17 pages • 34 minutes read
This Is a Photograph of Me
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Girl and Horse, 1928” by Margaret Atwood (1970)
In this poem from Procedures for the Underground (1970), the speaker also describes a photograph. While both poems feature blurry photos, this speaker resents the innocence of the girl pictured, since she is oblivious to the transitory nature of life. Like “This Is a Photograph of Me,” “Girl and Horse, 1928” uses a parenthetical aside to show the speaker’s true thoughts. Both poems use characters that are vanishing into the landscape to discuss the arbitrary nature of happiness and loss.
“[you fit into me]” by Margaret Atwood (1971)
This four-line lyric appears in the collection Power Politics (1971). Like “This is a Photograph of Me,” and many of Atwood’s other poems, it relies on a surprise twist and reveals potential violence. Here, a seemingly benign hook being inserted into an eyelet on a piece of clothing turns into the gruesome image of “a fish hook” (Line 3) being stabbed into “an open eye” (Line 4). As in “This is a Photograph of Me,” we see something peaceful turn deadly.
“The Robber Bridegroom” by Margaret Atwood (1988)
In this poem from Interlunar, based on a German variant of the “Bluebeard” fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm circa 1815, Atwood explores the villain’s perspective and discusses his feelings of betrayal. The murderous groom blames his victims for putting up a fight, and later searches in the “shards / of their faces” (Lines 13-14) for his lost “soul” (Line 12). This poem uses a similar landscape to the earlier “This is a Photograph of Me”: The killer remembers his first bride “in the poplar and spruce forest” (Line 16), just as the speaker in “This Is a Photograph of Me” sees a “balsam or spruce” branch (Line 9).
Further Literary Resources
“The Subtle Horror of Margaret Atwood’s ‘This is a Photograph of Me’” by Lenika Cruz (2017)
In this article written for The Atlantic magazine, Cruz argues for Atwood’s poem as a piece of horror, with elements like the mystery of why the body wound up in the lake, and the reader’s surprise to be talking to a ghost: “The seemingly straightforward title doesn’t hint at the haunting direction the poem will take [before] readers know it, they’re complicit in something awful and unexplained.” Cruz also notes how necessary it is for the marginalized narrator to be seen and for her death to be witnessed, even after the fact.
“Selfie, Unselfie, Poetic Selfie” by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (2014)
Ho’s article for Asia Literature discusses Victorian photography and offers a close reading of Atwood’s “This is a Photograph of Me.” Photographs in the Victoria era required stillness, which meant “[t]he dead were thus inadvertently the perfect sitters” (2). The practice of adults hiding to hold their children still as they were being photographed meant mothers were often placed behind a veil, which is echoed by the veil of water covering the ghost in Atwood’s poem and “the use of parentheses—her voice on the page is enclosed within brackets much as her body in the image is within the lake” (5).
“Atwood’s Gorgon’s Touch” by Frank Davey (1977)
This article for Studies in Canadian Literature concentrates on the juxtaposition between the static and kinetic in Atwood’s poetry from 1964 through 1977. Davey also explores Atwood treatment of space and time as mutually exclusive: “One can choose the aesthetics of space—style, sculpture, ritual, static beauty—or the aesthetics of time—flesh, earth, and process” (147). While photography seems to root us in space, the speaker of “This is a Photograph of Me” exists instead in time, since she appears “eventually” (25). In his reading of “This is a Photograph of Me,” the speaker has become an objective observer, removing herself from the idea of spatial process, securing the “impossibility of resolution” (163).
Listen to Poem
Atwood delivered her poem during a public reading at Sir George Williams University. There is a short introduction where she apologizes for having a cold.
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By Margaret Atwood
