Margaret Atwood Friday Tone

Our energy levels change as the season’s progress. Many people slow down and feel lethargic during the winter months because it is overall a slow deviation of time. Margaret Atwood’s February uses tone, syntax, and imagery to illustrate that mood evolves over seasons. Atwood begins with a tone that expresses the narrator’s bitterness to the world around her. The narrator is very lonely and bitter and compares her cat to overall human behavior. The bitterness can possibly be due to loneliness and despair in the month of February, around Valentine’s Day. Also the bitterness to procreation of cats exemplifies the bitterness that she is feeling toward sex and love, again falling into the February as the “month of despair” theme. As the poem progresses,

the overall theme begins to take a slowly, but positive turn. The attitude changes from a negative to a positive with even some signs of optimism with the changing of heart toward her cat, proving that everything changes over time.
Along with the tone, the syntax of the poem helps to illustrate that mood can evolve over time.

The word order of the poem helps give us a tone for the poem by allowing us to feel the irritation or annoyance that the narrator feels toward the month of February. The way in which the words appear in the poem show us how the attitude progresses as the poem continues. For instance, the first word of the first line of the poem is “Winter” which gives us the idea that it is cold and that the days drag by. The last word of the poem is “Spring” and connecting winter to spring shows us the evolution of time through the seasons. This shows the connection between the seasons and the overall attitude that the narrator portrays to the seasons. Atwood places the word “fat” in the first line, shows helps to connect the winter with eating fatty foods because our bodies need it throughout the long winter to survive. In the summertime and even in the spring our bodies do not necessarily need to eat fatty French because bodies are able to evolve to the climate conditions and we do not need to stay as warm. Also, snuggling up to bed sheets and an eiderdown blanket are just not things that you would do in the spring when the climate is

changing.
The imagery Atwood illustrates allows us to envision what exactly this particular morning in her life is like.

The narrator compares her cat’s behavior to the overall behavior of humans. The cat’s “Houdini eyes” give off the feeling that her can is up to something or has some mischievous plan in the works. This helps us to get a feel for how the cat is viewed in the narrator’s eyes. The imagery can show us a connection between hockey and sex in the line “he shoots, he scores” once again connected human behavior to the cat. Winter is the season with most common conception rate, showing us that not only the cats “shoot and score.” Atwood calls the month of February the month of despair, giving us the idea that she hates the month of February due to Valentine’s Day and heartbreak. Generally if people are heart broken on Valentine’s Day they are single and bitter toward the day. I mean, the narrator is waking up next to their cat and not a significant other, I think it’s fair to say that she is at least slightly depressed over Valentine’s

Day.
The overall bitterness and loneliness of the poem slowly turns in to optimism and hope for the future of her cat, which can be directed to the hope and optimism of the narrator. The narrator inflicts her anger on her cat when really the anger that she has is inside of her. The way that the narrator’s attitude toward the cat changed from almost disgust to showing how the narrator cares for the cat, can also show us how we change our emotions as seasons go on. The narrator wants the cat to make something of its’ self and to celebrate spring, which can also show us an internal aspect of the narrator. The emotions that the narrator was feeling at the beginning of the poem are the not the same at the end, showing an evolution in time and emotions. The narrator uses the tone, syntax, and imagery to express her feelings toward the month of February and how that changes to the way she feels about people in general.