This week’s ‘Poem of the Week’ comes courtesy of one of the biggest writers of the past forty years: Canadian novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, and environmentalist Margaret Atwood.
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 1939 and raised mostly in Toronto, she received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto, followed by her master’s degree from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. Along with writing over 18 novels and 18 poetry collections, she has taught at several universities since she got her master’s degree, including at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, the University of Alberta, the University of Alabama, and New York University. Similar to Toni Morrison, Atwood has stated that education, and teaching the future writers and younger generations of tomorrow, is an essential task that adults and experienced writers and members of society have today, noting that without giving the leaders of tomorrow the skills they need to write, lead, and save the environment, and institute gender equality in ways that generations before never have, the world will become a much darker place.
Atwood is arguably more well-known for her novels than for her poetry, but she has published an even amount between the two forms of writing. Her most famous novel is The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1985 novel of a dystopic American future where women are severely repressed by men and the story of one woman’s fight against the system, and it has since been turned into a very successful television show on Hulu. More recently, she has published the MaddAddam trilogy of novels, the books also focusing on a dystopic future where humans have gene-edited much of the living world in horrible ways, and the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale¸ titled The Testaments. Poetry was her first love though, and her most recent collection was published late last year, titled Dearly, and it is the collection that this week’s poem is drawn from.
Much of Atwood’s work, both in her novels and her poetry, and even in her short stories, essays, and literary criticism pieces, features a recurring set of themes: explorations of environmentalism and the dangers of human impact on the environment, the struggle for equal rights for women and the uplifting of feminism, animal rights and the humane treatment of all animals (Atwood herself is a pescatarian), and the exploration and invention of speculative and sci-fi-laden futures, many of them dystopic and taking place in the United States or Canada.
She has won many awards over the years: a Guggenheim fellowship in 1981, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award in 1986, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1987, the Booker Prize twice, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2007, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2020, amongst many, many others and even more nominations.
And now, we turn to the poem of the week, culled from Dearly: ‘Disenchanted Corpse.’ This poem, composed of twenty-five lines, is both simple and complex with both its messaging and its theme: on the surface, it seems to be just about a literal dead body, with the speaker viewing what some believe to be the physical vessel for a soul before it perishes, and her meditation on the physical aspect of life. But, looking a little bit further between the lines, a reader of the poem can see that Atwood is getting at more than just a simple physical observation of the physical remains of a person after death—she is questioning the whole concept of life and death itself, and where life even comes from in the first place, and if there really is a heaven or an afterlife after our physical body breaks down and what we technically call ‘life’ ends.
The first six lines act as an introduction to the questioning and theming that she introduces later in the poem: she says that a dead body can now be called a ‘disenchanted corpse,’ which immediately brings to mind magic and all related ephemera. On the surface, this is just another way to look at the physical remains of a human being, an emotional way to try to tell yourself that the dead body in front of you is something other than just a plain and simple old corpse, and it shows that the speaker is both distressed and trying to think beyond just the physical body in front of her, that she is starting to question whether or not the physical body is really the end of life as we humans like to think of it, or if there is possibly something else out there in the Great Unknown. She also speaks of what’s gone now: ‘The magic’s left you: / that flicker, that sparkle, gone.’ Whereas most people believe that it’s either God Himself who imbues us with life (if you’re religious), or some kind of chemical reaction that was set off millions upon millions of years ago in the deep-sea vents under prehistoric oceans that sparked life for the first time (if you’re strictly scientific), or some kind of combination of both, Atwood seems to be dodging the debate a little by simply saying that it’s something akin to magic that gives all physical bodies life. Life is equal to magic, and no one truly knows where magic comes from or what it is, but rather that it just is.
The next six lines get extremely heavy and start to wade into the theoretical concepts that philosophers and religious scholars and human beings in general have had since the beginning of time—where does life truly come from? The speaker says: ‘But if you’re now disenchanted, / who enchanted you, back then?’ She speaks the question that everyone has thought about from time to time, and it’s both one of the most elemental questions and one of the most complex questions in all of human thought: just where did we come from? What started life? Who started life? How did the perfect ingredients all come together and how did we as human beings get to the physical place that we are today on planet Earth in the Solar System, orbiting our Sun in one of the bands of the Milky Way? Some people refer to God, and some people refer to chemical reactions, but what if it was a mixture of both? Or what if neither of them are technically correct? Who are we to know or judge? Will we ever be able to answer that mystery? By asking the question of how did life get started, Atwood is trying to plumb the full depth of that quandary, forcing readers to think about where life really started, and also what happens when physical life ends—if something magical put life into this corpse in front of the speaker, where does that magic go when the body is done functioning? Do our minds and our souls, or what we think of as both, expire as well at the time of physical death, or do they continue on? Do minds and souls even exist? The possibilities are endless in this regard, and Atwood is able to distill this worry and this line of questioning down into a simple few lines—in other words, pure literary genius.
The following seven lines continue in that vein—she speaks about how, when the corpse was still a person, full of life and happiness and energy, everything was magical, in both a literal and metaphorical way: ‘Life, life, you sang / with every cell, / compelled into dancing / as the spell held you enchained / and you burned air.’ The word choice brings to mind images of a person dancing and laughing and jumping around with joy, a bright and happy image, but then it all comes crashing down just as quickly in the following lines: ‘Then it was midnight, and a pale flame rose / from you, and you collapsed into bone.’ Just as something magical, something that we humans might not be able to technically explain, can appear out of nowhere and hang around for a while, so can it disappear just as quickly, just as abruptly. Atwood is telling us to savor the magic that we have while it exists, to make the most of our lives and to enjoy the short time we have as human beings on this planet, and to also know, at the back of our minds, that, although we may not want to think about it too much, there will come a day where, either slowly and over time, or abruptly and quickly, our magic will come to an end, and we will become nothing but lifeless corpses.
The last six lines end on a somber but hopeful tone. The last stanza of the poem itself is like someone pausing and taking a few steps back after the magic and happiness of the prior stanza, one that reminds readers of someone maybe walking into a chapel to view a body before a funeral, or one where someone walks into a mausoleum to stand and stare at the spot in the wall where a former lover’s ashes are now interred, still physically there with the lover in the literal sense, but not there in the emotional and metaphorical way. It makes readers pause, and think, and meditate, on that idea of sudden loss and the bottom dropping out from underneath them, and it’s quiet—the lines are short, the sentiment clipped, and the word choice simple. Atwood spends the stanza simply stating what most people think of when they view a corpse—that it’s lifeless, that it’s now emptied of the soul that was held within it before for so many years, that it simply is just another physical thing that will soon revert back to the earth, and that there is nothing more to it than that.
And yet. The very last line of the poem is an optimistic one, a line that allows readers to have a glimmer of hope and a chance to think beyond the pale of death, a vehicle for readers to explore the lighter possibilities of life after death versus the sadness and immediacy of the physical death itself: ‘Or are you? Or is it?’ The line is referring to the one immediately before it (‘Lifeless. Less.’), and it seeks to show readers that there might be something beyond the physical degeneration of the human body. While the corpse in front of the speaker is empty and devoid of what we think of as ‘life,’ who says that life doesn’t exist beyond the physical expiration of a body? That’s what the concept of heaven and the afterlife is all about—while your loved ones might be alone and sad now that your physical body is dead, can’t your consciousness and your soul, if such things exist, continue on, like magic, after that physical death? Who are we to know, Atwood is saying with that last line, and she’s right—while we are in this physical realm, we will never have a definitive answer, but there will come a time for everyone when they will find out what happens after we physically die. Like Atwood, some choose to be hopeful about it, to have the view that good things might wait for us on the other side of the veil, and that all we can do in the meantime is to enjoy the magic of life and wait and see what happens with a hopeful attitude.
There is one more thing to note about this poem—Dearly, as a collection, was published a little over a year after her longtime partner, Graeme Gibson, passed away. Atwood has spoken in a few interviews since then and said that the book was largely composed of poems that she wanted to use to explore the themes of loss and grief and pain, and this poem is no exception to that idea. One can read ‘Disenchanted Corpse’ as if Atwood is standing above her former love’s body before his funeral or right after he has perished, and she is trying to think that there is still something left of him in this world or the next, that the magic of their first life together may have ended, but their second one has yet to begin. Maybe that’s a little saccharine, but I think it’s a hopeful image to end on.
To read Atwood’s brilliant new collection, Dearly, place a hold on a copy from our library here. To purchase a copy, head over to Amazon by clicking here, or head over to a local bookstore’s website and purchase a copy here.
'Disenchanted Corpse'
Disenchanted corpse--
this seems to be the new name
for a dead body.
The magic's left you:
that flicker, that sparkle, gone.
Dried firefly.
But if you're now disenchanted,
who enchanted you, back then?
What magus or sorceress cast over you
the net of words, the charm?
Placed the scroll in your golem's
mouth of mud?
Life, life, you sang
with every cell,
compelled into dancing
as the spell held you enchained
and you burned air.
Then it was midnight, and a pale flame rose
from you, and you collapsed into bone.
Disenchanted corpse, they say.
Inert. Emptied of prayer,
limp to all conjures.
A figment, a fragment.
Lifeless. Less.
Or are you? Or is it?
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