Morning in the Burned House

“Morning in the Burned House” (1995) is a free-verse poem by Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood that was originally published in The North American Review. Later that same year, it appeared as the concluding poem in a volume of poems with the same title. Morning in the Burned House is divided into five sections. The poems in each section range from realistic depictions of nature to persona poems in which mythic women speak. It is widely believed that the last two sections, which culminate with the titular poem, navigate the death of the poet’s father and the emotional aftermath. Throughout, Atwood’s speakers explore concerns regarding autonomy, relationships with the Earth, love, and loss in alternately realistic and symbolic ways. 

“Morning in the Burned House” is often used as a definitive example of Atwood’s poetry since it engages with dichotomies and conflicting emotions that transform the speaker. Like many of Atwood’s poems, it utilizes free verse to describe a dreamlike scenario that shows the fine line between what is tangible and identifiable and what remains abstract and indistinct. Best known for her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood is also a renowned poet, essayist, and children’s author.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death.

Poet Biography

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Margaret Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada. Her parents were Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist, and his wife, Dorothy. She has two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister. In 1950, the family built a small cabin in the woods in northern Quebec, where Carl did his research. The siblings were homeschooled until 1946, when the family moved to Toronto. 

Atwood graduated high school and enrolled at the University of Toronto, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1961. She then attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University in the United States, earned her Master of Arts degree, and began but did not finish her doctoral degree. She married Jim Polk in 1968 but divorced him in 1973. Later that year, she married writer Graeme Gibson. The pair had one child, Eleanor, born in 1976. 

Atwood first garnered acclaim as a poet. Her first book, Double Persephone, was self-published in 1961, while The Circle Game appeared in 1966. The latter book won the Governor General’s Award, solidifying Atwood’s reputation as a poet. Over the next two decades, Atwood published several collections, including Kaleidoscopes Baroque (1965), Talismans for Children (1965), Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966), The Animals in That Country (1968), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Procedures for Underground (1970), and Power Politics (1971). 

The poetry collections You Are Happy, Selected Poems and Two-Headed Poems came out in the 1970s, but Atwood’s main artistic concentration shifted to fictional prose, for which she became internationally known. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood’s sixth novel, is her most famous work. It won several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was nominated for the Booker Prize. Atwood also continued to write poetry, publishing True Stories in 1981, Love Songs of a Terminator in 1983, and two volumes—Snake Poems and Interlunar—in 1984. Her Selected Poems were also published. 

In 1995, after a decade’s absence from poetical work, she published Morning in the Burned House (1995), which was, in part, an elegy to her late father. Eating Fire, a collected volume, came out in 1998. Nearly another decade would pass before she published The Door (2007). Her 16th book of poetry, Dearly (2020), was written after the death of her husband.

Atwood also won the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and awards for her speculative trilogy: Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). She also received critical notice for her retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey called The Penelopiad (2005), as well as Hag-Seed (2016), which reworks Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Testaments (2019), a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, also won the Booker Prize. A short story collection Old Babes in the Wood arrived in 2023, while her latest collection of selected poems, Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems 1961-2023, appeared in 2024. 

Poem Text

Atwood, Margaret. “Morning in the Burned House.” 1995. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The poem begins with the speaker telling the reader that they are having a meal in “the burned house” (Line 1). They correct themselves and note that they are not really present and are not actually ingesting a meal, nor are they in the house. However, they are still present within this memory of their child self observing the interior of the house. The speaker fully feels as if they are eating and can hear the scrape of the utensil against the curve of the bowl, despite the fact that both have melted (in the burning of the house). Nobody other than the child is present in the memory, and they wonder where their family members have gone, imagining that perhaps they’ve gone down to the lakeshore. 

The family’s belongings are observed by the speaker in the house: clothes, dishes, wood, a cup, a teapot, and a table. It is a sunny day, although a large storm is growing on the horizon. The speaker notes that they can see the precise features of the room and the way the sunlight falls but can’t make out their own body. They wonder if this memory is a “trap or blessing” (Line 23). Everything in the house is no longer there, and even they—as they once were—have changed. They realize that they are no longer the child they once were. That version of themselves is also burning away, reducing the past to ash, leaving them luminous at the end of the poem’s sequence.