35 pages • 1 hour read
Margaret AtwoodSiren Song
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Music
Music (and the lack thereof) is a primary motif in Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song.” From Greek myth comes the tale of the sirens who sing a song so compelling, it sends ships and men to wreck themselves against the rocks. The implication is that it is unbearably beautiful, or that it will impart something too great for mortals to suffer. For most of the poem, the song is kept from the reader/listener. In its place, the siren bargains and complains—and rather prosaically, at that. She seems to be a songless, as well as flightless, bird. Readers don’t really understand that the song has been sung until it’s over and it’s just the same old tune—irresistible, maybe, but utterly forgettable. In this case, melody is lost to the intimacy of the whispered lyric: “Come closer. This song” (Line 21).
Rule of Three
The rule of three is a significant motif in “Siren Song.” Atwood chooses to write the poem in tercets, or stanzas composed of three lines. There are nine stanzas, and three is the cube root of nine. In this iteration of the siren myth, three sirens live on the island. In art and design, three signifies a grouping that the eye finds pleasing; three objects form a grouping that the brain doesn’t need to further divide into smaller groupings to make sense of it.
Three is also the number of lines generally used to write haiku poetry, a tradition that manages to introduce an image, complicate it, and expand it in a small space. Each three-line stanza in “Siren Song” is a self-contained little room that opens the door to the next, changing the tone, energy, and ultimately, the meaning of the poem in the process. The repeated use of three lends both stability and surprise to the piece.
Death
Death is a necessary motif in “Siren Song.” Far from hidden, it is introduced with “beached skulls” (Line 6) in the second stanza, and named outright in the third. As death is undeniably irresistible, in that every living thing must die, one could argue that death shows up in the first stanza, too, as “the song that is irresistible” (Lines 2-3). Death, if inevitable, feels more dangerous, somehow, with the mention of “maniacs” (Line 16) and “this trio, fatal” (Line 18). Part of the dark humor of the poem is that while death brazenly basks on the beach, the reader/listener nonetheless develops magical thinking suggesting that there just might be an escape, after all, for the right candidate.
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By Margaret Atwood
