Siren Song

7 Pages 1751 Words

Analyzing the Alluring “Siren Song”
Your next encounter will be with the Sirens, who bewitch everybody who approaches them. There is no home-coming for the man who draws near them unawares...for with their high clear song the Sirens bewitch him, as they sit there in a meadow piled high with the mouldering skeletons of men, whose withered skin still hangs upon their bones” (Odyssey, Book 12, ll. 39ff trans. Rieu/Jones)
This is a warning to the great adventurer Odysseus from the mythological epic poem by Homer called the “Odyssey.” The mythological creatures called sirens sung so beautifully that men couldn’t resist them, even though their lives would be taken. Margaret Atwood lures her audience in the poem “Siren Song” by utilizing many literary devices and techniques, which ultimately trick the reader into thinking that she will reveal something beneficial and the “song that is irresistible” (2-3). The sirens sang a song to fool men, but Atwood poetically deceives the reader.
The genre of the poem is narrative. The narrator is alone in the poem and speaks in the first person with the auditor being the reader. The poem takes place on an island where the narrator is discussing her “secret” and her attitude toward the situation she is in. The narrator will trick the reader into thinking that the song is very important until the end when she reveals her “secret.”
“Siren Song” is fairly short poem that grabs the reader’s attention quickly. It consists of twenty-seven lines and nine stanzas, each being a triplet. Each stanza of the poem contains a certain theme that will have the power to persuade in a different way, thus the reader’s attention is grabbed with the various emotions displayed by the author. She changes her mood to keep the reader’s attention and then finally in the last stanza reveals the conclusion. Within the first four of the nine total stanzas, only two sentences are...