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The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
Margaret Atwood
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Read poems about / on: house, work, time, tree
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Comments about this poem (The Moment
by
Margaret Atwood
) |
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comments about this poem (The Moment by
Margaret Atwood
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Nancy Keyser
(2/20/2009 10:04:00 PM) |
We own nothing in the natural world. If we owned it, then we would be able to control it. In the second stanza, it is made clear that we could not even breathe without the elements of nature. Trees are some of the answer to our own survival given the oxygen they produce and the CO2 that they counteract in the atmosphere.
The last stanza sets the matter in its true perspective. You didn't find us; we found you. We are only visitors here and we will return by way of death and decay to rejoin the earth from which we came.
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Brian Dorn
(7/28/2006 1:53:00 PM) |
Man must learn to simply appreciate nature for what it is, we can not own it or control it... rather, it controls us. A brilliant perspective.
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Dr. Afaq Qureshi
(4/19/2005 1:58:00 AM) |
is it about the proprietary rights? the transition from 'house' to 'universe' and the defining period of time where the trees and air melt, and change to make the 'owner' realize about the inherent quality of change and stark reality of something more tangible, more permanent, the change itself. Can it be read in the perspective of human drama instead of mere imagery or wordplay. Maybe the person who wrote the lines didn't think of time but of timelessness. What then..
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Erica Lucero
(2/24/2005 8:26:00 PM) |
This is a beautiful poem about nature. The main theme of this poem is natures ownership. The first stanza talks about natures beauty and that humans own all of it. The second stanza changes all of this. Margaret Atwood uses personification and imagery to convey natures rejection to the fact that humans own nature. In the third stanza nature restates that humans indeed do not own nature and that humans belong to nature. Instead of the other way around. Natures ownership is a good question. I agree that nature owns us because why else must we return to the ground when we die?
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