Atwood's In the Secular Night
The Pitfalls of Loose Musing
Margaret Atwood’s “In the Secular Night” consists of three free verse paragraphs. The theme is self-examination. The speaker lives an unexamined life, but on occasion ventures into loose musing with the result of slipshod bits of poetic drama. In this poem, the speaker employs the device of addressing a second person who is actually the first person; she is, in effect, talking to herself, addressing herself as “you.” Many modernist poets employ this device.
First Verse Paragraph: “In the secular night you wander around”
In the first verse paragraph, the speaker sets up her dilemma: “In the secular night you wander around / alone in your house.” Because she has designated the night “secular,” she can claim to be alone, because if the night were spiritual, she would be accompanied by the Divine.
The speaker then claims that she will insist, “everyone has deserted” her: that’s her story and she sticking to it. The speaker’s age is uncertain, but she seems to be remembering everyone leaving her at home to baby-sit when she was sixteen. Here the reader encounters the first disadvantage of the concept of loose musing. The speaker has claimed to be alone, but if she was left home to baby-sit, she would be accompanied by the child with whom she is sitting.
The speaker then reports that she makes a concoction of “vanilla ice-cream,” “grapejuice,” and “ginger ale” and then listens to the “big-band sound” of “Glenn Miller.” She then lights a cigarette and blows the smoke up the chimney. She then cries for a while, “because [she was] not dancing.” So then she dances “by herself”; the speaker has forgotten that she had earlier affirmed she was alone in the house. She has taken the time to look at a mirror to note that her “mouth” was “circled with purple,” but she does not include the mirror in her narrative.
Second Verse Paragraph: “Now, forty years later, things have changed”
The speaker jumps ahead forty years and reports, “things have changed.” If that bit of information seems a bit obtuse because so obvious, then the change from a vanilla ice cream float to “baby lima beans” will boldly clear up the first impression. The speaker then asserts, “It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.” Her vice is that she sometimes forgets to “eat / at the stated mealtimes.” At this point, the reader must remember that this scenario features no ordinary narrative: this speaker is not trying to make the reader laugh; she is simply engaging in loose musing.
The speaker then enlightens the reader about how she prepares her baby limas: she “simmer[s] them carefully” and then she strains out all the water and then “add[s] cream and pepper.” To add to the yumminess of the beans, she then “amble[s] up and down the stairs, / scooping them up with [her] fingers right out of the bowl.” The scenario of ambling and scooping with fingers represents only one of the demarcations that lay bare the juncture separating this speaker from those who posses the skill to exhibit clarity of thought in a poetic drama.
The speaker then admits to talking to herself but not yet receiving an answer; her loose musing has not yet resulted in insanity, but she expects “that part will come later.”
Third Verse Paragraph: “There is so much silence between the words”
The final verse paragraph amalgamates in her loose-muse fashion the terms “silence,” “God,” “white clothing,” “mysticism,” “sirens” and yammers, “the century grinds on.” The most loose-mused lines of this verse paragraph are those that allude to and actually use the term, “God”: “The sensed absence / of God and the sensed presence / amount to much the same thing, / only in reverse.” The reader, thus, infers that this speaker will receive those answers very soon.
lima beans
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