Margaret Atwood's It Is Dangerous To Read Newspapers
520 Words3 Pages
It is hard for one to escape the awareness of the suffering and evil that go on in the world every day. In Margaret Atwood’s poem, “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers,” she discusses how after knowing about all the bad events that go on, i.e. through reading the newspaper, one can’t help but feel somewhat responsible and helpless. Atwood expresses this feeling by organizing the poem as she matures from a child to an adult with juxtaposing childhood games and warfare and employing metaphors comparing her adult self to violent objects. Atwood begins her poem off when she was a child. She is building sand castles while “hasty pits” were being filled with “bulldozed corpses” (lines 2-3). This is a reference to World War I and the Holocaust. The