C+&+L

C& L Carlie Cattelona and Lenny Marshall

The “Siren Song”, by Margaret Atwood is a modern interpretation of the mythical Greek Sirens. The Sirens have a reputation for being evil and seductive, and Atwood’s poem supports and strengthens this perspective. Throughout the piece, Atwood uses narrative style, shifts in tone, and diction in order to present an overriding tone of manipulation.

Atwood’s narration of the poem is key in uncovering the hidden motives of the siren’s plea. She highlights the heavy manipulation through use of second person narration. The siren slyly navigates a conversation with her unsuspecting victim, drawing him in on the condition, “Shall I tell you the secret and if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit?” After explaining her "dreadful" life, she appeals to the reader's masculinity, acting as a damsel in distress, in need of a hero to take her away. She targets the reader as an individual, claiming, "Help me! only you, only you can, you are unique." This kind of seduction makes it clear that any despondency or tenderness is entirely feigned. If Atwood had hoped to show any emotional weakness that a siren might have possessed, she would have written the poem as a description of a siren's life. We can assume that Atwood wanted us to see the siren's dialogue, especially given that her speech is directed towards a particular subject, is intentionally seductive.

During the second half of the poem, Atwood begins to shift her tone, and this helps to create the illusion of sincerity. As opposed to being genuine, Atwood is actually crafting a web of lies. Her first shift in tone from objectivity is in the third stanza. The speaker uses a pathetic appeal to the audience and discusses the despair and the suffering she is experiencing. On a first read, it seems genuine, but upon further examination this is feigned. The tone then shifts in the next stanza. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker was somewhat fair-minded, calmly discussing the properties of her song. Then, all of a sudden in the fourth and fifth stanza, she becomes much more desperate, appealing and begging to the audience to “come closer”. This desperation could be believable if the speaker had been more urgent at the start of the poem, but at this point it feels extremely artificial. In the final stanza, the speaker loses her urgency once more, and this shift implies a change unmentioned in the siren’s dialogue. She states that her song “works every time”. In saying this, she could even be suggesting that the audience of this poem was just lured toward her island and killed, just as the squadrons of men before him did. Thus, she smugly states that her song is flawless in execution.

Though subtle, the diction of the poem seems to reveal most about the intentions of the siren. It would be easy to mistake the siren's supposed hatred of her fate as genuine if it weren't for specific words that suggested otherwise. At one point she claims, "I don't enjoy it here/ squatting on this island/ looking picturesque and mythical." This statement almost seems contradictory. The siren contradicts the image of herself squatting uncomfortably by immediately following up with a description of herself looking "picturesque and mythical." Atwood's mentioning of her appearance was no accident, and it helped to maintain the egotistical air the reader has already assumed of the typical siren. The reader can also assume that the melodramatic light in which the siren shed her life was purposeful. The siren refers to her comrades as "feathery maniacs" at one point in the second stanza. Often a character exaggerates to such an extreme to "convincingly" put on a show for whoever might be listening. Atwood strives to show the reader that the siren is doing her best to play the part of a poor, helpless soul.

The sirens have long held a reputation for being evil and seductive, and in Atwood's poem there is no exception. To the uneducated eye, it may seem as though Atwood is protesting the accepted belief that the sirens are evil. It may seem at first as though the sirens are innocent actually feel remorse. But if attention is given to Atwood's use of narrative style, shifts in tone, and diction it becomes very clear that there is a manipulative and deceptive side to the siren's nature.