35 pages • 1 hour read
Margaret AtwoodSiren Song
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Siren Song” is written in free verse, which, by most definitions, has no formal meter. Free verse is an interesting choice for a poem about a song, given the absence of meter, and also underscores the theme that the music may not come in a guise too easily recognized.
Nine tercets give the poem form, however, and definite shape. The absence of end-rhyme and the use of everyday language offer a conversational mood. When the speaker begins to address the reader/listener direction in the fourth stanza, the poem becomes quite intimate. The introduction of the “I” and “you” pronouns lure in the reader/listener. Distinctive use of various metrical feet contribute to the ironic tone of the piece. For example, in the fourth stanza, “out of this bird suit” (Line 12) provides four single syllable words, four beats, the last two of which—bird suit—offer side-by-side stressed syllables, a dactylic effect allowing the phrase to be both silly and weighted.
In the fifth stanza, “picturesque and mythical” gives two anapests (stressed-unstressed-unstressed) that take all the high-toned air out of the notions of what is normally thought when reading “picturesque and mythical,” and imbue them with a sing-song irony.
Enjambment
Enjambment is a well-employed device in “Siren Song.” Atwood maps the course through the poem, indicates how to read it, and offers a number of surprises with phrases that span multiple lines as well as stanzas. The first three stanzas syntactically make up a single phrase, punctuated with two colons in the first stanza, then left to run wild and unpunctuated until the period at the end of the ninth line. Enjambment allows single ideas and images to shine on their own: “[T]he song nobody knows” (Line 7) frankly states that not a single individual has knowledge of the song. That line leads into the rest of the stanza, which confirms the reason nobody knows the song: They are dead, or can’t remember. The stanza ends in a full stop, as if to say, beware all ye who enter.
Another effective use of enjambment comes between fifth and sixth stanzas, with “looking picturesque and mythical // with these two feathery maniacs” (Lines 15-16). In a single leap down the page, the tone of the speaker jumps from bored sardonicism to a kind of hysteria. The shift is both humorous and alarming.
Narrative Voice
“Siren Song” is written in first person from the perspective of a siren. While the first three stanzas express a distinct tone, the “I” doesn’t enter the poem until the fourth stanza. The song doesn’t really begin until this moment. Prior to the “I” of “[s]hall I tell you the secret'' (Line 10), the poem sets the scene. The three opening stanzas are an overture for the intimate language to come.
In stanza four, the speaker teases, suggesting that the listener/reader could get her out of her “bird suit” (Line 12) and gain access to the woman hidden within. She turns pouty, and whines about her ornamental obligations as a mythical being. She increases the urgency by referring to her “maniac” (Line16) companions. Finally, she linguistically crooks her finger and draws her listener/reader in, incanting three times, “to you / to you, only to you” (Lines 19-20), and then again with, “[o]nly you, only you can / you are unique” (Lines 23-24). The listener/reader’s ear is glistening with the moist breath of the siren’s pleading whisper, so much that they drown. The siren can stop singing. The last stanza brings the reader back to the forthright nature of the voice in the first line, before the manipulation: “This is the one song everyone / would like to learn” (Lines 1-2).
Related Titles
By Margaret Atwood
