Margaret Atwood: An Analysis Of Flying Inside Your Own Body

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Flying Inside Your Own Body By: Margaret Atwood Your lungs fill & spread themselves, wings of pink blood, and your bones empty themselves and become hollow. When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon and your heart is light too & huge, beating with pure joy, pure helium. The sun’s white winds blow through you, there’s nothing above you, you see the earth now as an oval jewel, radiant & seablue with love. It’s only in dreams you can do this. Waking, your heart is a shaken fist, a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in; the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight down on the think pink rind of your skull. It’s always the moment just before gunshot. You try & try to rise but you cannot. Analyze This poem brings light to the…show more content…
Literally, if you were to imagine your lungs breathing, it would look like this, however; obviously the human body doesn’t consist of wings. You associate wings with flying, and flying for many represents being free. She titles this poem, Flying Inside Your Own Body, perhaps implying that you’re more free within yourself and your body, than on the outside with the rest of the world. The whole poem consists of words she carefully chose to convey the message she wanted. For example, pink she uses to describe the blood we have circulating through us. Most would think blood was red, but for her she chose pink, why? Because pink is lighter, like the flesh of our skin, it’s delicate. Another simile she goes on to write is, “when you breathe in, you’ll lift like a balloon”, with that you create the imagery of a balloon going higher and higher up in the sky, like your chest goes up when you take a breath in. Margaret continues to describe your heart as light and huge, beating with pure joy & helium. For her, everything is happy internally. The image she then creates is the “white winds” blowing through you, “you see the earth now as an oval jewel, radiant & seablue

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