Variations on the Word Love by Margaret Atwood

Throughout history, the word “love” has been given countless definitions and interpretations from various media sources. Poets have described love as everything from roses to stars, and musicians often glorify love, such as the Beatles, who expressed that “Love is all you need.” Television characters often express strange views of love, such as on the CBS drama Joan of Arcadia, where love was compared to a “mental illness.” Love has taken many different forms throughout the history of language, during which time the perceived meaning has been distorted from the true meaning. In the poem “Variations on the Word Love,” Margaret Atwood expresses her own interpretation of the word “love” by commenting on the common distortion of the word.

Atwood divides her poem, “Variations on the Word Love,” into two concrete sections, which in turn represent two different ways of looking at the word love. The first stanza is dedicated to expressing love as a word and the second focuses on love as a feeling. Readers notice a drastic change in Atwood’s tone between the two stanzas because in the first stanza, her attitude about love is expressed quite bitterly. This bitterness is evident in her description of love as “a word we use to plug/ holes with.” This description makes the word “love” seem insignificant, expressing how casual the word has become. Within the same stanza, she expresses the idea that love has become too commercialized, such as with heart-shaped Valentines Day cards that “look nothing/ like real hearts. Add lace/ and you can sell/ it.” In these lines, Atwood expresses that love has lost all of its meaning because it has been misrepresented and exploited.

Although Atwood’s attitude towards love appears bitter in the first stanza, her bitterness vanishes at the start of the second stanza when she says, “Then there’s the two/ of us. This word/ is far too short for us, it has only/ four letters.” Upon reading this line, it becomes evident that Atwood’s bitterness is not towards love itself, but towards the misleading image associated with it. Atwood describes love as a “single/ vowel in this metallic/ silence,” which expresses that a one syllable, four-letter word is not sufficient to accurately represent such a strong emotion. She feels very strongly that the word “love” is “not enough but it will/ have to do” and finishes the poem with a literal cliff-hanger ending, dangling the readers on the edge of possibility when she expresses it as, “a finger-/ grip on a cliffside. You can/ hold on or let go.” This illustrates that love is a very subjective feeling, which has different effects on different individuals, who can, in turn, make various different decisions on the subject as well.

Atwood further expresses this theme that love is complicated and varied by writing her poem in free verse. The absence of distinct structure reinforces the idea that love does not follow a strict pattern or structure either. As stated in the appropriate title, love has many variations. These variations do not allow love to be presented easily or accurately by one simple definition. Her line breaks are irregular, making the poem unpredictable, which is another characteristic of love; furthermore, the absence of rhyme in a poem about love challenges preconceptions of how love should be expressed.

Throughout “Variations on the Word Love,” Atwood explores the topic of love in terms of connotation versus denotation. As a word, love has become so misused that it has lost significance. Therefore, as a feeling, love is too deep and intimate to be represented by such a short word. Her drastic change in diction and attitude further show that love has many different sides and can be viewed by many different perspectives, and furthermore, the general meaning has also been changed throughout the years.