s merely something sold for commercial value (“add lace on it . . .”) and cutesy magazine advertisements “There are whole/ magazines with not much in them/ but the word love, you can/ rub it all over your body and you/ can cook with it too”(802). Again, here we see a bit more of the feminist theme we’ve come to expect from Margaret Atwood. She expertly mocks the type of women’s literature that provides its reader’s with mushy romance, heavy perfumes, and cooking recipes. Yet, as before, it is important to interpret Atwood’s intentions correctly. Assuming “Variations on the Word Sleep” was written in a sincere tone, we know that love, for Atwood, transcends the boundaries of commercialism and even conventional devotion. Atwood is not saying that love is an over-rated, half-imagined concept created by Hallmark or Cosmo that should be rejected by intelligent females. She is using her poetry to redefine the boundaries of love. Her approach in this poem is from a post-modernist point of view, because she recognizes that words can be powerful, yet often inept at holding meaning. Her second stanza becomes more personal, showing the gap between what the shrunken word “love” and what it can be, in reality, between soul mates: “Then there’s the two/ of us. This word/ is far too short for us, it has only/ four letters, too sparse/ to fill those deep bare/ vacuums between the stars/ that press on us with their deafness”(802). So again, Atwood has effectively evolved the concept of love. And she has let her feminist colors glimmer in her portrayal of modern women’s magazines, while showing that connections between two people are intensive and indefinable. This poem is also intriguing because she manages to come to the same feelings of helplessness towards the end of the poem that we saw glimpses of in “Variations on the Word Sleep.”...
