Analysis of Poem Variations on the Word Love by Margaret Atwood

Love is a beautiful feeling that I would presume everyone would want to feel at certain points in their life. It is described as a “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties. ”(Webster 1a) but the poem Variation on the word love by Margaret Atwood describes the different ways the word love is being used, both positively and negatively.

Margaret Atwood’s poem Variation on the Word Love is a free verse poem that can also be called a free-flowing poem. Margaret Atwood writes that love is sometimes used as a filler word, which is usually used unconsciously and not subconsciously. In the sense that it does not mean too much when it is used. An example would be when an individual is asked about a particular dish or a particular situation and says “I love it”, does the individual love it, or is it trying to appeal to others.

Margaret Atwood then, describes the word love as a word that is not meant to be malicious, cruel or wicked, but words that are meant to be embraced, empathized and used when showing kindness. In stanza one lines three and four, Margaret Atwood draws attention to the symbol which is used when the word love is being talked about or being described “for those red heart-shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts” (Atwood). The symbol which we all use to symbolize a heart to attribute love to is not a heart because a heart has veins, beats and pumps blood around the body.

Margaret Atwood talks about how you can make money from love, and a good example would be Valentine's Day, where different items and things that symbolize love are sold. She is alluding to the idea that sex sells, which is a very common marketing technique that has existed since the beginning of time. An example of how love can be sold and bought in relation to what she means by sex sells is, when you go to stores that sell female underwear, there is always heart and love because of how much sex is associated with love. Another example would be going to the female sections of bookstores; you will always see the word sex on the cover of the books, especially books that were published in the early nineties and early two thousand. All these happen because publishers know those sex drives sales. Nevertheless, in those magazines, there were sometimes helpful pieces of information for women like articles on women’s health or that that affect women and how they could be corrected.

In stanza two lines nine to thirteen, “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”(Atwood) Margaret Atwood talks about how some of the traditional ways of cooking whereby the woman cooking says things like “I am cooking with love” or she says things like “lunch is cooked with love” which just means to put care into what you are cooking. The point remains that we use love for all these different terms, all of these different ways that the same word love is used all over, yet it has unlimited meanings.

We associate love with all these beautiful things, all these beautiful images like sex. But then, Margaret Atwood asks us, why is it that slugs under pieces of cardboard are not described as love, or why are soldiers fighting and killing themselves over their country not also described as love. So she gives us a dose of reality and makes us question what society uses the word love and tells us that love sometimes love is not all about joy and happiness and love sometimes is not all milk and honey but sometimes love costs a lot and sometimes love costs some people their lives, so what do we individually know as love?

In the poem Variation on the word love, Margaret Atwood separates her and the world where she differentiates it into two which are the public and the private wherein the public love is categorized into magazines; love is shown on the television, but in the private, it is the two of so what do we know as love.

Finally, Margaret Atwood started by talking about all the traditional things and immediately hits us with the facts that for sure there are all these beautiful things about love and there are also the ugly things about love or bad things about love.