Siren_Song

Siren Song Analyzing the Alluring “Siren Song” Your next encounter will be with the Sirens, who bewitch everybody who approaches them. There is no home-coming for the man who draws near them unawares...for with their high clear song the Sirens bewitch him, as they sit there in a meadow piled high with the mouldering skeletons of men, whose withered skin still hangs upon their bones” (Odyssey, Book 12, ll. 39ff trans. Rieu/Jones) This is a warning to the great adventurer Odysseus from the mythological epic poem by Homer called the “Odyssey.” The mythological creatures called sirens sung so beautifully that men couldn’t resist them, even though their lives would be taken. Margaret Atwood lures her audience in the poem “Siren Song” by utilizing many literary devices and techniques, which ultimately trick the reader into thinking that she will reveal something beneficial and the “song that is irresistible” (2-3). The sirens sang a song to fool men, but Atwood poetically deceives the reader. The genre of the poem is narrative. The narrator is alone in the poem and speaks in the first person with the auditor being the reader. The poem takes place on an island where poem, song, reader, narrator, stanza, end, secret, siren, lines, line, atwood, men, first, very, through, sirens, sentences, out, one, make, each, author, attention, structure, stanzas, reader’s, fatal, being, word, valuable, two, trick, three, thinking, nine