Atwood Poem Reflection: 10-15 minutes

My take on the poem It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers by Atwood is that it is a well written,

descriptive poem about the dark topics newspapers have to offer. The speaker, or the voice of the

poem tells a story of his experiences growing up as child to adult in a perfect world where reality

was a much darker place. In the first two stanzas of the poem, the stanzas start with an innocent

child walking to school or playing in a sandbox, before transitioning into the last line of the

stanza, which was much darker than the rest. The last lines of these two stanzas had references to

war, with bulldozed corpses and detonating bombs. The following stanzas now tell the story of

how the speaker has now grown up into an adult, and faces the darker memories of their

childhood and trauma. The phrase “I sit in my chair as quietly as a fuse” tells me that they’re like

a fuse, holding the explosion in but with the slightest bit of a nudge can explode. It reminds me

of the stories I’ve read about people who struggle with PTSD, how one little thing can trigger

their trauma. The poem ends with a stanza similar to the first, where the first few lines start with

innocence and the sense of being naive before being stripped away. My take on the title of the

poem is that newspapers can be dangerous to read because of the bad news they bring. The

newspapers affected the speaker as a child, informing them of the dark reality of the world

during their prime days of innocence. Now, even though he’s an adult, seeing the black and white

photos and headlines on a newspaper triggers their trauma from when they were a child.