Love?

Love?
 

Love is the strangest emotion. It is the only emotion able to bring humans to both extremes of the emotional spectrum, from the tip of the tallest mountain to the bottom of the deepest cave. Haddaway, in their popular song “Baby Don't Hurt Me,” sings: “What is love. Oh baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me no more” (Haddaway). These lyrics go hand in hand with how Atwood portrays love in her poem “You Fit Into Me.” She uses vivid imagery of hooks and eyes to make the claim that love is both enduring and painful, both harsh and everlasting.

To fully understand how she can portray love in both a positive and negative light in only four lines requires a line by line dissection of the poem. The poem begins as a typical love poem, saying “You fit into me / like a hook into an eye” (Atwood 1-2). Obviously a reference to a button-type mechanism, it brings forth thoughts of two things that were made specifically to be together, to hold each other. These lines also evoke thoughts of that one special person for the reader—how perfect everything seems, how the two lovers feel as though they were meant for one another. The speaker is obviously profoundly in love with someone.

Or is she? After a line of whitespace Atwood drastically changes the image by saying “A fish hook / An open eye” (3-4). This causes a significant shift in image—from the lovey-dovey-two-things-that-were-meant-for-each-other to suddenly one of pain, anguish and probably lots of blood. The very thought of a human eye with a fish hook through it is enough to turn the food in stomachs of even the most battle hardened people. Atwood makes use of this shift in image to make a deep statement on the nature of love itself. She makes the point that any relationship, regardless of how perfect, can turn into pain.

The juxtaposition of these two very different statements on love, separated by whitespace implies that love has a beginning and love has an end. In the beginning the two lovers feel as though they were meant to hold each other for all of eternity. In the end, they’re stuck together as a fish hook is stuck in an eyeball. It was painful for the love to turn to that; however, it would probably be more painful to yank it out. This raises the age old question: “do I take it out or do I leave it in?” just as before any breakup it is wondered if it removing the “hook from the eye” is worth the pain of a breakup, or if living with the hook in the eye is something that can be dealt with. Of course, a very interesting aspect of the fish hook into the eye is that the removal of the hook would leave a horrible scar, just as a bad relationship can scar a heart.

Love really is the strangest emotion: it’s the only emotion that can go from a feeling of perfection to the feeling of immense pain. Atwood’s use of the hook/eye imagery in You Fit Into Me shows how one feeling can be both enduring and painful, and can be both harsh and everlasting. Everyone will likely, albeit unfortunately, experience this at one point in their life. Everyone will have that one bad relationship that they don’t want to let go of. Atwood doesn’t say if it’s better to let go, she leaves that decision up to the reader.