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.

Love is a grenade best covered in Chocolate

Love is an incredibly strange. If love were a bag, and life was the arm grabbing from it, sometimes life would receive a scrumptious chocolate, and sometimes it would receive a live hand grenade—but it would always go back for more. Margaret Atwood would certainly agree with this poorly constructed analogy as evident by her poem You Fit into Me. I agree with Atwood’s claim that love is both enduring and painful, both harsh and everlasting, because of my own experiences with the confusing, hurting, joyful topic.

You Fit into Me deals with the lasting effects that love has on a person over the course of a relationship. It starts out with “you fit into me like a hook into an eye” this is referring to a clasp on an article of clothing. Not only is it a perfect fit (like true lovers are) but it holds the clothing (or the lovers) together. The word eye is an allophone to the word “I” so it’s safe to assume that Atwood is referring to herself as the article of clothing, whom is being held together by the love she shares for that special someone. The placing of these romantic lines at the start of the poem isn’t coincidence. All relationships, all true loves, start with the feeling that the lovers were made specifically for one another. The poem then takes a drastic turn for the worst, by saying “a fish hook an open eye” which is incredibly interesting. At first glance it seems that Atwood is redefining the metaphor in the opening lines from romantic to tragic, but upon further inspection it’s evident that this isn’t the case. Instead Atwood, by use of this disturbing imagery, is making the point that love progresses. It goes from the giddy “we’re perfect for each other” feeling to a stronger feeling of being intertwined and interconnected and it does this through pain. Yes, getting a fish hook shoved through your eye would hurt, but ripping it out would hurt much more. If a relationship could endure the pain of shoving a fish hook through your eye, there is no stronger bind, however if it can’t, ripping it out would be like breaking up. Eventually the pain would go away—the scars wont—but it would be huge temporary increase in the pain. Again, Atwood is referring to herself. The poem seems as if she’s stuck in a bad relationship with someone she loves. She knows that ending the relationship, or ripping out the hook, would hurt a ton, but at the same time she isn’t sure if she likes the feeling of being caught in this bad relationship.

Morgan from PoetryConnection has this to say: “I have found that when someone enters your life very quickly it can be surprising, painful and hard to adjust. When this person is removed from your life you have a one sided and scared view of love and the world. I must convey pity for those of who have felt such moments. “Morgan has hit the nail on the head, this is exactly the feeling that Atwood is trying to portray. My own experiences are similar to Morgan’s, and the situation that Atwood is portraying in this poem. I’m currently in the process of attempting to remove the fish hook from my eye as painlessly as possible, and while the hook is still there, it is very difficult to move on or meet new people in a meaningful way.

You Fit into Me is a very interesting poem that defines both the good and the bad of love in just four small lines. My experiences fall into line with Atwood’s views on the topic, and reading this poem really opens old wounds. I definitely agree with You Fit into Me’s claim that love is enjoyable and painful. Be it chocolate or hand grenade, I will continue to reach into the bag of love.