Thoughts from underground; Margaret Atwood

THOUGHTS FROM UNDERGROUND
In Thoughts from underground we are placed in the third journal. Susanna Moodie changed from hating
Canada to feeling proud of its success. This poem takes her back to what she felt when she arrived at Canada
and to the first years she spent there. She hated it so much She felt that she did not fit in there, that it was not
her place. Everyone were rude and she was polite, everyone were rough and she was not She could not stand
the weather, nor in winter neither in summer.
But then, everything changed. They became successful and her head told her that she should be proud of her
new country. Then a fight in her heart began; she tells us how she still loved England but at the same time felt
proud of Canada. She did not want to forget England but she knew that she would never go back and that it
was not bad to love Canada.
This poem makes us see how she felt when she had to tell herself that they would be successful in this new
country and that she would never be back to England. After enumerating us all the bad things she experienced
in Canada, she remembers the good things that she began to find and that made her see that people like her
and her husband would make that big country successful. She remembers the moment in which she began to
convince herself of the positive features of Canada.
I see this poem as a memory. She evokes her contradictory feelings towards a country that has made her suffer
a lot but has also given her so many pleasures that she cannot help loving it.
This is another beautiful and direct poem that draws us a picture of Canada the way it was in the 19th Century.
It does not only draw a picture of Canada as it was in the 19th, , it also draws a sincere picture of how Canada
changed and of the people that made this change possible. People of whom we may not know their names but
people who made their dreams become a reality.
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