Loneliness In Margaret Atwood's In The Secular Night

Within the poem “In The Secular Night”, Margaret Atwood invokes a morose, and careless, and ultimately bitter character through a life of loneliness and isolation. Throughout the poem, the protagonist, seemingly a woman, seems to have a cloud of misery revolving around her, she feels “deserted” and - at “two-thirty” in the morning - feels herself start to relive a specific night of her adolescence in which she first felt lonely. The night she “lit a cigarette”, “cried for a while” and ultimately ended by “dancing, by [her]self.”

She is, furthermore, a character with a “devil-may-care” attitude. She wanders about her house at the wee hours of the morning, in an “amble” pace, obviously unafraid of waking anyone because she is so utterly