The personification Atwood uses, such as when she describes “the rational whine of a power mower” added interest for me, as it is not often that we think of machinery as being “rational”. Personification reinforces the neighbourhood’s sickly obsession with perfection even the lawnmowers are carefully selected for their trim sound. The fact that Atwood included the word “power” in the line also indicates how smug the neighbourhood is the people think they’re special because they have a “power mower”, not a manual one. This made me strongly consider the pathetic side of striving for perfection the fact that these people define themselves by their lawnmower shows the emptiness of their lives and reflects the materialistic society in which we live today.
The repeated use of sibilance in the second stanza draws attention to negative words such as “spilled”, “sickness”, “vicious” and “bruise” and shows a detesting attitude towards this symmetrical neighbourhood. The repeated ‘s’ sound and description of “a plastic hose poised in a vicious/ coil” also reminded me of a snake, which led me to strongly believe that the people in the neighbourhood, while having ‘perfect’ front yards, are rather unaccommodating towards those who are different. Atwood does this to show how unwelcome this immaculate neighbourhood made the persona in the poem feel and shows that people who desire only perfection in their lives have to be unkind in order to exclude all that is inconsistent.
Atwood uses juxtaposition with the words “bland madness”, which caught my attention because the two words contradict each other. “Madness” is usually associated with frenzy, vivaciousness and abnormality, yet Atwood deliberately placed it next to the word “bland” (boring, blank, conventional). This reinforces her idea that the people in this symmetrical, neat neighbourhood are insane for fooling themselves by trying to conform to a society that is aiming for something impossible perfection. This...