Going through Atwood’s poetry again recently, I found myself returning to “You Begin”, a poem I keep coming back to every now and then. Partly, I suppose, because it seems so straightforward, but reveals itself as being more profound the longer you engage with it; its form mirroring its content.
Some interpretations I’ve come across frame it in terms of maternal love, or the complications and insights of teaching. The readings tend to focus on the often challenging task of explaining the world’s complexity to a child who doesn’t yet have the language or experience to grasp it. I’ve always liked the poem for its elegance beneath its simple imagery: How, by formal way of an instructive educational lesson, it illustrates how language often fails to convey immediate, lived experience for which there can’t ever be an adequate linguistic substitute. Language can be surprisingly clumsy when it tries to bridge the gap between the word and the world.
You Begin is about many different things. It is a poem about the weight of language, signification, the limitations of knowledge, embodiment, and the ever-present, quiet proximity of danger. It keeps returning to the body (more specifically: the hand) as the final fallback when signification breaks down.
“You begin this way: / This is your hand, / this is your eye…”
The teaching begins in the body. Before abstraction and metaphor, the child understands the tangible. The body is the site of first knowledge, and the hand becomes the motif of return. Later in the poem (and, by metonymical extension, in life), when language falters and experience exceeds comprehension, it becomes the anchoring concept.
“Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.”
The gentle tone now takes on a serious tinge. Language, initially a tool of naming, ordering and structuring, with time becomes overwhelming. There will always be more words, and yet never enough adequacy to fully contain what needs saying. The speaker goes on to teach a hard truth: much of knowledge is non-transferable.
“The word hand floats above your hand / like a small cloud over a lake.”
The word “hand” hovers, distanced from its referent. The image is quiet, but impactful. It visualizes the logical gap between signifier and signified, a core concept in both linguistics and semiotics. The word is not the thing. The word is above the thing. It floats, untethered. Naming does not grant understanding. The child learns “hand,” but what it is — its grip, its warmth, its history, its impact as a cultural symbol, its capacity to console or strike — eludes language and defies explanation.
Even as we name and touch the world, we remain epistemologically limited within it. Consider, for example, how bees can see light within the ultraviolet spectrum; or how many animals hear frequencies we do not. The flight of migratory birds and their sense of orientation is attributed to magnetoreception, their fascinating awareness of the earth’s magnetic field.
The world is much vaster than our limited human senses permit. Our understanding of it is always situated, bounded by biology and perception.
“This is the world, which is fuller / and more difficult to learn than I have said. / You are right to smudge it that way / with the red and then / the orange: the world burns.”
Atwood performs a tonal sleight of hand here, moving from childhood coloring to apocalyptic metaphor with ease. The world is not just hard to explain, it is, just as importantly, full of danger. There is war, environmental collapse, violence. Even within this seemingly safe context of an innocent lesson, You Begin is subtly honest about darkness. The adult does not lie about or soften the state of the world. She admits where she fails. But there is consolation to be found, yet again, in the hand, which she keeps returning to, which the reader is drawn to again and again:
“The word hand anchors / your hand to this table, / your hand is a warm stone / I hold between two words.”
When trauma inevitably arrives and overwhelms the mind, we fall back on sensation: this is warm, this is here, this is mine. The body is both origin and fallback. It is how we first reached out to the world, and how we cling to it when comprehension collapses. In trauma theory, the return to immediate tangible experience is a deliberate coping strategy: the body is forced to return to its grounding function during a psychological breakdown.
This point of origin, once more and emphatically so, is also where the poem returns to in its closing lines:
This is what you will come back to, / this is your hand.”
This concerns childhood as much as it does adulthood. In a trauma-saturated culture, we too return to the hand whenever it has the power to console us: the sensory, the grounded, the tactile. We cook. We build. We pet a dog. We reach out to another person. When words fail us, we return to the hand that feeds, that clasps, that consoles: a warm stone.
It gently reminds us of the necessity for touch and connection, to make a gesture toward the world: A hand reaching out, even if the world itself sometimes seems to remain unreachable and indifferent to us.