A Poem Where Death Pauses, Patriarchy Panics, and a Woman on a Rope Redefines Power
ABS Believes:
Some poems aren’t written—they’re whispered by the nearly dead.
And sometimes survival is the loudest poem of all.
Atwood: Chronicler of Wrath in Whispered Monologues
Margaret Atwood doesn’t write women. She summons them. Half-Hanged Mary is one such conjuring—a poem based on a real woman, Mary Webster, hanged for witchcraft in Puritan New England in 1680, and left dangling overnight… only to be found alive the next morning.
Atwood gives Mary her voice back. And it is not soft.
This isn’t a poem—it’s a revenant’s soliloquy, told hour by hour through one long, chilling, and sarcastically defiant internal monologue.
Hour by Hour Breakdown: When Time Doesn’t Heal—It Testifies
“7 p.m.”
We begin with rope and judgment. The townspeople have done their part—violence delivered, righteousness preserved. Mary’s body hangs, but her mind is sharp.
She’s already mocking them:
“To be witch’d is nothing— / it’s just to know what others don’t.”
Translation: I know more than you, and you hate me for it.
“9 p.m.”
The body starts to numb, but the rage kicks in. The sky is silent. The men are gone. But their sins linger.
“The body doesn’t like being suspended.”
No kidding. She’s swinging between dimensions—alive in form, dead in social status.
“Midnight”
This is where the real poetry starts:
“I was born for this.”
She’s no longer scared. She’s transcending. Hanging in silence, she begins dismantling everything—gender roles, religion, the fragility of male morality.
“God isn’t interested in this transaction.”
Atwood’s theological mic drop. Heaven didn’t sanction this. Men did.
“3 a.m.”
Delirium? No. Clarity.
Mary becomes elemental. Cosmic.
She isn’t waiting to be saved. She’s narrating her own spiritual takeover.
“I fell into the dark, and it was silent.”
Silence in Atwood is not emptiness—it’s revolution in disguise.
“5 a.m.”
Now she’s turned prophet. No longer angry. Just aware.
“The rope was an umbilical cord.”
She’s giving birth to herself. What was meant to kill her, midwifed her.
“8 a.m.”
Morning comes. The town returns.
She’s alive.
And they’re afraid. Because nothing terrifies a patriarchal town more than a woman who’s both damned and breathing.
“I will go on writing until they understand.”
Which means: You didn’t silence me. You gave me a plot twist.
Modern Echoes & ABS Commentary
“To be witch’d is nothing…”
Try being female and opinionated in a Facebook thread.
“The rope was an umbilical cord.”
Only Atwood could turn execution into rebirth like it’s a poetic yoga pose.
“I was born for this.”
A line that could caption every feminist manifesto ever carved into metaphor.
Why This Poem Still Hangs Heavy—and Doesn’t Budge
Because society still fears women who don’t die when told.
Because silence doesn’t mean surrender.
Because hanging is temporary—survival is permanent.
And because Margaret Atwood knew: giving a woman the last word means she never stops talking.
The Literary Scholar folds the scroll and pins it to the scaffold beam, where the echo of a woman’s voice still swings between centuries.
Signed,
The Literary Scholar
Where rope doesn’t end a sentence—it starts a poem
Where witches don’t burn—they rewrite the fire
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