Completely Subjective: Margaret Atwood’s “Tell Me Something Good”
Fine, I’ll admit it: I watch the news every night, and I’m proud of it. This is a fact that my friends and peers are often appalled to hear. “How could you do that to yourself?” they remark, or “I could never, that’s too depressing.” And, to the critics I say, “Yeah, you might be right.” As much as I value being aware of, say, Louisiana’s policy requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, I sometimes struggle to tell if my dinnertime news-watching rituals are more informative or more torturous. And, though my pride remains intact—mostly— I sometimes envy my classmates who prefer blissful ignorance, and I can empathize with the desires that Margaret Atwood presents in “Tell Me Something Good.”
If you’re at all present in literary spaces (or if you’ve taken an 11th-grade English class), chances are, you’ve heard of Atwood. Her most famous work, the 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a dystopian, theocratic United States, criticizes society’s subjugation of women. It’s unsurprising, then, that throughout her life, Atwood has been a feminist in the real world, saying on the content of her novel, “I simply extended trends that are already with us. I didn’t invent anything, I didn’t add anything new in, I took things that are really happening now.”
This knowledge of the “things that are really happening now” may be what inspired Atwood to write The Handmaid’s Tale, but it also seems to have influenced her 2024 poem “Tell Me Something Good.” In the poem, the speaker laments the volume of terrible things in the world, and searches for anything, however small, to bring joy into her life. The poem begins optimistically, with the speaker asking to be told something to get her through the difficulties of the world. But, as it continues, the possibility of goodness shrinks, from “green buds” to “just one green bud” to “that it got cooler,” to, eventually, “breakfast.” And, although the speaker eventually does find some solace in the beauty of a breakfast, the poem seems to end on a low note: “[W]asn’t that / enough? No. Wait.”
Atwood’s piece, to me, highlights the repetitive nature of the world. As it begins, it asks for a bit of hope, then sinks when the speaker touches on the horrors of reality. She suggests good things, bringing the tone back up—but this sinks again, until the only good thing is “breakfast.” And, although this brings her comfort, it’s only temporary; it will never be enough. I’m certainly familiar with the vicious cycle—I get emotional whiplash just from watching one news broadcast; at dinner each night, my family’s favorite reporter, David Muir, can go from talking about the war in Palestine to a viral video of a chubby baby, and back again. But it seems like every other week, my parents and I have the same remark to make: “There’s just no good news now.”
This idea of “no good news” was a particularly prevalent feeling in my life last spring, when the United States Supreme Court ruled on a number of cases. One, in particular, got under my skin: the deadlock on Oklahoma Charter School Board v. Drummond, which ultimately upheld the previous ruling prohibiting publicly-funded religious charter schools in Oklahoma. Regardless of the final verdict, how, I wondered, could four of the nine Supreme Court Justices, dedicated to the American Constitution, so blatantly ignore the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause about the separation of church and state, and support the creation of a Christian school funded by taxpayer dollars? (I’m not here just to get fired up about politics—I have a point, I swear.) The day the Court’s verdict was released, I argued about the case to just about anyone who would listen to me rant. I don’t live in Oklahoma, nor do I even pay taxes just yet—still, I was frustrated not only by the decisions of the Justices but by the shifting political climate all around our country, and by the atrocities worldwide that I had been hearing about day in and day out.
However, what I failed to remember then, and what I try to remember now, in a world that seems to have no good news, is exactly what the speaker of Atwood’s poem seeks to take comfort in: the small, and the beautiful. This, I think, is what drives journalists like David Muir to report on more lighthearted matters from time to time. As individuals privy to the division in our nation’s political sphere, privy to the horrors continuing around the globe—regardless of our political stances—we need to remind each other, and ourselves, that there is still beauty in this world, whether that beauty takes the form of “green buds,” “breakfast,” or (you guessed it,) a happy, round little baby.
The speaker of “Tell Me Something Good” knows this, yet that knowledge is still not enough to put her at ease. If life is a series of rises and falls, Atwood’s poem seems to place more emphasis on the falls. The first time I read it, I felt more than a little defeated by the end. Why, I wondered, did Atwood seem so insistent on the triumph of suffering over peace? Why end an otherwise hopeful poem on such a pessimistic note? But when I reread it, I understood something less clear. Much like an interested reader restarts a poem, so too does the cycle of rises and falls repeat. The poem doesn’t end on a low note; it continues, over, and over, and it will never end—at least, not until humanity does. By portraying the cyclical nature of life, Atwood reminds readers that although their break may not last more than thirty minutes, it doesn’t have to. The poem can restart, once again, with hope. The cycle can repeat, and that’s all right too.
If examining Atwood’s poem has left me with any concrete message or moral, it would be to the politically active youth of our country, myself included: take a breath. Have some breakfast. Keep fighting afterward. Those countless foreign wars, those Supreme Court Justices, will still be there when you are finished eating.
Do I speak from a place of privilege? Absolutely. I am infinitely lucky to be able to take a step back from these current events, while “these current events” make up the very lives of some children my own age. But if you’re someone who’s been caught up in one too many news broadcasts, who feels like nothing will ever make up for the terrible things happening around the world, let yourself be told something good. Let yourself see green buds, let yourself celebrate that it is cool again.
I’m not telling you to stop the cycle. I’m not going to stop watching the news, either. What I’m saying is that just as you can reread Atwood’s poem and keep gaining and losing hope over again, if you are lucky enough to be able to enjoy your own life for just thirty minutes, then you take that opportunity—and I’ll wait until dinner is over to put on David Muir, sometime.