Can someone interpret Margaret Atwood poem, The Elegy for Giant Tortoises?
This poem by Margaret Atwood, a well-known Canadian writer, laments the gradual passing into extinction of giant tortoises. It speaks to their destruction at our hands, and how we honor their symbolic imagery—but not always their actual lives—reducing them eventually to nothing more than holy relics kept in glass cases in eternity’s museum. As conservationists, each of us must specialize and become champions and advocates for our particular charges—in this case, turtles and tortoises—lest they materialize eventually from our peripheral vision, too late for help, on the road to certain extinction. The poem is a call to action, a call for personal empathy and commitment—a challenge to us to prevent this plodding, lumbering path towards extinction. Turtles and tortoises must remain living members of our natural world, not just destroyed, holy, and obsolete symbols of that world. The imagery she chooses, “plodding,” “small heads pondering/ from side to side” and their “useless armour” make
