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Theme Of Woodchucks

Decent Essays

“Woodchucks” By Maxine Kumin, page 530-531 Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right. (A) The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange (B) was featured as merciful, quick at the bone (C) and the case we had against them was airtight, (A) (5) both exists shoehorned shut with puddingstone, (B) but they had a sub-sub basement out of range. (C) Next morning they turned up again, no worse (A) for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes (B) and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch. (C) (10) They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course (A) and then took over the vegetable patch (B) nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots. (C) The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling (A) to the feel of the …show more content…

The theme of this poem is an overall extended metaphor of woodchucks and the mind state of the people that were influenced by the Nazi warfare. Also, that what happened during the Holocaust was horrible and inhuman. The tone of this poem starts out to be non violent, however, shifts to a more aggressive tone when we get to the third stanza. Also, the speaker makes a shift as well in lines 10-12 “ They brought down the marigolds as matter of course and then took over the vegetable patch nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots”. In these lines, the speaker’s personality is more in a nonviolent perspective. However, the speaker changes to a not have grace for the woodchucks in lines 13-15, “ The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling to the feel of the .22, the bullets; neat noses. I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace”. Then again, the speaker also changes their mood to almost heartless in lines 22-24, “Another baby next. O one-two-three the murderer inside me rose up hard, the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith”. The speaker of the poem is mostly likely not connected to the woodchucks and it is a woman, also we know is that she ruined their garden. The mood of this poem is sad of how the speaker became so violent. The way that the speaker handled the situation influenced my tone and mood to be more disgusted from the inhuman way that they were dying and how the speaker started to have a little fun with it. Some of the different elements that the poet used affected the audience’s mood of the situation and the poet also used some figurative language in the poem as

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