Woodchucks Poem Analysis

The protagonist of the poem is Rosa Parks, a seamstress and an active member in the local NAACP, who refused to give up her seat for a white man. Parks was arrested, which led to a boycott against Montgomery bus system. As a result of more than one year of boycott, the segregation law was announced unconstitutional.

He died down in the everbearing roses.” This paints a picture of how the woodchucks face looked as he died in the bed of roses. Moving into the fourth stanza, the speaker creates another vivid picture of killing the mother when he says, “She flip flopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.” This imagery backs up the line in which the speaker realizes he’s in the wrong. “The murderer inside me rose up hard, the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.” Here, he realizes that no killing is justified and he is in the wrong.

Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.

In Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection Native Guard, the reader is exposed to the story of Trethewey’s growing up in the southern United States and the tragedy which she encountered during her younger years, in addition to her experiences with prejudice and to issues surrounding prejudice within the society she is living in. Throughout this work, Trethewey often refers to graves and provides compelling imagery regarding the burial of the dead. Within Trethewey’s work, the recurring imagery surrounding graves evolves from the graves simply serving as a personal reminder of the past, to a statement on the collective memory of society and comments on how Trethewey is troubled with what society has forgotten as it signifies a willingness to overlook the dehumanization of a large group of people.

     In the fourth stanza, the speaker’s killing instinct has taken over her body. She shows no pity towards the woodchucks as she takes the mother woodchuck and shoots her, watching it fall to its helpless death. She then takes another baby woodchuck, looking in its eyes, and kills it. She continues to kill the rest like a trained assassin, or psycho killer driven by pure frustration.

Humanity is but a facet of the sublime macrocosm that is the world’s landscapes. In the relationship between man and landscape, nature is perpetually authoritarian. In her free-verse poems, The Hawthorn Hedge, (1945) and Flame-Tree in a Quarry (1949), Judith Wright illustrates the how refusal to engage with this environment is detrimental to one’s sense of self, and the relentless endurance of the Australian landscape. This overwhelming force of nature is mirrored in JMW Turner’s Romantic artwork, Fishermen at Sea (1796). Both Wright and Turner utilise their respective texts to allegorise the unequal relationship between people and the unforgiving landscape.

She admits that a “lapsed pacifist” such as herself can be filled with “Darwinian pieties” to murder, specifically referencing the woodchucks destroying the landscape. Though the narrator may seem to simply realize her obsession with killing the woodchucks, her overall connotation leads readers to consider the possibility of a preoccupation to execute humans as well. This theme continues throughout the remaining stanzas in the poem, as the speaker utilizes phrases such as “the murderer inside me” and “if only they’d consented to die unseen.” These lines insinuate that the speaker represents one who murders people rather than a hunter of rodents. The use of violent, personified vocabulary throughout the entire poem also signifies the speaker’s focus on human violence. The strand of harsh and sometimes humanized words such as “beheading,” “gassing,” “nipping,” “killing,” and “bullets” inflict a negative connotation for the narrator’s actions. These words are not always used when referring to the woodchucks; the “beheading” refers to a patch of carrots, which signifies that this violent connotation is intentional. If the speaker simply aims to reflect an innocent woodchuck hunt, she should not use such violent or personal vocabulary. Therefore, the incorporation of this strand of words along with the narrator’s description of her own actions signifies the overall personification of the rodents in the speaker’s

Death is inescapable. In the same way, life is inescapable. The Appalachian short story, “Jake Pond”, portrays this inevitable cycle through the depiction of a young boy enjoying nature. Lou Crabtree writes of the many inner workings of life through symbolism. While some would say this story is a literal telling of a boy and his surroundings, it does, in fact, include a plethora of metaphors to display the complexities of life through figurative language (Crabtree). In Lou Crabtree’s “Jake Pond” symbols such as the young boy, black snakes, pond, hollytree, and other natural entities portray themes of life and death, while detailing multiple aspects of change.

In the music video/song “Strange Fruit”, the phrase strange fruit doesn’t really refer to a fruit that is strange. It actually refers to people being lynched and hanging from trees. More specifically, the term strange fruit applies to the lynching of African Americans. This song was performed by Billie Holiday in 1939 at the Cafe Society in New York. The music video was actually a recorded performance from 1959. The song was written and performed because the purpose of was to raise awareness and fight against African American lynching because during that time, African Americans were being discriminated and abused. Billie Holiday in the music video/song “Strange Fruit” displays logos through context and imagery, pathos through her sorrowful tone and facial expressions, and lastly, ethos because she won many awards during her career in singing, and Strange Fruit is one of them.

I have entered into the field of education with full knowledge that it can be very challenging but it is my venture to make it gratifying for both my students and myself. A crucial point of “The Woodcarver” is the ability to focus. Once the woodcarver was finished with his work, all credits were taken from him and given to higher powers. Similarly, once I am able to bring the task at hand to the central point of my concentration, then I am bond to astonish many, including myself. I particularly gain wisdom from the fact that “The woodcarver” guarded his spirit and did not expend it on trifles that were not to the point. Burning up energy on issues that have nothing to do with the mission at hand is detrimental to success. Like “The

In “Monkey Hill,” Stan Rice writes about the speaker of the poem who sits at a zoo with his friend observing the spider monkey exhibit. The two stay the whole day to observe these monkeys. The speaker becomes envious of these monkeys and their ability to be confident with exactly where they are and with who they are. Rice argues that our minds imprison us when we are worried about judgment from others. The monkeys in the exhibit felt free and at ease while the two observers were trapped in worrisome about the outside world in fear of how others would perceive them.

The details of the imagery forces vulgar images through the audience’s mind and showcases the speaker’s mentality: obsessive and merciless. When the speaker shoots the woodchucks, “Ten minutes later [he or she] dropped the mother” as “[the mother] flip flopped… still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard” (19-21). Not only the “Swiss chard” alludes to Rosh Hashanah, a Jewish holiday, but his or her merciless actions is shown by shooting the mother first and the “baby next”(22). Seen as the delicate member of society, the mother and baby woodchuck are shot with no hesitation nor regret. One woodchuck is still on the loose and was described as the “Old wily fellow, he keeps [the speaker] cocked and ready day after day after day” and “all night

The two short stories “Black Swan Green” written by David Mitchell and “Letters To A Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke both share a common central idea. In both stories, there is a mentee looking for advice from their mentors. The mentees have a passion for poetry and are aspiring poets. The mentors inform their mentees that someone who wants to be a poet should get their motivation from natural aspects. For one thing, It’s your natural beauty that makes you who you are as a person and a poet. Poetry is for yourself, your thoughts and ideas, not an audience.

Kumin uses vivid imagery to describe the destruction that the woodchucks caused. “They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course” and “beheaded the carrots.” This introduces the speaker’s adversarial tone throughout the rest of the poem. She immediately seeks revenge on the woodchuck family. The author states that the speaker, at one point, was not a violent person. “I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing.” Now, the author shows the speaker’s “survival of the fittest” beliefs in order to express the ongoing adventure of killing the woodchucks. She shot the smallest woodchuck first and watched it fall into the roses. The author provides more imagery to describe the manner in which the mother woodchuck died. “She flip-flopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.” By doing this, it is easy to imagine the ball of fur tumbling through the air, dead. Kumin shows the speaker’s seek for vengeance when she begins to kill all of the woodchucks. “O one-two-three the murderer inside me rose up hard.” Here, the revenge that the speaker is in search of is noticed. The author puts into her poem that the last woodchuck is an “old wily fellow,” implying that he is clever and sneaky. The

Ted Kooser, the thirteenth Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner, is known for his honest and accessible writing. Kooser’s poem “A Spiral Notebook” was published in 2004, in the book Good Poems for Hard Times, depicting a spiral notebook as something that represents more than its appearance. Through the use of imagery, diction, and structure, Ted Kooser reveals the reality of a spiral notebook to be a canvas of possibilities and goes deeper to portray the increasing complexities in life as we age.