Woodchucks By Maxine Kumin Summary

It can be hard to limit yourself when facing a new situation. Some handle it better than others, but some can spiral out of control and it’s too late for them. Others can own up to their actions and try to make up for what they have done. In “Woodchucks”, Maxine Kumin uses metaphors, characterization, and word choice to say it’s easier to get something over and done with before it gets out of hand, because things may not end up as planned. The poem begins with the line “Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.” The speaker then goes on to talk about how the knockout bomb didn’t work as it was advertised to because the groundhogs were out of range. The day after this, the speaker sees the groundhogs eating food from the vegetable patch and taking “the food from our mouths”, which seems to give the speaker some motivation and justification. They also could have been a bit frustrated with the knockout bomb not working and that could have given the speaker a personal vendetta against the woodchucks. So instead of killing the groundhogs in a way that induces less pain, the speaker has to find new ways to kill these groundhogs off. When the speaker was going to kill the woodchucks with the knockout bomb, they made it seem like the woodchucks were an infestation and the woodchucks invaded the speakers space. However, it was probably the …show more content…
The speaker sees themselves become a “lapsed pacifist”, someone who once did not believe in violence as means of resolving disputes, and has “pieties for killing,” or devotion to killing. One can assume that since they tried to be “merciful” and “quick at the bone” with the knockout bomb, they were never a “murderer” or a “hawkeye killer” prior to having to personally kill the woodchucks. So the speaker could obviously see the change in themselves, but they didn’t seem to do anything about it. By using these registers, the change the speaker goes through is