Maxine Kumin Woodchucks Essay

The poem “Woodchucks” by Maxine Kumin, is about the narrator’s attempt to eradicate woodchucks from a garden. The figurative message of the poem is how a person can change from good to evil effortlessly. The metaphor of the Holocaust is intertwined in the poem and helps enhance the figurative message. The uniform format and the implication of Kumin’s word choices creates a framework that allows the reader to draw out deeper meanings that the literary devices create. Maxine Kumin’s use of an undeviating format, word choice, and allusion to the Holocaust reinforces the purpose of her poem.
Kumin creates a conventionally formatted poem that recounts the narrator's fall from pacifist to murderer. The uniform format creates an acceptable structure

The moment of change in the narrator’s personality occurs when the time it takes to kill the woodchucks diminishes and less moral preparation is needed. Before the first kill, the narrator bolsters herself with “Darwinian pieties” allowing justification for survival of the fittest. The Nazis used similar rationale for exterminating those less genetically fit. After convincing herself of these new morals, she starts to kill the woodchucks : “Now drew a bead on the little woodchucks face” (17). … “Ten minutes later I dropped the mother” (19). … “O one-two-three/ the murderer inside me rose up hard” (22-23). At first, the narrator needs time to recover and grieve for the “little woodchuck” she kills. Ultimately, she is able to kill a group within seconds, feels little, if any, compassion for them and takes on the mindset of a killer. The reader can easily imagine the Nazis breaching the same moral barrier when murdering the Jews. Maxine Kumin illustrates the purpose of the poem “Woodchucks” by her use of a neat format descriptive word choice, and the metaphor of the Holocaust giving the reader a better sense of the feeling you get of the poem and an example which helps understand concepts