Freddie Brewington
Professor Link
ENG 1020
September 15, 2020
Respond 4.
Woodchucks.
As you read WOODCHUCKS aloud, how does your tone of voice change from beginning to end? What tone do you use to read the ending? How does the hunter feel about her increasing attraction of violence? Why does the poem begin by calling the gassing of the woodchucks “merciful” (line 3) and end by describing it as “the quiet Nazi way” (30)? What names does the hunter call herself? How does the name-calling affect your feelings about her? Exactly when does the hunter begin to enjoy the feel of the gun and the idea of killing? How does the poet make that clear? What, ultimately, might the poem as a whole say or show us about ourselves –especially, perhaps, our relation to animals? to violence.
In “Woodchucks” the speaker is a farmer who believes that killing the woodchucks is the best alternative for his problems. When reading the poem aloud, the tone of voice at the beginning is relaxed, then it proceeds with a serious tone towards the end of the poem. In the first two stanzas, the speaker tries to kill the woodchucks in a humanely and painless way. In the poem, the gassing bomb used on woodchucks is referred to as “merciful and quick at the bone.” Murdering the woodchucks by gas is ‘merciful’ nearly a painless method for the woodchucks to die. The gassing of the woodchucks at the end of the poem is described as “the quiet Nazi way” shows how the speaker murdered the woodchucks after the first painless attempt failed. The killing of the woodchucks shifted from the effortless way, using gas to ensuring that the speaker killed them using her hand. The hunter refers to herself as Nazi and her teeth as “needles” since the woodchucks are recognized to have thin sharp teeth. How the hunter courageously refers to herself after killing the woodchucks makes me believe that she enjoys torturing the animals. I love animals, and therefore, any person who tortures animals is inhumane. The speaker states, “I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing, now drew a bead on the little woodchuck’s face. He died down in the everbearing roses” (line15-17). This stanza shows that the speaker is excited about killing, and her inner perception is evidently exposed. The “woodchucks” poem indicates that human beings have a killer inside them, which cannot be controlled. It is important that we treat animals well since they also feel the pain we feel when those around us hurt us.
Works Cited.
Mays, Kelly J., Ed. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Thirteenth Ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. Print.