Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin

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seems very self-aware yet unable to rise above a fairly barbaric reaction to another being’s attempt to survive. This poem is about attempts to eradicate woodchucks from a garden on a literal level. The speaker also puts it on a level about how little it takes to turn a person to evil. In the poem, the speaker is trying to eliminate a family of woodchucks. The speaker’s attempt to take out the woodchucks in the most humane way possible infuriates her in a way that’s not humanly normal. When the “merciful” method does not work, the speaker should have calmed down and figured something else out. The woodchucks are still destroying the garden though. This gives the speaker her aggression talked about in the first paragraph. The speaker justifies this by the fact that she is killing the woodchucks, but she is actually beginning to enjoy it. Although all of the woodchucks are gone, they have left a lasting effect on the speaker and her audience. The speaker cannot be the same person she was when she first began, and has instead been turned into a killer and one who enjoys killing. What does this say about her, or to her audience? The speaker starts as a merciful person in the beginning of her poem, but by the end she has turned into something completely unexpected. A monster now lies within the speaker by the end of the poem with ties to the Nazi party.