“Woodchucks,” by Maxine Kumin, is an exploration of the dehumanization of a man when he can begin to justify mass extermination to himself and his conscience. Rather than a specific comparison to one event in history, this is an overall commentary on the effect hatred has on the soul of any human being. What begins as a general prejudice held by one population, the farming community, against another, the woodchucks, turns into a personal vendetta for an individual. The evolution of this hatred inspires the beginning of an erosion of all that is human within this man.
The poem is presented with dramatic irony. There is a discrepancy between the words of the speaker and the meaning intended by Kumin. There is also a great deal of symbolism present in the poem; the farmer and woodchucks are representative of more than they first appear to be. This is not just a poem about some crazy farmer who enjoys killing small animals.
The speaker in the poem begins as a peace-loving farmer. He agreed with the general attitude held in his community-the woodchucks were a nuisance. Then he aggressively participated in the first attempted extermination of the rodents. Their survival and subsequent invasion of the garden is a turning point for the farmer. He begins to take their presence personally. When they “[nip] the broccoli shoots” and [behead] the carrots,” he sees this as taking “the food from our mouths” (lines 12 and 13). They have graduated from being general nuisances to personally targeting the farmer. This is the last time the speaker narrates in plural terms; he continues on in first-person singular narrative. This represents how this has become a personal war for him.
The characterization of the aggressor as a farmer in this poem is very important. Farmers are not generally thought of as bloodthirsty killers. They do what they have to in order to save their farms and provide from their families, even if this includes the extermination of an entire species. They do not believe it is evil that motivates them; it is necessity. This also could be said of the average white Christian citizen in pre-World War II Germany. They, along with the rest of the world, were trying to exist through economic hardships. As a rodent infestation might endanger a farmer’s crops, the existence of everyone who did not fit the Nazis’ ideal prototype was seen as a threat. This was an idea propagated by a charismatic leader and accepted by a population starved for salvation. However, although it was devastating for its victims, the Holocaust did not succeed in a “pure” white race. The “Solution” did not work.
There is a constant reiteration of the “s” sound in this poem. There are eighteen words in which this sound is alliterated. “Shoehorned, “shut,” “puddingstone,” “sub-sub-basement,” “cyanide,” “cigarettes,” “state,” “store,” and “Scotch” are just half of these words. This “s” sound could have several meanings. The first is the SS, which were the most elite fanatics of the Nazi regime. Another relation that can be made between the “s” sound and this poem is the actual noise produced when uttering “s”: sssss. It sounds like the seeping of gas into a room, like the gas chambers used by the Nazis. It might also represent the seeping of the rodents into the garden, or in keeping with the symbolism of the poem, the seeping of an “inferior” race into a country.
Instead of the us-against-them mentality, as in the first stanza, a me-against-them ideology developed in the poem. This is exhibited very plainly by the changing method of murder. The farmer began to kill individuals one at a time with a gun, as opposed to gassing many faceless victims. Shooting an individual face-to-face is infinitely more personal than gassing a crowd.
The farmer begins to justify murdering the woodchucks. He is full of “Darwinian pieties for killing” (line 16). Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory is well-suited to the farmer’s reasoning. The words “righteously” and “pieties” both have religious connotation. The farmer sees himself as having the God-given right to assert his power over the woodchucks. He has also taken the word of
Darwin
as his religion. He has dedicated himself to the elimination of the woodchucks by asserting his superior strength, exactly the idea behind “survival of the fittest.”
The fourth stanza shows how the farmer begins killing for the sake of the kill, instead of for survival. He begins to become desensitized to death. When he kills the second baby woodchuck, he barely notes it: “Another baby next” (line 22). That is the only mention the murder of this baby warrants. He has become a “hawkeye killer” (line 24). Not only has he become a predator, but he is becoming an animal, a hawk who preys on small animals. Guilt is a human emotion, and he is losing it.
This man, though, is not completely without conscience yet. He is still haunted by the survivors of the woodchuck Holocaust. He metaphorically compares himself to a gun; he is “cocked and ready,” like a gun (line 26). He has gone beyond being the facilitator of death to being the actual cause, the means by which death occurs. He dreams at night of killing the last “old wily fellow” in order to eliminate the last reminder of his crimes which, in spite of his efforts, are not justifiable (line 25). He wishes the woodchucks would have died faceless, “the quiet Nazi way,” so his conscience would not be haunted (line 30). He even blames the woodchucks for not dying the first time. He must do this to live with his obsession, guilt, and the ugly truth he has learned about himself.
Maxine Kumin is lecturing those holding suppressed prejudices, the possible seeds of hatred, in the poem “Woodchucks.” Her use of symbolism, presenting the farmer as the power-wielder and the woodchucks the targeted minority, is very effective. Through dramatic irony, she shows how a seemingly innocent ideal can become dangerous. When someone can begin to justify the extermination of an entire race – or in the case of the poem, an entire species-the very basis of humanity begins to deteriorate.
