Woodchucks

“Woodchucks” maintains a tone that works in two registers; initially, the poem seems like a tongue-in-cheek recounting of a gardener’s encounters with woodchucks who eat the plants in the garden, but the allegorical topic of the poem creates a darker, more upsetting tone. The poem's opening line embodies this duality. The phrase “Gassing the woodchucks” (Line 1) is quite horrifying, but its effect is dampened by the phrase “didn’t turn out right” (Line 1), which is comically understated to allow the reader to empathize with the speaker’s struggle with pests.

At first, the speaker attempts to kill the woodchucks with a “knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange” (Line 2). The speaker describes this method as “merciful, quick at the bone” (Line 3) to justify the choice, showing that the speaker is trying to handle the animals humanely. The insistence that “the case we had against them was airtight” (Line 4) has a double meaning; first, it describes the physical contraption that should contain the poison gas, and second, it validates the speaker’s actions, suggesting how the speaker has spent time trying to solve the problem and catch the actual culprits.