Nazis and Woodchucks Essay Example for Free

national socialists and Woodchucks EssayNazi racial ideology has baffled the farmingd mind since the atrocities were first made known to the world with the end of WWII. though the inconceivable horror Jews and other nationalities endured under Nazi reign is common knowledge in our culture and is found in almost any modern history textbook, the mindset that made such atrocities acceptable to Nazis under Hitlers regime remains a mystery to many. Maxine Kumin admirably conveys the thought process potty this oppressive outlook through the seemingly simplistic poem Woodchucks. The purpose of the poem is to align the readers with the narrators apparently reasonable yet somewhat sociopathic view of the woodchucks as an inferior disembodied spirit form while building an allegory to the Nazis justification for mass extermination that forget shock the consultation when made explicit by the poems end. In the first stanza, Maxine introduces the narrators problem with the woodchucks and how she justifies attempting to gas them.The narrator states how violent death the woodchucks with gas didnt turn out practiced (1). This phrase emphasizes how the narrator views cleanup position the woodchucks as a mundane and emotionless task, the same way a batch of cookies or pot of coffee may non turn out right. gas has connotations of a slow agonizing death, but the poem continues the knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain supervene upon / was featured as merciful, quick at the bone (2-3). This contrast in connotation and given translation is meant to show how the narrator is striving to justify their deaths. The second stanza begins to make the narrators view of the woodchucks as lesser clearer to the audience. Maxine uses alliteration to draw attention to the words cyanide, cigarettes and state-store Scotch when the narrator states the woodchucks are No worse / for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes (7-8).In this comparison, the narrator gives the impression th at she considers gassing the woodchucks a favor to them, like giving them louse up or cigarettes. While it is not explicit in the poem by the second stanza, this metaphor hints at the narrators unbalanced views of life regarding the woodchucks. Maxine to a fault introduces war imagery in this stanza. The narrator describes how the woodchucks took everywhere the vegetables by nipping and beheading (11-12). These verbs not only personify the vegetables as victims, but turn woodchucks into a force of evil in a war-like manner in the narrators mind. It is important to celebrate that the narrator never addresses the woodchucks need to eat and survive and only views it as an unjustified invasion. This mindset fast aligns with the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. The narrator treats the woodchucks with no right to the garden the same way that Jews still carried the inwardness of proof that they simply had the right to be there (Hartmann 636). By the third stanza, the Maxine so lidifies the narrators detestation and blood thirst towards the woodchucks, using a Nazi related whipping boy excuse to rationalize killing them.The food from our mouths (13) starts the stanza a sentence fragment most likely muttered bitterly by the narrator that fortifies the judgement that woodchucks are not simply invading and eating food, but stealing food from the narrator. To the narrator, the woodchucks become the scapegoat for the gardens ruin the same way the Jews were used to blame for the economic collapse of Germany (Foster 13). However, Maxine also undertones the narrators scapegoat claim as unsubstantial and exaggerated. In a vegetable stain containing numerous vegetable types, a small family of woodchucks is unlikely to be as deadly of a scourge as the narrator makes it out to be. Similarly, The Nazi claim that Germany was being Judaized can hardly be substantiated as Germanys Jewish inhabitants in 1933 made up a mere .80 percent of the total world (Foster 15). T he third stanza also starts to unearth the poems greater implications towards Nazi ideology with the line puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing (16).The Darwinian aspect is an outstanding piece of the third stanza because it applies a fairly max human social concept to the killing of woodchucks. This is directly related to the Nazis ideology which had evolved all over the previous 80 years from the related notions of eugenics and Social Darwinism (Erdos 6), but Maxine has not made this relation on the whole explicit yet. With the last two stanzas, the narrator degrades the death of the woodchucks. Rather than describe it in detail, the woodchucks died down (18). The equivocal language hides any aspects of horror in the killing and gives the deaths a cartoonish aspect when the mother dropped and flip-flopped (19-20). The narrator fifty-fifty portrays their deaths in an eerie sing-song tone when O one-two-three / the murderer inside me rose up hard (22-23).This is connect t o the way Holocaust victims were killed systematically (one-two-three) and their bodies were piled up for disposal. The language describing death in the poem and the way killing was carried out in Nazi concentration camps are connected in the way both were dehumanized. The fourth stanza also has a tone shift when the narrator explains the murderer inside me rose up hard. / the hawkeye killer whale came on stage forthwith (23-24). This part of the poem shifts the tone from the woodchucks as aggressors to the narrator becoming the aggressor. The corroborative yet clear tone change indicates that the poem is now less related to the Nazis perspective, but the modern view of Nazis as the invaders.The last stanza in this poem brings an ultimate shock to the audience by directly referencing the Nazis in the ending line If only theyd all consented to die unseen / gassed underground the quiet Nazi way (29-30). Any slight relations to Nazi ideology end-to-end the poem are now highlighted by this last line. At this point the readers have been carried through an falteringly reasonable rant by the narrator of the woodchucks as a lesser life form, and then slammed into the allusion to the Nazis killings. The entire poem, even the spread-out rhyme scheme, threads into this central idea accented in the last line. Maxine, through the language and design of the poem Woodchucks, ultimately presented how frightening ideology similar to the Nazis is not as uncommon on a small scale as one may think. kit and caboodle CitedErdos, E. G. Regarding German Science and Racismroots of the Nazi Holocaust The FASEB Journal 22.6 (2008) 1623. Print. Foster, C. R. Historical Antecedents Why the Holocaust? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 450.1 (1980) 1-19. Print. Hartmann, Dieter D. Anti-Semitism and the Appeal of Nazism. Political Psychology 5.4 (1994) 635-42. Print.