Vivid Imagery In Woodchucks And Traveling Through The Dark

Vivid imagery used throughout both poems reflects the speaker's attitude and emotion toward the animals and their death. In “Woodchucks” phrases like “flip-flopped in the air and fell” (Kumin l. 19), are used to depict a scene where the narrator feels no remorse for her horrific actions of killing the mother of the woodchucks. The allusion to the Holocaust in the last two lines of Kumin’s poem allow us to imagine the gardener as a vicious Nazi who has nothing besides hate for the woodchucks, or in this case the Jews, thus wanting to gas them. In the poem “Woodchucks”, the narrator is filled with hostility; however, in “Traveling through the Dark” the speakers shows signs of guilt and grief. For example, the narrator hesitates and cries a bit