Chainsaw v Pampass Grass Flashcards
1
Q
Human technology vs Nature
A
- When the speaker of Armitage’s poem hauls a chainsaw out of his shed to cut down some decorative feathery “pampas grass,” he admits it’s “overkill”: the chainsaw is a tool of pure destruction, ready to chew through anything in its path, and more than a match for a patch of ornamental vegetation. However, while the speaker and his chainsaw manage to wipe out the grass above ground, its roots persist, and before long the plant has sprung right back up. Nature, this poem suggests, has a quiet power that’s more than a match for mechanical destruction. Humanity might enjoy a brief fantasy of dominance through technology, but technology can never defeat nature.
- The chainsaw the speaker pulls out of his shed is a frightening, indiscriminately destructive instrument. To the speaker, it seems just as eager to devour “the flesh of the face and the bones beneath” as to do the jobs it’s intended for: it’s emotionless and pitiless, and its only purpose is to buzz right through whatever it meets. A real technological achievement, it has one job—to saw—and it’s terrifyingly good at it.
- The poem thus makes some wry fun of humanity’s illusions of control. People enjoy the idea that, through cleverness and technology, they can bend nature to their will. But no matter how people try to manipulate (or destroy!) the world around them, nature will always quietly go on doing its thing behind their backs.
2
Q
Violent force vs Quiet persistence
A
- The chainsaw this poem’s speaker uses to mow down some ornamental grass is a tool of pure destruction: angry, greedy, and violent, it drips with power and danger. The pampas grass appears to be no match for it. But by quietly regrowing even after it’s unceremoniously chainsawed down, the pampas grass wins out in the end. Read symbolically, this poem suggests that gentle persistence and endurance can beat even the most aggressive displays of force.
- At first glance, the chainsaw’s indiscriminate power seems unstoppable. As the speaker observes, this machine can buzz through anything the speaker puts in its path, “flesh” and “bone” included. (It feels a little bit frightening for that reason!) Symbolically, this chainsaw represents the kind of power that’s built on sheer strength and violence. The poem hints that this kind of force has a way of getting out of control: used carelessly or left in the wrong hands, hard power can be destructive.
- With this tool of sheer power in his hands, the speaker has no trouble cutting down the pampas grass. But he can’t kill it altogether. The pampas grass doesn’t fight the speaker or the chainsaw; it has no hard power of its own. Instead, it simply persists, refusing to let apparent defeat keep it down. Its soft power, slow and steady as the proverbial tortoise’s, wins out against the chainsaw’s violence in the end. Not long after the speaker thinks he’s hacked it to death, it’s sprouted again, placidly “sunning itself” in the exact same spot.
- In this light, some readers have also interpreted this poem as a tale of stereotypical masculinity versus stereotypical femininity, with male dominance ultimately losing out to female persistence and patience.
3
Q
It seemed an …
… the dry links.
A
- In these first lines, though, the “unlikely match” could also be an unlikely partnership. Hefting the chainsaw, the speaker feels awe, alarm, and titillation at its power—emotions that make him seem like a very “unlikely match” indeed for such a singlemindedly destructive piece of equipment.
- Right from the start, the chainsaw seems dangerous. The speaker personifies it, picturing it “grinding its teeth” as it waits “all winter unplugged”; it sounds frustrated and angry at its long inactivity, more than ready to leap into action again.
- It’s also thirsty. It “knock[s] back a quarter-pint of engine oil” like a belligerent drunk doing a shot at the bar, and an overflow of “juices” messily run down its blade into its “dry links” like dribblings into stubble. The speaker follows the course of that oozing oil as it crosses “the guide-bar and the maker’s name” embossed in the metal, making it sound as if he’s looking the chainsaw up and down in admiration and fear.
- In short, the speaker seems in awe of the chainsaw, treating it not like a tool he’s about to use, but like a dangerous guest who’s been lurking in his “darkroom” all winter long. He’s fascinated by the chainsaw’s brusque gulpings and grindings. Perhaps he himself is not the kind of guy who grinds his teeth and knocks back a quarter-pint of anything; perhaps he’d sort of like to be. This will be a tongue-in-cheek poem about the allure—and folly—of violent power.
- The speaker will tell this tale in seven irregular stanzas of free verse, without rhyme or meter. This flexible form will shift its shape to mirror his experiences.
4
Q
From the summerhouse, still holding one last gulp
of last year’s heat behind its double doors, and hung
with the weightless wreckage of wasps and flies,
mothballed in spider’s wool . . .
A
- The summerhouse’s stale, overheated air and dangling fly-corpses create a stagnant atmosphere. Everything in this shed feels old and worn out: the heat is “last year’s,” the wasps and flies are wound up in dirty webs like mothballs in a fusty old closet. (Notice, too, the visual joke the speaker makes there: the dead insects in their windings look like the pellets people use to keep bugs away.)
- In other words, the speaker’s domestic garden feels pretty musty and dull. Perhaps this scene gives a hint of the speaker’s own frame of mind as he heads out to challenge the grass with his chainsaw: he’s ready for there to be a little noise and action around here!
5
Q
from there, I …
… gunned the trigger.
A
- Now, the speaker prepares himself and the chainsaw to wreak backyard havoc. As he hooks up the “day-glo orange power line,” his imagery already suggests peril: the cord that will power the chainsaw is the same glaring, cautionary orange as a safety vest or a traffic cone. The speaker is aware of the danger; in a telling simile, he describes feeding this cord out “like powder from a keg,” as if he were laying out a gunpowder fuse to set off an explosion.
- Nervously, he describes every second of his preparations. Verb-focused parallelism and repetitions trace each step of the process: “I trailed the day-glo orange power lone […] then walked […] then walked again,” he says, following his own path back and forth between the outlet in the summerhouse and the place on the lawn where the chainsaw lies in wait.
- At long last, everything is hooked up; he’s ready to get started. So far, all of his metaphors about the chainsaw have presented it as an angry beast “grinding its teeth” and waiting to get down to its violent business. Now, he’s moved into images of explosions and gunfire. He doesn’t merely turn the chainsaw on: he flips off the “safety catch” and “gun[s] the trigger,” just as if he were firing a revolver.
6
Q
No gearing up …
… into the brain.
A
- Chainsaw’s fury comes as a shock. The machine springs to life without even needing to warm up; its “instant rage […] lash[es] out at air” as if it were a caged tiger, just released.
- In awe of all this violent power, the speaker also feels more than a little unsettled. The personified chainsaw’s “perfect disregard” for everything around it strikes him as sinister, even psychopathic: he feels the chainsaw might just have a “sweet tooth,” a “bloody desire” to grind right through “the flesh of the face and the bones underneath.” Perhaps it’s even plotting against him, making a “grand plan” to kick back and sink right into his brains.
- The speaker’s long, vivid description of all the ways the chainsaw might mangle a guy suggests that he’s torn between fear and fascination. Perhaps he’s even projecting some of his own violent impulses onto this violent machine. When he observes that the chainsaw might get into a mood “to tangle with cloth, or jewellery, or hair,” the specific items he mentions seem oddly feminine. While some men wear jewelry or have hair long enough to get tangled in a chainsaw’s blade, the images still suggest a vision from a slasher movie: a dolled-up woman screaming in terror as the chainsaw descends.
- The speaker, in other words, seems to feel both threatened and threatening as he holds this machine. Sure, the chainsaw might rebel against him—it doesn’t care one bit what it cuts up, it just likes cutting. But, for the moment at least, its power is at his command. It lets him imagine being a dangerous, powerful, fascinatingly cruel man.
7
Q
I let it …
… in its throat.
A
- Notice how his anaphora focuses attention on what he can feel happening in the chainsaw’s works, suggesting that for a moment he and the chainsaw could almost be one being: at last, his arm is complete again. His technical attention to the motor—he knows the chainsaw runs at a “hundred beats per second” and uses a “drive-wheel”—also suggests an enthusiastic relish of this machine’s workings.
- Still, though, he presents the personified chainsaw as a living beast with its own intentions and its own moods. Its dangerous “heart” and “throat” aren’t the speaker’s; the speaker is just getting a little vicarious enjoyment out of the idea that he might be indiscriminately powerful and violent.
- Readers here might want to take a step back and imagine the scene from the outside. The speaker is enjoying a full-on power trip (if a little nervously). An observer, however, would just see some guy in his suburban backyard gearing up a much-too-powerful machine to do a spot of gardening. There’s something silly about this image—though the chainsaw’s dangers are very real.
8
Q
The pampas grass …
… Overkill.
A
- The dramatic anaphora here ushers the grass onstage as if it were a cage fighter. If it’s a fighter, though, it’s an unlikely one indeed. With “ludicrous feathers / and plumes,” it’s like an ostrich or a Victorian lady in a fancy hat; “sunning itself” and casually stealing the light from the “cuttings and bulbs” straggling in its shadow, it’s like a big lazy cat. It’s enjoying itself, decorating its surroundings with “footstools, cushions and tufts” of growth. In short, it’s a languorous, pleasure-loving, ladylike sort of creature.
- It’s not defenseless, however. Amid all those comfy footstools and show-stealing feathers, the pampas grass also grows “twelve-foot spears”—a metaphor that suggests this plush plant has military reserves.
- The speaker doesn’t seem too worried about those spears, though. In fact, he scoffs at them. In relation to the grass, the chainsaw is a “sledgehammer taken to crack the nut”—that is, as the speaker puts it a moment later, serious “overkill.” It seems to the speaker as if he could do away with the plant with little more than a “good pull or shove,” or with the help of a “pitchfork” at most.
- As the previous stanzas have shown, however, he’s having too much fun with his mighty chainsaw to give it up now. Overkill it might be—but overkilling is exactly what he plans to do, attacking this grass until it’s deader than dead.
9
Q
I touched the …
… dark, secret warmth.
A
- The dramatic caesura at the dash makes it clear just how sudden and complete the chainsaw’s destruction is. It takes only that little touch for the “blur of the blade” (and note that almost onomatopoeic /bl/ alliteration, too) to make the reed into nothing.
- Thrilled, the speaker starts to get into the swing of things. In a parallel sequence of three alliterative verbs, he first “dab[s]” at “swoon[ing]” stalks of grass, then “dock[s]” the grass as if lopping off its many “heads,” then “dismiss[es]” the whole “top third of its canes” in one dramatic “sideways sweep.” From a mild dab to a scornful and complete dismissal, the speaker moves from cautious to gleefully aggressive in moments.
- The real coup de grace comes when he starts to get down into the plant’s “trunk.” Though the pampas grass rebels a little, “sp[itting]” its “plant-juice” at him like a cobra, that juice can’t do him a bit of harm. He “rip[s] into pockets of dark secret warmth” down in the plant’s undergrowth without meeting any real resistance.
- This action-packed passage makes it clear that things are going just as the speaker hoped they might when he got that chainsaw out. With this powerful tool in hand, he feels like the godlike master of all he surveys, able to destroy with his touch. Perhaps he’s also working out some of those troubling misogynist impulses we noted earlier; the image of him attacking “pockets of dark, secret warmth” might evoke sexual violence, especially considering the way the grass has been personified as an elegant lady and the chainsaw as a drunk, angry man
9
Q
To clear a …
… from the earth.
A
- The polysyndeton of “severed or felled or torn” draws attention to the raggedy destruction he’s visited on the grass: some stalks are cleanly “severed or felled” like trees, some are just cruelly “torn” apart. The epizeuxis on “cut and raked,” meanwhile, makes him sound maniacal. He’s utterly absorbed in destruction now, dragging everything to the “dead zone”—just a plot of bare ground beside a shed, but one to which the speaker gives a significant grim name.
- All that’s left after this energetic clearing-away is “a flat stump the size of a barrel lid” that the speaker can’t dig up or “prise[] from the earth” no matter how hard he tries. Readers might recall that, not long ago, the speaker was bragging that he probably could have uprooted the whole plant with “a good pull or shove,” or a “pitchfork” at the most. This barrel-lid stump gives the lie to that bravado.
- The image of the barrel lid also offers a touch of foreshadowing. A barrel lid, after all, sits atop a barrel—and who knows what that barrel might contain? The pampas grass might look totally defeated, but perhaps it isn’t out of surprises yet.
9
Q
Wanting to finish …
… it at that.
A
- There, though, he runs into a problem. “Choked with soil or fouled with weeds,” the previously unstoppable blade sputters. The speaker can’t even tell if he’s doing any damage. The roots he “slice[s] or split[s]” seem to close up, he says; it’s as if he’s “cutting at water or air with a knife.”
- This simile, like that barrel-lid stump, foreshadows the grass’s eventual victory. Water and air are both defenseless against knives (you can slice right into ‘em!) and undisturbable by knives (you’ll never leave a lasting mark). The earth the speaker drives his blade into now seems to have just the same quiet, unbothered resilience.
- Still, the speaker isn’t ready to give up yet. His mighty chainsaw has failed him, but perhaps fire won’t. He douses the stump with “barbecue fluid” and lights it on fire. Perhaps he’s hoping for a dramatic bonfire or an explosion; he doesn’t get it. Halfheartedly, the fire:
[…] flamed for a minute, smoked
for a minute more, and went out. I left it at that.
- Notice how the speaker’s mild repetitions there stress just how anticlimactic this all looked. A minute of fire, a minute of smoke: one small sentence can describe the whole process. Worn out and perhaps a little crestfallen, the speaker decides that’s probably good enough. Fatal error!
10
Q
In the weeks …
… the midday moon.
A
- As the poem starts to move toward its close, look back for a moment at the last couple of stanzas. They’ve been long and elaborate, full of violent detail and action, right in the moment with the speaker and his chainsaw.
- The simile of the “new shoots like asparagus tips” suggests that the grass’s fresh growth is green and tender: no “twelve-foot spears” here, just gentle little sprigs, grown in a “nest” like baby birds. From such soft beginnings, though, the grass rears back up to its former magnificent height and earns some powerful personification. “Riding high in its saddle,” it could be a tough old cowpoke or a noble knight; “wearing a new crown,” it’s like a monarch.
- In fact, the transformation is so thorough that it makes the speaker think of “corn in Egypt”—an allusion to a Bible story in which the patriarch Jacob sends his sons to Egypt, knowing there’s an abundance of corn there. The reference also suggests that something feels ancient, legendary, and miraculous about this regrowth.
- The resurrected grass looks as if it were never attacked; its passive, patient power has won out over the speaker’s active, violent, technological power. In the face of this defeat, the speaker can only look sulkily out his “upstairs window like the midday moon,” pale, ineffectual, out of place, and decidedly indoors. All his dreams of total power over his surroundings were dreams only.
11
Q
Back below stairs …
… as it got.
A
- Sure, readers sense, it’s certainly just the chainsaw that needs to take a break to “try to forget” about its humiliating failure to achieve even a simple spot of gardening with an arsenal of motors and oils and grinding teeth. The speaker acknowledges his projection quietly in describing the chainsaw’s “man-made dreams.” The chainsaw has no dreams itself, only the dreams of the men who made it. In fact, it is a man-made dream: a dream of ultimate destructive power and control that simply can’t last in the real world.
- The speaker’s changing line lengths there suggest his sheepishness as he comes up short against his own limitations, “try[ing] to forget” that he really doesn’t have as much power as he might like to dream: he’s learned that the simple, persistent mechanisms of nature will always win over human schemes.
- Still, he can’t quite give up on that fantasy. He and the chainsaw share “the seamless urge to persist,” a driven, intense desire to keep on mastering the world—or to believe that this might be possible at all.
12
Q
The Chainsaw
A
- The chainsaw symbolizes violent power, technology in general, and the futile human urge to dominate nature.
- The speaker sees the chainsaw as an unstoppable force, ready to indiscriminately slice through the pampas grass or human “brain[s].” Holding it makes him feel both powerful and frightened. In this, the chainsaw suggests a fantasy of domination. With such a tool in his hand, the speaker feels, he has great power. But that power—like all violent power—is dangerous, volatile, and liable to backfire.
- Trying to master the pampas grass with the chainsaw, the speaker is also trying to assert human dominance over nature through technological skill. This, the poem suggests, is futile. No matter how powerful or clever technology gets, nature will always win out.
- Some readers might also see the chainsaw as a symbol of male dominance in particular. The image of the chainsaw destroying the “dark, secret warmth” of the pampas grass could be read as a fantasy of violent sexuality.
13
Q
The Grass
A
- The pampas grass symbolizes the quiet power of nature—and soft, passive power in general. Its regrowth and rebirth in the face of destruction suggest that dogged persistence beats out violent force in the long run.
- By sprouting right back up almost as soon as it’s cut down, the pampas grass makes a mockery of the speaker’s oh-so-scary and oh-so-powerful chainsaw. It doesn’t matter how violently one attacks nature, the regrown grass suggests: nature keeps on doing what it does. This image might even offer an environmentalist message, reminding readers that people who try to master or exploit nature only embarrass (and harm) themselves in the end.
- The grass’s resurrection also suggests that persistent, gentle growth always defeats violent destruction. Destruction takes violent effort; regrowth quietly goes on and on.
14
Q
Form
A
- “Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass” is written in seven irregular stanzas of free verse. Rather than sticking to any standard stanza form or regular pattern of rhyme or meter, Armitage allows the poem to develop in a loose, organic way; the verse shapeshifts to mirror the speaker’s emotional experience.
- For instance, compare the two long, elaborate stanzas in which the speaker describes how he sawed the pampas grass into oblivion and the short, simple closing stanzas in which the grass grows back and the personified chainsaw “seethes” in rage at its defeat. This movement from intense descriptions of violence and destruction to the casual, matter-of-fact payoff works like a punchline, suggesting that it’s pretty funny when people believe (foolishly) that they can take on nature and win.
15
Q
Meter and rhyme scheme
A
- “Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass” is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a meter. Instead, the speaker uses varied, flexible line lengths to give the poem a conversational tone—and to create moments of drama.
- Written in free verse, “Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass” doesn’t use a rhyme scheme. Instead, it plays with sound through evocative alliteration and assonance.
When the speaker first attacks the pampas grass with his chainsaw, for instance, the /bl/ alliteration in “the blur of the blade” suggests the sawblade’s unbelievably quick, sputtering motion. By contrast, the gentle /uh/ assonance the speaker uses to describe how the pampas grass overshadows “cuttings and bulbs, sunning itself” feels soft, luxurious, and calm.
