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Learn More. "Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass" is Simon Armitage's tongue-in-cheek tale of the battle between humanity and nature. The poem's speaker heads out into his garden, chainsaw in hand, to destroy some ornamental grass. Although his powerful chainsaw seems like "overkill," it turns out that even its destructive blade is no match for ...
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- Structure
- Poetic Techniques
- Detailed Analysis
The poem begins with the speaker going into detail about a chainsaw. He’s preparing it for a task, and like a caged animal it is ready to let its anger loose on whatever source the speaker chooses. Armitage makes use of personificationthroughout this poem, using it to describe the chainsaw as a snarling dangerous animal, but also its victim, the pa...
‘Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass’ by Simon Armitage is made up of eight stanzas of irregular lengths. They vary from five lines up to eleven. Armitage did not choose to use a specific rhyme schemeto unify the lines of the poem, nor did he structure the lines to a particular metrical pattern. The lines themselves are very different from one another...
Armitage makes use of several poetic techniques in ‘Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass’. These include personification, alliteration, and enjambment. The first, personification,occurs when a poet imbues a non-human creature or object with human characteristics. This is the most important technique in the poem. It powers the entire narrative as the ve...
Stanza One
The speaker opens the poem with a simple description of an unknown “match”. The reader is immediately told that whatever the match is, it is “unlikely”. On one side, there is the chainsaw. It is personified, depicted as an animal with “grinding teeth”. It spent all winter unplugged, suggesting that it’s been in wait this whole time. Eventually, it’s time for the chainsaw to come down again, and it is “offered the can”. This is the gasoline that someone is filling it up with. Again, like an an...
Stanza Two
In the second stanza, the speaker breaks into the first-person, using the pronoun “I”. He describes how he got the bright orange power-line the chainsaw needs out of the summerhouse. The space it emerged from is vivid and easy to imagine. Armitage taps into the reader’s senses to depict the heat and the wasps and flies. There is a sense of anticipation in these lines, also of danger. The cord and the ways the speaker brings it out is compared through a simileto feeding out “powder from a keg”...
Stanza Three
At this point, the build-up is over. The power flows directly into the machine and it jumps to life with an “instant rage”. The speaker can very clearly feel the danger of the machine in his hands. It could tangle with “cloth, or jewellery, or hair” with complete disregard for the damage it does. This alludes to even worse bodily harm and how pleasurable that would be for the animal-like machine. The poet does not back away from the gruesome imagerythat’s inherently connected to a running cha...
- Female
- October 9, 1995
- Poetry Analyst And Editor
Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass Lyrics. It seemed an unlikely match. All winter unplugged, grinding its teeth in a plastic sleeve, the chainsaw swung. nose-down from a hook in the darkroom. under ...
Mar 8, 2016 · Summary. ‘Chainsaw versus the Pampas Grass’ is about a man (we assume the speaker is male) taking a chainsaw and cutting down the pampas grass of South America. The chainsaw is ‘overkill’ where such a simple task is concerned: one doesn’t need to use an electric chainsaw to cut grass. But this is, as Armitage puts it, the sledgehammer ...
Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass – Poem Analysis. ‘Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass’ is a poem by Simon Armitage which considers the relationship between man made, physical objects, with nature and the natural world, specifically using the symbolism of a chainsaw to show man’s interaction. Armitage is Yorkshire-born poet whose early ...
May 12, 2019 · Chainsaw versus the Pampas Grass. by Simon Armitage. It seemed an unlikely match. All winter unplugged, grinding its teeth in a plastic sleeve, the chainsaw swung. nose-down from a hook in the darkroom. under the hatch in the floor. When offered the can. it knocked back a quarter-pint of engine oil.
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Feb 20, 2017 · The title also sounds much like a sporting match or show-down of some kind which alludes to the battle within the poem. “Chainsaw” and “The Pampas Grass” sound like the names of two competitors. Themes: Male vs. Female – Whilst the Chainsaw represents men and masculinity, the Pampas Grass represents females and femininity.
