“Chainsaw vs. the Pampas Grass” - Simon Armitage

The decidedly unpoetic “versus” in the title tells us that this poem deals with opposing forces. Underpinning the division between the chainsaw and the pampas grass is a series of dichotomies including active and passive, mechanical and natural, and the sun and the moon. It is the final pair in this series which, as we will see, leads to the most interesting and productive reading of the poem.

 

Even the most casual reader is aware that the battle of the chainsaw vs the pampas grass is a version of  what used to be called the battle of the sexes. The pampas grass is clearly coded as feminine with its “ludicrous feathers,” swooning like a Victorian lady. On the other hand, the chainsaw is pure masculine aggression, knocking back oil like pints of beer and craving violence. Of course the chainsaw is one big phallic symbol and if, somehow, the reader misses this, it is hard not to read the thrusting of the saw into the roots of the grass as a sexual symbol: “I took up the saw / and drove it vertically downwards into the upper roots.” The poem hammers this point home, with a reference to the “man-made dreams” of the saw.

 

A classic distinction between masculinity and femininity divides between active males and passive females. This dichotomy is clearly present in the difference between the chainsaw and the pampas grass. The chainsaw could not be more active. It is richly personified to make it come alive. It has body parts like “teeth,” “throat” and “heart” as well as “mood,” “desire” and “rage.” It is desperate for action and has no halfway measures. As soon as the trigger is engaged, the saw unleashes “an instant rage.” Its drive is towards pure and unrestrained action. On the other hand, the pampas grass does not act at all. In the fourth stanza it is described with a pair of noun phrases. The first one is: “The pampas grass with its ludicrous feathers / and plumes.” The absence of verbs here emphasises the passivity.

 

The twist comes in the penultimate stanza where the decimated grass sprouts once again from its mangled roots. The surface reading is that despite the ferocious power of masculinity, the feminine side prevails through the force of patient regeneration, a power, perhaps related to the female capacity to give life through childbirth, which leaves the chainsaw furious and, perhaps, emasculated, hanging from its hook under the stairs.

 

But what have we really learned from these massively exaggerated versions of masculinity and femininity? From this pure aggressive action and this utter passivity? Not much, perhaps, since neither account maps onto real expressions of gender. If only there were someone more realistic in the poem whose behaviour we could analyse. And of course, there is, Our first person narrator seems to be a fairly normative middle-class man, engaged in a little gardening. 

 

I want to suggest that the chainsaw and the pampas grass are symbols of gender in the poem, each representing their respective gender turned up to ten. In this reading, we understand gender to be a set of norms which instruct human males and females how to act and behave. Gender is a socially constructed collection of forces to which we are subject for all of our lives. The benefit of the poem, in this case, is that these usually invisible forces are made visible through these two very palpable objects.

 

We are born into gender. It comes before us and from the beginning, it tells us how to behave. And so, in the poem, it is the chainsaw which appears first, asserting its mad aggression for a full 12 lines before we are even made aware of the presence of the narrator. And when we take a close look at the actions of the narrator, we see how his mechanical actions appear less and less to be his own. Armitage stresses the mundane and repetitive actions of the narrator in two places:

 

I trailed the day-glo orange power line

the length of the lawn and the garden path,

fed it out like powder from a keg, then walked

back to the socket and flicked the switch, then walked again

and coupled the saw to the flex

 

He trudges back and forth between the summer house and chainsaw and then rakes like a robot:

 

I raked whatever was severed or felled or torn

towards the dead zone under the outhouse wall, to be fired.

Then cut and raked, cut and raked,

 

In other words, Armitage stesses the machine-like actions of the narrator. It is less like he is acting of his own accord than he is being acted by the chainsaw. By this, I mean that his actions are determined by the chainsaw itself. Thinking back to our claim that the chainsaw symbolises masculinity, the poem seems to suggest that the man acts as he does because this is how men are supposed to behave. 

 

And the interesting point here, is that masculinity is not so great for men. For one thing, the irony at the heart of all of this, is that although masculinity is supposed to sit on the active side of the passive/active divide, the man’s actions seem decidedly passive since he is not active of his own accord or volition. In other words, masculine-coded actions seem a lot less active when understood as an expression of a pre-existing set of ideas. This idea that masculinity implodes under its own weight is traced by the appearance of the sun and the moon in the poem. These have been used since time immemorial to represent masculinity and femininity respectively. The sun is mentioned during the poem’s peak masculinity, when the narrator becomes one with the beating heat of the chainsaw:

 

I let it flare, lifted it into the sun

and felt the hundred beats per second drumming in its heart,

and felt the drive-wheel gargle in its throat.

 

Yet once he realises that he has been defeated by the pampas grass, he identifies with the moon: “I looked on / from the upstairs window like the midday moon.” He ends the poem sad, disappointed and emasculated; a man out of place, like the moon in daytime. Ultimately, the poem tells the story of a man who falls under the sad sway of a violent and destructive masculinity, and who ends up lost and dejected.