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Nick Glezman Morris Advanced World Literature 5 February, 2013 The Grass-Roots Revolution The poem Song of the Worms by Margaret Atwood has many underlying ideals and symbols coming from the oppresseds revolutionary potential. The poem structures itself around the ideal of rhizomatic potential to escape the capitalistic oppression of the state, that was created by the French philosophers Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. To start, what exactly is rhizomatic potential? Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the anti-arborescent mindset. A person who thinks in an arborescent way bases everything around what is rigidly structured by society and the state that controls them, much like a tree has roots based and rigid in a solid set of ground, and water (Knowledge) travels to the leaves through that set path. Whereas a rhizomatic mindset allows knowledge to be gained from wherever it wants, they provide the example of grass being a rhizomatic organism, it has no set center and grows in all directions, allowing it to move wherever it pleases and has no set structure. Thats how they get to the ideal of a grass-roots movement, a revolution started by those oppressed by their government, the state. Margaret Atwood tells us through the poem, that the worms are essentially oppressed people, shown by the fact that she personifies the worms as being sentient beings who are constantly being oppressed by the all-powerful boots. She even goes on to say in the poem that,

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We are many, and we are one/ we remember when we were human.(Atwood, pg.1). Telling us directly that the humans were degraded into worms, forced to have their voices oppressed, and even told that they cannot love one another without fear, shown in the following stanza we have sung and nobody has listened,/ We come into the open air at night only to love. (Atwood, pg. 1) The state is symbolized by the boots, we know the boots philosophy,/ their metaphysics of kicks and ladders,(Atwood, pg.1) this ascribes directly to Gilles Deleuzes and Felix Guattaris ideas of why the state is oppressive. The two philosophers, after the French revolution, constantly speak of how the state oppresses the individual with the metaphysics of securitization and hierarchical capitalism. To put that into English, the government oppresses people by creating a hierarchy based on capitalism, we all work to provide for the state, and thus become oppressed by it. Atwood is showing us this by telling us that, We are afraid of the boots, but are contemptuous of the foot that needs them.(Atwood, pg.1) , the people do not fear those who work within the state, the feet, but rather they fear the structure of the government around them, the boot. The ultimate theme of the poem is that, despite the oppressive philosophy of the government, we as the worms can stage our own revolution against this capitalistic, hierarchic structure that is a state to destroy its arborescent hold on us all, as Margaret tells us, We will spread like weeds When we say Attack! you will hear nothing at first, (Atwood, pg.1)