As the groundhog goes through its own metamorphosis, the speaker experiences a transmutation, which affects his emotions and actions towards the animal corpse. The orator's world was like Eden, bursting in all of its heaven-like beauty. However, the rotting presence of the corpse lying there aloofly greatly impacted him. The groundhog is a disturbance within the norms of the speaker's world. His "senses shook" at the site of the decaying entity. It perturbed him to …showed first 75 words of 443 total…

…showed last 75 words of 443 total…anger, but gradually as he grew to understand the on going process, his emotions became more empathetic to the conditions of how life is. Three years after the initial visit, the man chances upon the same spot only to find that in the creature's corpse's absence he has found a reaffirm belief in his own mortality. The speaker has come to the acceptance of his mortal life and that it is natural process of death.