The Plot Against The Giant - Analysis

A conspiracy of refinement

Despite its title’s grand menace, The Plot Against the Giant is less about defeating a monster by force than about disarming him through delicacy. Three girls speak like collaborators in a quiet counterattack, each proposing a different kind of gentleness—scent, color, then speech—to stop a threatening male figure. The poem’s central claim feels audacious: what seems softest can be the most effective resistance, not because it overpowers violence, but because it makes violence look foolish, out of place, and finally untenable.

The threat is bluntly sketched in the First Girl’s opening: this yokel arrives maundering and whetting his hacker, a phrase that suggests a sharpened tool and a sharpened intention. Against that, the girls don’t raise weapons; they “run before him,” as if staying just ahead of harm while altering the air and the atmosphere he moves through.

Geraniums as a civic weapon

The First Girl’s plan is almost comically polite: she will diffuse the civilest odors from geraniums and even unsmelled flowers. The word civilest matters: this is fragrance as civility, manners as a kind of shield. Even unsmelled flowers implies possibility rather than display—an understated, unclaimed reserve of sweetness. Her confidence is practical, even brisk: It will check him. The verb makes the “giant” less mythic and more like a lout who can be stopped by a well-timed reminder of what a shared world is supposed to feel like.

Fish-egg colors and the shame of looking

The Second Girl shifts from smell to sight. She will run ahead arching cloths sprinkled with colors as small as fish-eggs, and she trusts that The threads / Will abash him. This is a sharper tactic than it first appears. The tiny scale—fish-eggs, threads—suggests patience, craft, and attention, the opposite of the yokel’s crude momentum. To “abash” is to make someone self-conscious, to force an awareness of how one appears. Her plan implies that brutality depends on a kind of blindness; if you make the world visibly intricate, you make the brute newly clumsy inside it.

From pity to linguistic sabotage

The Third Girl begins with a turn in tone: Oh, la...le pauvre! The exclamation carries pity and a little theatrical mockery. Now the giant is not only dangerous; he is, in some way, doomed by his own coarseness. Her method becomes intimate: she will approach With a curious puffing until He will bend his ear. This is the poem’s closest contact, and it changes the stakes. She will whisper Heavenly labials into a world of gutturals, setting soft mouth-sounds against harsh throat-sounds—refinement against brute noise, tenderness against grating force. The conclusion escalates from checking and shaming to unraveling: It will undo him. Not kill him—unmake him.

The tension: resistance that refuses to mirror violence

Calling this a “plot” raises a contradiction the poem never fully resolves: is this sweetness innocent, or is it a strategic manipulation? The girls’ refrain—I shall run before him—sounds playful, but it is also tactical, like a choreographed evasion. They intend to control what the giant senses: the air perfumed, the eye dazzled by meticulous color, the ear captured by a private whisper. The poem asks us to accept that artifice and beauty can be a form of power, yet it also leaves a faint unease: to “undo” someone through seduction of the senses is still to undo them.

A sharp question hidden in the whisper

When the Third Girl says he will bend his ear, the giant becomes briefly teachable—almost childlike. But what happens if he learns the “heavenly” sounds and brings them back into his world of gutturals? The poem flirts with the idea that civility can disarm the yokel, yet it also hints that civility’s power depends on staying just ahead of him, always running, always plotting.