the whipping=evaluation=1200 words
Upon reading Robert Hayden’s 1970 poem, “The Whipping” (1075), one may find themselves feeling very disturbed. The title is not subtle in hiding the fact that the plot of the poem is of a mother beating her son. The tone of the poem is very violent, and filled with a lot of anger. The boy’s character immediately demands sympathy from the reader and just as instantaneously, the mother is hated by the reader. From his first stanza, to his sixth, Hayden utilizes an arsenal of words, symbols, and images to create a scene that is intense and emotional to the reader. Hayden introduces his poem with the first stanza, which begins with “The old woman across the way/ is whipping the boy again” (1-2). These lines create a setting, where the characters are introduced and the action that the title stated is in progress. One thing that the reader does sense is that this whipping is not unusual. It is happening again and whoever the narrator is, he is not surprised or alarmed that this is happening. The last two lines of the stanza describe the mother very well. She is “shouting to the neighborhood/ her goodness and his wrongs” (3-4). Its as if she feels that by yelling her son’s faults and her goodness, she is trying to justify he
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Robert Haydens, fear person, allows reader, , / boy, beating son, beaten remembers, woundlike memories, usage purged, poem whipping,
Approximate Word count = 1164
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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