The Whipping Poem Analysis

Challenges when growing up can have negative long term effects.

It is a well documented fact that your childhood has a direct impact on your personality and mannerisms as an adult. From table manners to the way we treat people, we are learning things from our parents all the time. But are the impacts always good? The impacts of various children's childhoods are very evident in the texts “Previous good conduct” by Ruth Thomas, “The whipping” by Robert Hayden, Zootopia directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush and Boy directed by Taika Waititi, In all of these texts the creators have used the childhoods of the characters to explore the type of adult they might or are becoming. In particular, the writers have used the challenges of …show more content…
During the poem, the persona in the text is watching “the old woman across the way whipping the boy again.” The persona is not getting beaten, but seeing the boy getting beaten brings back memories for them. “His tears are rain to wound like memories:” The writer then goes on to talk about how he has been scared by his own story of family violence. He gives gruesome details of how he used to get beaten himself. “My head gripped in bony vice of knees.” Hayden uses a first person pronoun to make sure the reader knows that it is now a flashback of the persona getting beaten. Hayden then uses antanaclasis in the phrase “it is over now, it is over” showing us that the beating in the flashback is over, and so is the flashback. The childhood memories of getting beaten have clearly had a huge impact on the persona's life. Particularly, it has impacted the relationship they have with the person that is beating them, presumably a family member. The persona speaks of the “fear worse than blows that hateful words could bring, the face that I no longer new or loved.” This quote shows us that not only does the person beat them, but hurls abuse at them. The persona feels emotionally disconnected from the family member and he clearly feels no attachment to them. The persona is having these feelings as an adult, which clearly means that the relationship …show more content…
Foxes and Rabbits are natural enemies, over time, however, different animals have become more and more civilised. Animals live alongside each other in a civil manner, but the Rabbit community are still very wary of the threat that some predators pose their community. Judy experienced this first had when she was bullied by the fox Gideon Gray in her youth, but that was just a childhood bully, wasn’t it? When she decides she is moving into Zootopia, her parents become afraid of the dangerous world it is. They give her fox repellent as she leaves on the train, and this becomes a symbol of her distrust of predators in the big old world of Zootopia. After being forced to work with a sly fox called Nick in order to gain respect in the police force, her attitude towards him turns from disgust to a genuine bond with him. But her nature gets the better of her when she delivers a press conference about how predators are “natural savage.” Nick sees this as blatant racism, but can she help it? From a young age she was taught to be wary of foxes and other predators. She was taught to be racist, and in the end, her childhood has affected her ability to have relationships with other animals. This is exactly what psychologist Jane Elliot believes. She