Violence In Robert Hayden's The Whipping '

Robert Hayden’s poem, “The Whipping” presents to the reader the ideas that violence is a temporary solution to a problem, and that memories from the past can seep into the present. Through the speaker’s diction, flashbacks, and use of metaphors, the reader is able to discern the terrible effects that violence has on others.
The first two stanzas set the scene for the poem, with the first one saying “The old woman across the way is whipping the boy again and shouting to the neighborhood her goodness and his wrongs.” The reader is able to infer from the word “again” that this act has happened before. The speaker, which in this case is the spectator of this tragic event, implies the hypocrisy of the woman beating the child. The woman claims that she is right and the boy is wrong, yet she is beating the young boy, which is a wrongful act. The second stanza uses an implicit metaphor to describe the boy and the woman. The speaker says, “Wildly he crashes through elephant ears, pleads in dusty zinnias,while she in spite of crippling fat pursues and corners him.” Elephant ears and zinnias are types of plants, and the image of the boy running away from the woman is …show more content…
According to the first line in stanza three, “She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling boy till the stick breaks in her hand.” The woman must be very angry if she beats the boy so hard that the stick she uses breaks. The speaker uses a metaphor to describe this image by saying, “His tears are rainy weather to woundlike memories.” The boy is crying from all of this pain, and watching him cry causes the speaker to remember his own violent past. The speaker states in stanza four, “My head gripped in bony vise of knees, the writhing struggle to wrench free.” The speaker relates to the boy because he too was a victim of violence. He vividly remembers the pain he went through when being beaten, just like the boy he was