"The Whipping"

The poem I chose is "The Whipping" by Robert Hayden. This poem uses  repetition of the same word a few times. It starts with, "She strikes and strikes..." I think that this makes the reader think that the boy is being hit again and again and again. The same happens later when he says, "the blows, the fear worse than blows that hateful." This gives the same picture as strikes, but with the fear and hateful, it makes you think of the scared child being hit by the mean hateful woman. The last time is when it says, "it is over now, it is over." This shows the relieved child that he is no longer being beaten, but it also shows the woman that is realizing what she just did and how she may have gone too far. It changes the view of the mean woman to the mistaken woman who took the beating too far. This is also supported by a part at the end that says, "avenged in part for lifelong hidings she has had to bear." This may have been why she was beating the child so hard, because she was letting out maybe anger that she has held in all her life.

There are also some other techniques that the author uses. He uses irony at the beginning when he is saying how the woman is whipping the boy while announcing her goodness and his wrongs. This is ironic because whipping a child seems like a wrong but she says how she is good. This also goes along with her bottling up her anger from something that happened in her life because she could be saying how she was good but something still happened to her. Another technique he uses is switching the boy and he with my and I. By doing this it could show how he is thinking about when he was whipped while he is watching it happen to someone else. It makes it seem like he wrote the poem about his own childhood experience but made it about someone else.