In the poem The Whipping is the author observing a young boy being whipped and relating it to a personal experience? Is the women doing the whipping linked to some personal demon?

Thanks-----------------Usul

-- mg (Usul@poem.org), February 12, 2000

Answers

ilza, thanks for printing this. It reminded me so much of my own father. He too was a laborer, working long, hard hours without complaint, and I might add, without thanks from me or my mother. I was to young to appreciate him and she was too uncaring.

-- Jean Scott (dezane@hotmail.com), February 13, 2000.

another heart-breaking poem :

Those Winter Sundays Robert Hayden

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Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueback cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

-- ilza (ilza@pobox.com), February 12, 2000.

I do hope someone will answer you, for I am curious now.

I always related this poem to his troubled childhood - "an emotionally tumultuous childhood", "shuttled between the home of his parents and that of a foster family, who lived next door".

Maybe I was wrong ?! But whenever I read this poem it makes me so sad - for reasons I don't quite understand.

-- ilza (ilza@pobox.com), February 12, 2000.