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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 ....

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... 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 her own wrongfulness of beating her son. She chose to shout, so that everyone would hear, almost as if she was confessing her sins. She seems to be making a show, a production out of this beating. She is trying t ...