Hayden's The Whipping

Victims of Domestic Violence

Mar 2, 2009 Linda Sue Grimes

Robert Hayden's exceptional poem, "The Whipping," features a speaker who observes a domestic scene that reminds him of one similar to his own experience.

The poem consists of six unrimed stanzas that dramatize the violent whipping of a boy by an enraged woman. The speaker’s wise commentary at the conclusion changes the reader’s perspective from the one originally gained from the beginning of the poem.

First Stanza: “The old woman across the way”

The speaker plunges in immediately describing the disturbing event that seems to occur routinely: “The old woman across the way / is whipping the boy again.” And as the neighbor lady is corporally punishing the boy, she loudly condemns him testifying so that her neighbors can hear about “her goodness and his wrongs.”

Second Stanza: “Wildly he crashes through elephant ears”

The next installment of the narration reveals that the woman who habitually “whips” this boy is morbidly obese; the speaker dubs it “crippling fat.” But even so, she is able to chase the boy through her flower garden as he “[w[ildly [ ] crashes through elephant ears” and “pleads in dusty zinnias.”

The poem never makes it clear that the woman and boy are, if fact, mother and son, but the nature of their relationship is more important than the specifics. The speaker refers to the woman as “the old woman,” which might imply that she is his grandmother, since she clearly serves as a guardian-parent, but the speaker is focusing on the implications of that relationship.

Third Stanza: “She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling”The speaker then reveals that the woman is repeatedly thwacking the boy with a stick “till the stick breaks / in her hand.” She is trailing him as he shrieks and moves around trying to avoid the whacks.

The speaker then announces that the boy’s tears remind him of his own back when he used to take beatings from a parent. Hayden’s masterful lines, “His tears are rainy weather / to woundlike memories,” serves as segue to his speaker’s flashback that is portrayed in the fourth stanza.

Fourth, Fifth Stanzas: “My head gripped in bony vise” “Words could bring, the face that I”

The speaker then becomes the boy receiving the punishing violence against him from someone he had loved. But the speaker remembers his “head gripped in a bony vise / of knees.” He thrashed about violently trying to free himself from that vise-grip, but unable to do so, he continued to endure the wallops.

The speaker divulges that those blows brought to him a fear “worse than blows that hateful // Words could bring.” And he found that he no longer “knew or loved” that person delivering his beating. Then suddenly, “Well, it is over now, it is over”—this masterfully crafted line signals that the speaker’s own beating is over, and the boy, whom he has been currently observing, is no longer being whipped. The boy is now in his own room crying.

Sixth Stanza: “And the woman leans muttering against”

The woman of the “crippling fat” has used up all her energy in this whipping, so she “leans muttering against / a tree, exhausted, purged.” The speaker then offers a remarkable commentary in his brief remark that the woman is “avenged in part for lifelong hidings / she has had to bear.” He implies that beating children is done by those who have been victims of beatings themselves.

Commentary

While experiencing the poem, the reader will first sympathize with the boy, then additionally with the speaker who was also beaten as a boy. But then after the completion of the scene and sociological commentary of the speaker, the reader now feels sympathy for all concerned in this drama, even the woman administering the brutal “whipping.”

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Robert Hayden