The Whipping The Home

The woman isn't reading the boy a bedtime story, or making him dinner, or helping him with his homework. Nope, she's whipping him—and not for the first time either. Some home, right?

This is a scene that would be perfectly at home on one of those nature shows: a smaller, weaker person crashing through bushes and plants while a larger, voracious predator chases him. And this is supposed to be a home? It's more like an uncivilized jungle.

The whole home-as-jungle theme appears in these lines as well. The image of the boy as a "shrilly circling" creature, for example, makes him seem like a whimpering fawn or desperate insect attempting to escape the claws of a more powerful predator.

Broken homes are an epidemic in this poem. This memory is either the woman's, or the speaker's, but either way the home described is just as bad as the one where the whipping is taking place. It is a home fully of control and violence. Instead of love and tenderness, there is an awful struggle and lots and lots of "blows."

The woman, or the speaker, no longer recognizes the face of what must be a parent (the word "love" suggests that this is the case). A child so alienated from the parent that recognition and love are no longer possible? That is the complete opposite of anything we could call a home. That's for sure.