The Whipping Analysis

"The Whipping" doesn't have any specific meter like iambic pentameter or trochaic hexameter (yeah, we can't think of any poems that have that last meter, btw). Since it doesn't have any specific me...

A fly on the wall—that's the best way to describe the speaker of this poem. Okay, he's not literally a fly, but he's like a fly on the wall because he's watching this whipping unfold and, it seem...

There's a lot of vegetation in this poem (trees, zinnias, elephant ears), but we're pretty sure "The Whipping" doesn't take place in a forest, even though it kind of seems like it sometimes. Actual...

If somebody were to ask you to describe this poem in one word, the best word of all would be "repetition." Even though a lot of your usual forms of poetic repetition (like rhyme) are absent from th...

"The Whipping": the title obviously describes what happens in the poem—a boy is savagely whipped and chased and cornered and beaten by some large, crazy woman. Keep in mind that we never learn wh...

It seems like every poem we've come across talks about pain, suffering, trauma, and a whole lot of other unpleasant stuff. "The Whipping," as we've seen, is full of violence, tears, and painful mem...

"The Whipping" really isn't too difficult of a poem, even though some of Hayden's work can be a little confusing. It's a pretty straightforward story (a woman whips a boy, chases him around, breaks...

We know him as Robert Hayden, but he wasn't born with that name. His birth name was Asa Bundy Sheffey. Hayden was the name of his foster parents (William and Sue Hayden). (Source.) Hayden had some...

"The Whipping" is a poem about punishment and violence, and it has nothing to do with sex. That would just be weird in a poem like this.