Poetry Outline: "The Whipping" by Robert Hayden

Question: Does this poem express any beauty? What human truth does it seem to embody? Could you argue against the claim that "it is over now, it is over" (19)?

A) No beauty whatsoever is embodied in this poem.
1) Physically: Words give awfully negative picture, such as "crippling" (7), "strikes" and "shrilly" (9), "writhing" (14), and "sobs" (20). Also, the poem is about a young boy who is whipped until "the stick breaks in her hand" (10-11) and he is crying hysterically.
2) Otherwise: The woman in the poem is not beautiful inside or out, she is whipping a young boy with a stick as he sobs and she yells at him. She has "crippling fat" (7) and is aggressive, abusive, and violent. There is not even beauty in the woman's garden, a place where one would expect an abundance of beauty. Hayden describes the scene saying that the young boy "wildly...crashes through the elephant-ears, pleads in dusty zinnias" (5-6). Even though they are flowers they are described and made to give the mental image of a treacherous scene not a beautiful garden.
B) Human truth: Humans can change and be awful, evil creatures, even to the innocent and undeserving, sometimes they even try to justify it.
1) The old woman is whipping a boy, yelling obnoxiously loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear her point out the boy's "faults". She chases him, corners him, and beats him until the stick itself breaks. The young boy struggles to free himself from the blows, sad because he describes her face as "the face that [he] no longer knew or loved" (17-18), meaning he once cared about this woman.
2) The old woman thinks it is okay for her to do this because after the whipping, it says that she was "avenged in part for lifelong hidings she has had to bear" (23-24). Some part of this woman believes this boy is responsible for some misery she has undergone in her life.
C) The whipping and abuse of the boy is definitely not over because at the very beginning the author says, "the old woman across the way is whipping the boy again" (1-2).
1) "Again" (2) means that this has happened before and will more likely than not happen again. It sounds so nonchalant in saying the woman is doing it again, as if though this type of abuse occurs often.
2) "The face I no longer knew or loved" (17-18) implies the reason why this young boy no longer feels that he knows or loves the face of this woman is because she has done this to him so much that it ruined their relationship. This physical altercation is not a minor disciplinary action of a parental figure, this woman abuses this child often and relentlessly.