Roberrt Hayden 시 "The Whipping"

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Edward Hirsch, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart (7)

 

[Robert] Hayden could be nostalgic about his neighborhood, but also knew that he came from a dysfunctional home. He was born Asa Sheffey, but his parents soon separated and left him with their neighbors, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who raised him as their son and renamed him Robert Earl. Hayden.... He was bound to his childhood as the foster son of poor, working-class people and remianed committed to what he liked to call "folk" people: poor, uneducated, dignified, all those who quietly fulfilled what he called "love's austere and lonely offices" ("Those Winter Sundays").

 

 

The Whipping

 

The old woman across the way

        is whipping the boy again

and shouting to the neighborhood

        her goodness and his wrongs.

 

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,

        pleads in dusty zinnias,

while she in spite of crippling fat

        pursues and corners him.

 

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling

        boy till the stick breaks

in her hand. His tears are rainy weather

        to woundlike memories:

 

My head gripped in bony vise

        of knees, the writhing struggle

to wrench free, the blows, the fear

        worse than blows that hateful

 

Words could bring, the face that I

        no longer knew or loved. ...

Well, it is over now, it is over,

        and the boy sobs in his room,

 

And the woman leans muttering against

        a tree, exhausted, purged --

avenged in part for lifelong hidings

        she has had to bear.

 

(1962)

 

 

   "The Whipping" begins in the present, turns to the past [네째 연에서], and then returns to the present [다섯째 연 중간에서] .... It's the formula that Wordsworth created in "Tintern Abbey."

 

 

 

 

Elephant Ears

 

Zinnias