Have you ever been whipped by your parents when you were young? My parents beat me seldom, but when they did, it hurt me very much. I like the poem, "The Whipping" written by Robert Hayden. The words he uses in the poem challenge me a lot, and as I read it, I had the same feeling that the boy had. This poem provides me a message that the writer wants us to understand..

Vocabulary seems like the first thing that I want to mention. Some particular words in the poem look familiar to me, but some do not. I often need to use my dictionary to look up words, and write the meaning in my notebook so I can remember them, and review them some other time. The words I need help with are such as exhausted and purged in the last few lines of the poem.

The emotion of the people in the poem is sadness. The boy in the poem was being whipped by his mother. She always treated him very badly. People around the neighborhood heard the boy crying, and the intolerance for her son's wrongs. "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…" From these words, we could feel how the boy tried to escape from his mother's whipping, and the hateful thought he had of his mother.

While reading this poem, I could feel the hurt on the boy's body, because I had the same experience as a little GIRL. They used to use a ruler to beat me, but not after I was 12 years old. I live with a great peace with my parents since they no longer beat me. "His tears are rainy weather to woundlike memories" Hayden wrote. This child was really hurt by his mother's every whip.

"The old woman across the way is whipping the boy again……" These lines give me a message about how some people treat their children and the common problem in many families. Parents beat their children for their wrongs. They grab their child's hand tightly, beat them with a whip, and scold them. They will neVER stop until they are so tired from chasing and beating the children, and then they let them go free,

After reading this poem, I think these parents should try to talk to their children rather than scold them or beat them, Whipping children will make things worse, and their child will hate them every time they feel those red bloody marks on their smooth skin from their parents' whipping. And when they grow up, they will not listen to them. This will make a lasting impression from their childhood. There should be peaceful conversation between parents and children, to solve their problems together.