His tears are rainy weather/ to wound like memories:" (Lines 11-12) to express how watching the beating makes the memories of his own childhood beatings more painful. Another metaphor he uses in the poem is to describe being held between his parent's knees while being beaten, "My head gripped in bony vise/ of knees the writhing struggle" (Lines 13-14). .
William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" is about a boy who is sold by his father, after the death of his mother to the chimneysweepers. In England little boys were used to clean chimneys because they were very small and fit into the chimneys. Most of the children used for this died from diseases related to breathing in all the soot from the chimneys, malnutrition, and accidents relating to chimney sweeping. Besides that it was very scary for the children to go down into the dark chimneys to clean and become covered in soot. The boy who is narrating the poem starts to comfort another boy who has just begun chimney sweeping and who has to have his hair cut so the soot does not embed in it. As the same boy dreams that night he says he sees all the child sweepers in coffins. The coffins are then opened by angels, who take them to a green plain to play, and to clean themselves of all the soot. An angel then tells the boy that if he does what is asked of him then he will have god as a father and that he will be happy. This is a child dealing with the fact that he cannot escape this brutal fate, and that though he may probably die like his friends, he finds hope and fate in a dream. He finds comfort so that he can continue his life. As a child he knows no better than to do what he is told, and as a child he believes it can only end in reward. .
"The Whipping" is a poem by Robert Hayden that illustrates a neighbor watching a boy across the street being beaten again. He pleads for mercy from his mother who still chases after his and beats him with a stick until it breaks.
