The poem “Little Boy Cry” by Melvin Morris describes the emotional hassle of punishing a child. Throughout the poem, Morris uses a range of emotive language and other literary techniques such as personification and alliteration to create vivid imagery as a means of getting the themes of remorse, resentment and love across to his readers. In this essay, we will explore the ways in which Morris uses this descriptive language to enhance readers understanding of the poem.
In stanza one, Morris focuses on the depiction of the young child’s emotions from happiness to sadness and fury as he receives a “quick slap” from his father. Morris starts off by using emotive words such as “contorted” and “metamorphosed” to dramatically express the ways in which there was a rapid transformation in emotions of the young child. Morris’s use of the word “contorted” creates the image of a disturbed facial expression in reaction to a physical stimulus causing pain. The word “metamorphosed”, used to describe the rapid manner in which the child’s emotions changed, couples with the aforementioned to contribute to the overall theatrical, over-exaggerated nature of the child’s actions. These two words come together to invoke feelings of pity within the reader and compassion for the young boy who has fallen victim to the steel hands of his father. Morris goes on to use sibilance in line five to express the uninterrupted flow of the child’s tears. He infuses the element of personification into this same line in the form of “swimming tears”. By personifying the child’s eyes to be “swimming [in] tears”, Morris is able to animate the scene and create imagery of an object being engulfed and drowned by water. This is in turn interpreted by readers as a sign of the extent to which the boy’s misery had swamped him. Morris creates an interesting effect as a result of using the two literary devices together; emphasis is drawn to that particular line and requires readers to pay extra attention to the intention behind it.
In stanza two of the poem, Morris presents the thoughts running wild in the mind of the young child and the way he perceives his father to be. The father is presented to us as an “ogre”, a very child-like description which, as lighthearted as it may be, conveys to readers that the child no longer views his father to be a human being capable of feeling emotion, but a mystical creature often associated with animalistic behavior. He goes on to use alliteration to express just how far the child’s imagination wanders, further likening the father to a “grim giant’ who is also “colossal [and] cruel”. Readers fully sympathize with the child at this point, wondering what on earth was running through the father’s mind to resort to such harsh punishment methods.
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The third stanza is unlike the preceding stanzas. It carries its own uniqueness by introducing and expressing a new point of view: the father. In this portion of the poem, readers gain a deeper insight of the father. He believes that the only reason why his son seems so wounded by his punishment is because the poor child “cannot understand, not yet”. His reasoning for this is simply because the child, at age three, cannot grasp the gravity and future implications of his actions but must be taught a lesson regardless. Unfortunately the lesson must be taught with something harsher than words, but his son will not be able to realize the benefits of his fathers “teachings” until a later time in his life. Through Morris’s use of personification in “tears can scald him,” readers come to understand that the father is not as heinous as the boy sees him to be and feels very guilty for assaulting his son. The father further expresses how much remorse he feels when he describes his emotions to be “wavering behind that mask,” with “wavering” expressing to readers how hard he finds it to have to watch his son cry, drawing them closer to the father in sympathy. It also uncovers the veiled idea that although both characters reacted differently to one another, there were shared emotions.
In the last stanza, Morris closes off the poem with an assertive statement, saying “you must not make a plaything of the rain”. This line holds a double meaning; it alludes to both the child’s tears being an attentive cry for compassion and the requirement of the father to be firm in reprimanding his child. Readers also realize that Morris purposely toggles between the perspectives of the father and child with hopes to open up their hearts and encourage them to feel compassionate towards both parties involved. In doing this, they are able to strengthen the earlier formed connection with the poem.
