Little Boy Crying and The Toys
The poems "The Toys" and "Little Boy Crying" are two similar poems which both mainly talk about a father to child relationship. The poems show the father's point of view as well as the child's, which are quite different, during an event in which the father tries to teach his little son a lesson. As well as their similarities, these two poems have their differences.
Both poems talk about how the father has hit his son for being disobedient. They both show how much this event hurts the child as well as the father. In "Little Boy Crying", the little boy is both shocked and hurt by this event. The phrase: "Hurt, your laughter metamorphosed into howls," suggests that at that time, the child was changed, mentally and physically, because of his father's slap. It shows that it really hurt him because he changed completely.
Maybe it was not the strength of the slap that was hurting him, but the fact that the father hit him really hurt, because further down the poem, the boy sees his father as a big monster and wants to destroy him. Similarly, in "The Toys", the boy was hurt. Around the beginning of the poem, the poet suggests that the little boy's mother was dead and she was the patient parent; "His mother, who was patient, being dead". Then later on, in the poem, the poet tells us what the boy did after being slapped and sent to bed without a kiss by his father, and that's what shows how much the boy is hurt by this event. The boy went to his room, cried, and placed, within his reach, objects that probably had some memories in them of his mother. These memories were probably comforting...