Little Boy Crying
“Your mouth contorting in brief spite and hurt,
your laughter metamorphosed into howls...”
Mervyn Morris
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright)
VOCABULARY
Contorting — twisting or curling up
Spite — usually driven by anger, a desire to hurt or annoy someone
Metamorphosed — transformed
Angling for — trying to get something without directly asking for it or being obvious about it
Hint — suggestion
Guilt — a feeling of deep remorse and regret, after one has done something that is clearly bad
Colossal — huge, like a giant statue
Scrambling — hurrying clumsily up or over something, usually using hands and feet
Wavering — hovering back and forth between two things
INTRODUCTION TO KEY IDEAS
Mervyn Morris’ “Little Boy Crying” is a controversial poem in many ways. The basic idea is that an
upset child has been hit by his father by way of discipline, but we are presented with both the parent
and the child’s perspectives of this ambiguous situation. Is physical punishment an important part of
objective and formative discipline, or is it an unnecessarily cruel and extreme behaviour? Your opinion on
this matter may differ, depending on your own cultural context and the way in which you were raised.
To make matters even more difficult, Morris deliberately obscures the figures in the poem: we do not
know if he was the child or the parent in this situation, as he was 81 years old at the time of writing.
So he may have been looking back on himself as a child, or as a parent — alternatively, it may just be a
hypothetical scenario that never happened to him personally. Regardless, the poem sheds a lot of light
on parent-child relationships and explores a complex and nuanced way in which maturity and discipline
are interconnected.
Copyright © 2021 Scrbbly
, STORY / SUMMARY
Stanza 1: The father has hit a three-year-old child, and the boy is crying — he
was happy and relaxed but is now tense and upset. The boy looks for “guilt”
or “sorrow” in the father, a sign that he regrets hitting him that would prove
he was wrong.
Stanza 2: The child views the parent as an “ogre” because of his size and
cruelty. The boy is perhaps scared of the father. The boy hates the father at
this point, because he can’t understand why the father slapped him, and he
can’t understand why the father feels no remorse. The boy imagines getting
revenge.
Stanza 3: The boy is too young to understand that he can also hurt his father,
the father actually is pretending to feel nothing but on the inside, he feels
bad. He wants to play with the boy and make him happy, but he dare not
because if he does that, the boy won’t learn a lesson.
Stanza 4: The poem ends with a single line about how we should take the
rain seriously — it is not a “plaything”, something to mess around with.
Perhaps this is a metaphor, suggesting that things we don’t like sometimes
are important and good for us. The father wants to play with the boy, but he
needs him to take the discipline seriously.
SPEAKER / VOICE
• The speaker is talking straight to the boy (the addressee), about his
father — we assume the speaker is the poet himself. The boy did
something that requires discipline, but once the punishment was
administered he became upset, which in turn hurt the father — as a
reader, we can see both sides of the argument because the story is told
from a removed point of view.
• The father could be a good parent who feels the need to teach his child
important rules and boundaries, or he could be a bad parent who lost his
temper.
• Equally, the boy also has a good and bad side — he could be an innocent
child who has been hurt by his father’s outburst, or he could be a spoilt
child who is throwing a tantrum: there is a subtle exploration of parent-
child relationships.
Copyright © 2021 Scrbbly
“Your mouth contorting in brief spite and hurt,
your laughter metamorphosed into howls...”
Mervyn Morris
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright)
VOCABULARY
Contorting — twisting or curling up
Spite — usually driven by anger, a desire to hurt or annoy someone
Metamorphosed — transformed
Angling for — trying to get something without directly asking for it or being obvious about it
Hint — suggestion
Guilt — a feeling of deep remorse and regret, after one has done something that is clearly bad
Colossal — huge, like a giant statue
Scrambling — hurrying clumsily up or over something, usually using hands and feet
Wavering — hovering back and forth between two things
INTRODUCTION TO KEY IDEAS
Mervyn Morris’ “Little Boy Crying” is a controversial poem in many ways. The basic idea is that an
upset child has been hit by his father by way of discipline, but we are presented with both the parent
and the child’s perspectives of this ambiguous situation. Is physical punishment an important part of
objective and formative discipline, or is it an unnecessarily cruel and extreme behaviour? Your opinion on
this matter may differ, depending on your own cultural context and the way in which you were raised.
To make matters even more difficult, Morris deliberately obscures the figures in the poem: we do not
know if he was the child or the parent in this situation, as he was 81 years old at the time of writing.
So he may have been looking back on himself as a child, or as a parent — alternatively, it may just be a
hypothetical scenario that never happened to him personally. Regardless, the poem sheds a lot of light
on parent-child relationships and explores a complex and nuanced way in which maturity and discipline
are interconnected.
Copyright © 2021 Scrbbly
, STORY / SUMMARY
Stanza 1: The father has hit a three-year-old child, and the boy is crying — he
was happy and relaxed but is now tense and upset. The boy looks for “guilt”
or “sorrow” in the father, a sign that he regrets hitting him that would prove
he was wrong.
Stanza 2: The child views the parent as an “ogre” because of his size and
cruelty. The boy is perhaps scared of the father. The boy hates the father at
this point, because he can’t understand why the father slapped him, and he
can’t understand why the father feels no remorse. The boy imagines getting
revenge.
Stanza 3: The boy is too young to understand that he can also hurt his father,
the father actually is pretending to feel nothing but on the inside, he feels
bad. He wants to play with the boy and make him happy, but he dare not
because if he does that, the boy won’t learn a lesson.
Stanza 4: The poem ends with a single line about how we should take the
rain seriously — it is not a “plaything”, something to mess around with.
Perhaps this is a metaphor, suggesting that things we don’t like sometimes
are important and good for us. The father wants to play with the boy, but he
needs him to take the discipline seriously.
SPEAKER / VOICE
• The speaker is talking straight to the boy (the addressee), about his
father — we assume the speaker is the poet himself. The boy did
something that requires discipline, but once the punishment was
administered he became upset, which in turn hurt the father — as a
reader, we can see both sides of the argument because the story is told
from a removed point of view.
• The father could be a good parent who feels the need to teach his child
important rules and boundaries, or he could be a bad parent who lost his
temper.
• Equally, the boy also has a good and bad side — he could be an innocent
child who has been hurt by his father’s outburst, or he could be a spoilt
child who is throwing a tantrum: there is a subtle exploration of parent-
child relationships.
Copyright © 2021 Scrbbly
