Punishment – Hayden pg. 496 – 497

After reading over the poem multiple times, I am still trying to understand its entirety, however, I will say that I feel the speaker has brought me back to a time and place where people were still being hung as the main punishment. I felt that this poem was lacking a sense of life in it, as I read on I felt distanced from reality and brought back to the past. This poem brings me back to older times, and gives me the understanding that this women was killed because of her promiscuity. “Little adulteress, before they punished you” (pg. 496). Unfortunately, back in time, women were given very little rights and barely any freedom especially in matters that dealt with their sexuality. What I also found to be interesting, is that as I began to read the poem, the tone that I took on in my mind as I read along, was a somber tone. As I got to the end of the poem, I still felt a saddened emotion leading the author to each stanza. In my mind I picture a women, who has been abused emotionally and physically to the point that she has lost her life. “…it shakes the frail rigging of her ribs, I can see her drowned body in the bog…” (pg 496). All substance to who she was, was stripped from her being. The speaker offered such motivations to help me fill in on the blank spots in the poem that I stumbled into. So, at the end of the poem I was able to identify with this young woman