“Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl
I created this found poem by the actions of Mary, the protagonist (and possibly an antagonist because she killed her husband), in the story “Lamb to the Slaughter”. In the story, A challenge was exposed to Mary: her husband, shown slanting to the protagonist in the story, comes home after a busy day of work and acts odd by refusing all the proposes Mary makes; then, he announces that he will be leaving Mary because of some personal affairs. Mary is pregnant and has to care for an unborn baby by herself daily. Thus, Mary isn’t satisfied with this announcement because she does not want her husband to leave her, and here she encounters an external conflict between her and her husband.
This conflict is shown in Paragraph 30: “And he told her. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at most, and she sat very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word. This is also the rising action leading up to the conflict.
Paragraph 35: “Her first instinct was not to believe any of it, to reject it all. It occurred to her that perhaps he hadn’t even spoken, that she had imagined the whole thing…When she walked across the room she couldn’t feel her feet touching the Floor. She couldn’t feel anything at all — except slight nausea and a desire to vomit.” At this point, Mary has eventually decided to kill her husband, using a Leg of a lamb. Maybe this is the only way that Mary could keep her husband staying with her forever. (creepy)
After Mary has killed her husband, another internal conflict emerges. “It was extraordinary, now, how clear her mind became all of a sudden. She began thinking very fast. As the wife of a detective, she knew quite well what the penalty would be. That was fine. It made no difference to her. It would be a relief.”
On the other hand, what about the child? What were the laws about murderers with unborn children? Did they kill them both — mother and child? Or did they wait until the tenth month? What did they do? Mary Maloney didn’t know. And she certainly wasn’t prepared to take a chance.” As Mary killed her husband, there were two opposing forces inside Mary. One is to let the detectives and cops find out or try to obscure the weapon, fake everything, and act innocent. Mary was relaxed and didn’t worry much about getting caught, but thinking of the unborn baby inside Mary, she decided to act it all out.
The artwork in my found poem could be easily understood. It shows the leg of a lamb, which portrays the wrong side of humanity and the potential selfishness, while the hand with scars reflects us humans being hurt, again and again, being forced to do something that we didn’t wish to at first.
This shows both the virtuous and evil sides of humanity. Being selfish negatively affects things to bring benefits to oneself, and the importance of love and the motivation it grants to persevere.