This Found Poem I created is based on the main conflict in the short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl. The poem emphasizes the protagonist Mary Maloney’s internal conflicts which lead to the major external conflict that is between Mary and her husband Patrick (who plays the role of the antagonist). In the story, Mary is exposed to a considerably significant problem. On a typical night at home, Mary Maloney is resting anxiously on a chair waiting for her husband to come home after a long, tiring day of work. However, to Mary’s surprise, Patrick (her husband) seems to be acting oddly and refuses all the proposes she makes.
For this introductory part of my poem, I selected some positive words and phrases to build up the story and to also pose a contrast with the later darker plot. This serves as the rising action in the story.
After Patrick’s unusual actions, Mary realized that something was wrong and became uneasy. The main external conflict comes in paragraphs 37 and 38:
“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.” “Of course I’ll give you money and see you’re looked after. But there needn’t really be any fuss.” This passage reveals the shocking truth about Patrick’s decision to leave Mary.
Mary, of course, cannot accept this.
“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 herself had imagined the whole thing. Maybe, if she went about her business and acted as though she hadn’t been listening, then later, when she sort of woke up again, she might find none of it had ever happened.” I quoted this in paragraph 39. She is now full of despair and assumably anger, for this is the trigger that gave Mary the idea to murder her husband.
And this is exactly what she decided to do.
“At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head.” – Paragraph 45.
I represented this main conflict in my poem with a building of suspense. I chose some keywords that portray the most tension and bolded them while changing the font and their sizes to better emphasize the conflict. I also changed some colors of the words to red which makes them stand out in the text. The color red represents blood, death, and Mary’s torn and cruel feelings for this situation.
Apart from only including the main conflict, I also added another smaller conflict that is not aimed at another person but is aimed towards society. In the last few sentences of my poem, I chose some phrases regarding ‘weapons’ that are spoken by the police. Mary decided to destroy her murdering tool (a frozen lamb leg) and performed this action cleverly by acting innocent and kind toward the policemen to convince them to eat the lamb leg.
The last sentence wraps up the story while adding suspense and providing space for the readers to think. Will Mary Maloney get away with her crime? Will the police finally discover the truth? No one knows.
As I have explained in the previous paragraphs, I used two fonts for this poem. One is the normal font, and the other is the font that is used for emphasis and to give tension. I used an overall color of red and black in my design to portray the dark and gothic style of the story, and added several elements such as ‘corpse’, ‘lamb leg’, ‘woman’, ‘blood’, and ‘sly giggle’.
Wow so good