Hate Poem

Hate repeats throughout the poem like a motif, evident on just about every line of the poem. In Sheehan’s poem, hate is quite elastic, for not only does the speaker have this hate in her mind, she projects the intense feeling into various body parts and smallest cells, acts it out with her gestures and tone of voice, and even invokes the past—her ancestors and the history of a keychain—to back up her side.

“Hate Poem” makes hate something practiced, something articulated, and something that other things symbolize. The repetition of the word “hate” first adds a repeated, aspirated sound, like a breathy hissing in the aspiration of ha-. This is followed by the sharp -te that combines to create a repeated harsh, mono-syllabic cadence in the poem. This repetition of “hate” punctuates the poem, like a period, or a breath, at the end of each line. That breath is what her lungs, the “duplicitous twins” (Line 23) cannot get enough of at the end of the poem.