We told ourselves he had just wised up...

For my first blog entry, I chose the poem Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane. The first stanza has a tone of admiration, to an extent where you could call it child-like. It is like a kid talking about his favorite comic book superhero, "Hard Rock was 'known to take no shit from nobody.'" The narrator builds this image of Hard Rock for the reader that is almost superhuman and larger-than-life. The tone of this first stanza also bites at the reader, putting the reader in their place so they know that they would never want to mess with Hard Rock.

The second and third stanzas have a tone of apprehension to them. The narrator and the other prison mates are waiting and wondering about what happened to Hard Rock. They talk about the "WORD" and they are all very anxious to see if the "WORD" is true. They are reminiscent in the third stanza as well, talking about his past "exploits" like the way he smacked the captain with his dinner tray. They talk about him as if he were a legend, almost untouchable.

The fourth and fifth stanza's tones slowly decay into dissappointment. From the build up of the first couple of stanzas, the reader and the narrator expect this event to unfold from the incident with the "hillbilly" but nothing happens. It is a giant let down to both the reader and the prison mates because they knew this amazing hero that was once a ruthless inmate, but now he "just grinned and looked silly." It is a loss of hope for the inmates, they feel as though they have lost their voice, Hard Rock was the "doer of things" and now he has lost that, so they feel as though they have lost their strong hero as well.