Peter Grimes is justly punished, to what extent do you agree?
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Course
English
Institution
AQA
This is an essay that I wrote when I was doing my A-levels around two years ago. It discusses the character of Peter Grimes (a poem written by George Crabbe) and to what extent we, as a reader think he has been punished.
Peter Grimes is justly punished, to what extent do you agree?
The crime genre essentially focuses on the crime committed by the criminal against the victim, the
capture of the criminal and finally the just punishment of the criminal in the eyes of the law. The
adverb ‘justly’ can be defined as doing something that is morally right or fair and because of this we
can disagree to a certain extent that Grimes was not ‘justly’ punished because he was not sentenced
in front of the law. However, this could perhaps be overlooked because of the deterioration of
Grimes’s mental state right after he murdered the final boy which could be classified as his
punishment as it ultimately leads to his demise. Yet this does not justify nor lessen the extent of his
crimes committed against the three boys. Moreover, for Grimes to be ‘justly’ punished, we would
expect society who is complicit in his crimes to be equally punished and the fact that this does not
happen could be a powerful satirical comment made by Crabbe about a society that is aware of the
innocent suffering yet actively encourages it through a gross sin of omission.
In crime writing, the setting is intimately bound with the criminal activity and here we see that
Grimes’s own community is just as guilty as Grimes, perhaps more for their enablement in the
murders of the three boys. Right after Grimes has killed the first boy who is described to be a
“piteous orphan,” Crabbe extensively uses the anaphora of “none” to emphasise the lack of
enquiries made collectively in order to criminalise society as a whole so that the reader views Grimes
and society as equals. This is further emphasised when society questions Grimes about the death of
the second boy, who is an orphan like the first, asking “how died he, Peter?” highlighting how
society has a voice which could have been used to prevent further murders from happening but
instead preferred to bask in the comfort of their ignorance. Moreover, society finally punishes
Grimes for the murders after he kills the third boy who is depicted to be a “noble sinner’s son”. “The
word “noble” hints that the boy is from royalty and is therefore immediately linked to wealth which
could be a catalyst to society’s immediate response. The fact that society refused to act when the
victims were poor accentuates that they are guilty of differentiating between class types. Finally,
because society goes unpunished for their role in the murders, this could lead us to believe that
Grimes was not justly punished. George Crabbe was a clergyman and a surgeon as well as an
accomplished poet, writing within the context of nineteenth century Romanticism. The Romantics’
emphasis on individual liberty relates increasingly to crime writing. By elevating the importance of
individual experience, personal ethics and moral choices, the relationship between the individual
and society at large was subject to challenge and this is clearly illustrated in ‘Peter Grimes’.
Furthermore, even though Grimes was not punished ‘justly’ for his crimes we can observe that he
was indeed punished because of his dilapidating state of mind which leaves him isolated and
distanced from his community. This is evident when Crabbe uses the watery and brooding Suffolk
landscape as an extended example of pathetic fallacy to represent the nature of Grimes’s state of
mind. Towards the end of the poem when Peter’s deterioration becomes more rapid, Crabbe
describes how the waters in the “hot slimy Channel slowly glide” creating an image of the water
coagulating to symbolise the guilt that weighs Grimes down. In addition, the use of contrasting
words “small” and “narrow” in the sibilance “small stream, confined in narrow bound” thoroughly
highlights the lack of power that Grimes’ possesses over his unstable mind which we observe
continuously changes throughout the poem. At the start of the poem, Grimes is described to hold a
lot of power over the three boys “he’d now the power he loved to show” showcasing that Grimes
delights in gaining complete domination over his powerless victims. However, as the poem
progresses, we realise that Grimes’ control of this “power” gradually ebbs away and eventually he
falls victim (so that he is now in the position of the three boys he abused) to his state of mind, which
takes up the role of Grimes as the abuser shown in the initial stanzas. Here, Crabbe presents Grimes
as a victim of his own state of mind by detaching him from the one thing that he truly cherishes-
power - by making him weak to the point that he “rose in fright” at his nightmares. This strain of
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