In his song “Stronger,” the number one most impactful artist of our generation, Kanye West, fluidly rapped, “That that don’t kill me, can only make me stronger.” In this verse, West presents a universal significance to putting meaning to any form of pain. As long as any pain he experiences does not directly threaten his morality, he can further develop into something “stronger,” or a more complete individual. West’s assertion is an inherently positive one; it provides a motivation to move past any hindrances or obstacles that may lay in one’s path. Seamus Heaney’s poem “Hailstones” explores a similar concept, focusing on the development of man’s realization of this; to do so, Heaney employs shifting, complex tones of initial wavering and eventual…show more content… Describing the hailstones, the speaker portrays them as “rattling the classroom window / like a ruler across the knuckles.” The “classroom window,” a representation of the speaker’s youth, is “rattled” by these hailstones, an act which implies their presence as being a disturbance to him. The sound of “rattled” itself reflects the speaker’s beliefs, with its pattern of soft sounds and then hard mutes repeated within the word . As previously established, the hailstones are not deliberately trying to harm the speaker, but he still assigns a negative meaning to them, even in his youth here. By equating this pain he assigns to the hailstones to the punishment of a “ruler across the knuckles,” the speaker seems to be ironically unable to recognize the natural significance of them. The “ruler” is an enactment of subjective pain, given to the speaker in order to punish him for not following the arbitrarily determined rules of school. However, the pain it inflicts is unimportant and quickly fleeting, as it only strikes the “knuckles,” a relatively strong part of the body. The sound of “knuckles” further establishes this, as goes from soft to hard and then back to soft, making it seem like more of a rather superficial pain; it only hurts his physical being, rather than his spiritual and mental being, making it a pain he is willing to endure. Even though he assigns negative meaning to the hailstones, he does not appropriately do so for the “ruler,” revealing his continuous attempt to truly understand the pain he experiences, an action which is ultimately rendered futile by his arbitrary assignment of meaning. Directly after this comparison, the speaker refers to the inherent nature of the hailstones and the ruler, describing “the way they were perfect first /