Towards the beginning of this section, Winston is in a jail cell along with common criminals--in other words, those who were not Party members and hadn't committed thought crimes. I found it intersting how much commotion the common criminals could cause and not be punished for it; they even "shouted down the telescreen." I found the drunk 60-year-old woman to be a sort of comic relief for events to come because of how she saidy the guards "dono 'ow to treat a lady." This was humorous because she swore before this, belched, and puked on the floor in front of Winston, which is honestly not very ladylike (but of course, she is drunk).
Later, when Winston speaks with Ampleforth in the cell, Ampleforth states that he was imprisoned because he used the word "God" in a poem. He only used it because he needed a word to rhyme with "rod" (or so he said). I'm all for putting God in poetry and stuff, but really, poems don't have to rhyme. Does Ampleforth know that? Anyways, I believe that the reason the party condemns religious believers is that it wants to rid them of their faith and hope so that they will rely on Big Brother and think of the Party as being sovereign.
The instance with the chinless man and the skeletal man illustrates how the Party stripped this man of morality when it starved him of food. The man is a personification of the moral starvation here. The tortures these people endure make them selfish. The chinless man still had some morality because he had not been broken yet. When he saw the emaciated man, he offered him food, only to get slammed in the face and have the skeletal man turn around and betray him. The starved man even said he'd rather have his children's throats slit before him than go to Room 101.
Although the level is many times less severe than what Winston was going through, I can somewhat relate to his emotions during torture because of conditioning in sports. When running, one does not favor the coach very much at all, but when the coach finally says to stop and ends the pain, one feels grateful and likes the coach again. Even though humans would like to think that they won't break under pressure, even in something as small as running they become selfish and weak. All they want is for the pain to end, and unless it is something that they strongly believe in, they will not volunteer to run longer for someone else nine times out of ten. This demonstrates the actual weakness of human beings. Most like to believe that they are strong, but in actuality, most are the same and cripple under too much pressure.
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I agree with you when you said that poems don't have to rhyme, therefore, why does Ampleforth have to rhyme his poems? But the question that came to my mind when i was reading this section was why not just make a new line, and a new rhyming line, just throw out the lines and move on? I think they don't have enough thoughts of their own in their heads that they just think one way is the only way to do it.
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