Oh, dear. Now the poem's heading into the whole "darkness is bad" realm. 'Tis so common in poetry, and while the rest of the series is salvageable, I'd suggest ditching this stanza on the fact that it's so cliche. Yeah, it's humankind's oldest fear: darkness. What lies beyond the scope of the kitchen light. But so many folks have written on it, I'd love for this to be different. Try saying that you're not afraid of what the dark could be or what the dark could be hiding. Because the dark itself is so cliche....
Line four: "that creep soft"...."softly", I hope you mean? Otherwise it's dreadfully confusing.
"All is shadows"....
Oops! Singular/plural mixup here. "is" refers to one person. "He is tall..." "Are" refers to more than one person. "They are tall..."
So, grammatically correct, it would be, "All are [the] shadows/That creep softly".
I've already rambled about how cliche the subject of this stanza is, but let's take a look at your description:
"The blackness of the night"
:*sigh*: Well, at least you're not using the term "inky", like some writers I could mention.
I hate how the night is always associated with black. Perhaps you could try a stronger, more defined term instead of "blackness"? What the black reminds you of? A slight mention on how "the stars cast the shadows". (You can't have shadows without light, you know.)
Oh, yeah, I know 'blackness' and night are really overused. Just think of what I could've done--I was thinking of using a darkness of night/absence of light combo. Not so good. Yes, 'all is shadows' isn't exactly correct, but somehow 'all are shadows' sounds weird to me. Eh, I'll think about it. I will try to find a good synonym for blackness, though. Rereading it just makes the whole thing more unoriginal. Argh. The poem is supposed to look at the dark sides of things, though; you notice I don't say anything about the darkness being comforting, or in my other poem, about how fluffy happy animals are with me as I frolic under a rainbow. They are rather dark. And unoriginal. Crap, I'm getting ticked again. Now where's my thesaurus...
