Just Before the Dawn

[pre]When the night's deep
And the air sings a different symphony
I walk along the riverside
With some soulful melodies playing in me
On nights like these when i have lost all hope
For the zillionth time in my life
A ray of sunshine spreads across the sky
A glimpse of this ray makes me realise
That God has been watching all along
He has given me the darkest moments
That come just before the dawn![/pre]

Diva,


This is mediocre at best.

A significant part of the problem is conceptual. This is a poem about a narrator who feels isolated from the world but finds solace in God. That doesn’t even sound very interesting as a prose statement, and there’s little in this piece that raises the interest level above the prose.

Details in line:

When the night's deep
And the air sings a different symphony

** The jump from the night to the air to river to what's inside you is jarring. "When the night's deep" doesn't even mean anything--what, pray tell, is a deep night? If the air "sings a different symphony," you should contrast it back to the symphony played before.

I walk along the riverside
With some soulful melodies playing inside me

** Why “soulful”? This makes no sense. The introduction of an additional level of interiority adds nothing to the piece. Perhaps you intended the nested references to somehow support the theme of the poem. If so, it’s not working too well as the narrator's experiences in the piece are one-dimensional. The re-introduction of music is clumsy--is the air's symphony different from the melody inside you? Is that what "different" above?

For the zilliionth time in my life
A ray of sunshine spreads across the sky

** The word "zillionth" is pedestrian and is a beginner’s fingerprint. Don’t expect your work to be taken seriously if you continue to use it and other atrocities. Also, on top of the harried interior/exterior description above, suddenly we have a dramatic scenery change from the deep of night to sunlight spreading across the sky? What?

A glimpse of this ray makes me realise
That God has been watching all along
He has given me the darkest moments
That come just before the dawn!

** In the words of Spike Milligan, “When suddenly, nothing happened!”

There is nothing here that generates a new way of looking at a common condition--loneliness, support from religious belief. There is nothing that generates interest in either the character, her scenery, or her beliefs.

You have a decent style, but you need to develop a better ear for poetry by reading books--and not just reading poetry, but by absorbing it. Really sitting and thinking about the language, the images--it's when you've read a poem so many times, think you know what it means, and then return to it some time later and find it means something totally different: that's the mark of poetry.


All the best,
Brad