Dream

I'm more into prose, but I'm learning how to rhyme, as evident by a few of the couplets below, but I'm still bad at it, as evident by a few of the couplets below.

Anyway, this is a simple love poem. Nothing too complex or dark, unlike my other works (awesome way to work in a plug - go check out my profile to read some of my other stuff!). This isn't my best work by a long shot, but it's a nice little poem. Anyway, enjoy.

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"Dream"

Life is but a dream,
And nothing is what it seems.
Which explains why everything is so surreal;
It is that way that You make me feel.

Before, my life was a horrible nightmare,
Before I found that You cared.
But now I smile
Because the Monsters are less hostile

I thank You for waking me
Into finally being able to see
That Love has no bounds
When You, my love, are around.

But now I can never go back to sleep,
For my heart You now keep.
I can never go back into the darkness
And live a life of complete starkness

Hey there! I really love the idea/them behind this poem, coming out of your shell and darkness, falling in love, and finding hope in life through it. Of course I'd take much more of a cynical look and focus on the ensuing break up and how it's not worth it. But being positive and favoring love is also a great outlook!

I have a few things I'd like to critique in this poem and hopefully it helps you in the end.

Rhyming

In your beginning authors note you mention that you are learning how to rhyme but are not yet very good at it. First, I would like to tell you that you do not need to be able to rhyme to write poetry. Some poetry is well written with rhyming, but I personally think that rhyming can frequently keep you from writing well. It locks you into being forced to use certain words that don't necessarily express exactly what you're trying to get at. Poetry needs to express a lot, and every single word you use is important, so if the rhyming is getting in the way of expressing yourself, don't even worry about rhyming. It's not important right away. If anything, I'd say that rhyming poetry should be tackled after the other aspects of poetry have been understood.

Detail

Detail is very important in poetry. Thus far, you're missing a lot of good detail that this poem could easily have based on the emotions behind it. Right now you're telling a lot, about the emotion and what happened, but just like stories, showing is much better than just telling. Keep in mind all the various poetic devices you can use when writing poetry - imagery, symbolism. Themes, metaphors, similes. Try using those to spice up your poem and add life and stronger emotion to it. The ultimate goal of poetry is to make the reader feel, think, or react in some way. Using those devices can help you do that.

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The ultimate advice I can give you as to how you can improve writing your poetry is to read poetry. Reading poetry, finding the devices used in it, and understanding how those devices make you feel something from the poem will help you more than anything to write it. The best I've ever been at writing poetry was during the years where I studied it in my literature classes. If you want some suggestions on poets I like, feel free to PM me and I can give you a list.

Hope this helps!

Hi there! I'm Conrad, and I'll be your reviewer tonight.

So, I really think that you have a decent beginning here. However, your rhyming is bringing you down. It's making everything sound really clunky and unnatural, and I think that is detracting from what you have to say. I would suggest rewriting this in free-verse, and letting the words flow rather than trying to adhere to any particular form. You've got a good base here, you just need to build off of it a bit more. PM me if you have any comments or questions.

Good job, and good luck.

-Conrad Rice

Hello there!

I must say I like the idea behind it or the poem itself because it's understandable. I get the message of it.

#FF0000 ">Before, my life was a horrible nightmare,
Before I found that You cared.
But now I smile
Because the Monsters are less hostile

You repeated the word "Before" twice in a stanza and ended the first two lines with a period. It's unnesecary to place a period, because if you would look it as a sentence:
"Before, my life was a horrible nightmare, Before I found that You cared." It would look like this which is grammatically wrong... perhaps, rephrase that?
"Monsters" in your dreams, might as well be more specific 'cause you're talking about darkness and love thing.

As with your rhyming, I like it. You rhymed it well.

keep it up!

Peace out!

Thank you for your reviews. I'm always open to help, and always take what you have to say into consideration.

Like I said, I'm not that good at rhyming, so I'm not surprised it felt forced, unnatural, or just bad.

Suzanne wrote:Hey there! I really love the idea/them behind this poem, coming out of your shell and darkness, falling in love, and finding hope in life through it. Of course I'd take much more of a cynical look and focus on the ensuing break up and how it's not worth it. But being positive and favoring love is also a great outlook!

I'm usually the same way, although a recent turn of events has changed my outlook on life.

Suzanne wrote:Rhyming

Thanks for the advice. Usually I stick to free verse, but I wanted to try my hand at writing something that rhymed. But that is good advice - get the lines down, then work rhymes into it.

Suzanne wrote:Detail

Once again, thanks for the advice.

Conrad Rice wrote:So, I really think that you have a decent beginning here. However, your rhyming is bringing you down. It's making everything sound really clunky and unnatural, and I think that is detracting from what you have to say. I would suggest rewriting this in free-verse, and letting the words flow rather than trying to adhere to any particular form. You've got a good base here, you just need to build off of it a bit more.

Not far from how I feel. It started off with the first couplet, then just kind of evolved, extending the metaphor of sleeping and dreaming.

yuriiko12345 wrote:I must say I like the idea behind it or the poem itself because it's understandable. I get the message of it.

Thanks. Usually I write something so heady and convoluted that you have to be me to understand it.

yuriiko12345 wrote:

#FF0000 ">Before, my life was a horrible nightmare,
Before I found that You cared.
But now I smile
Because the Monsters are less hostile

You repeated the word "Before" twice in a stanza and ended the first two lines with a period. It's unnesecary to place a period, because if you would look it as a sentence:
"Before, my life was a horrible nightmare, Before I found that You cared." It would look like this which is grammatically wrong... perhaps, rephrase that?

I was trying to go for the repetition of words starting with "B" in that stanza, along with the repetition of "before". I do the same type of thing with the lines "That Love has no bounds/When You, my love, are around.". Although I do agree that I should probably change up the punctuation.

yuriiko12345 wrote:"Monsters" in your dreams, might as well be more specific 'cause you're talking about darkness and love thing.

Just trying to play off of the "nightmare" I set up earlier, although I might be able to get a bit more specific here.

Once again, thank you all for your reviews and critiques!