XVI

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XVI

Just
as the gates in the Harrowing were
torn and tossed from their hinges, down
tumbles the tower of hubris, struck
by the hand of a wrathful God.

It takes but a
brush of foudroyant fingers to
send all to ruin. Bystander, builder, and
brethren all shudder, shocked into submission even as
devils run rampant, barred no longer by the great gate
through which the Son led out the captives.

Gone are the days of indifferent kith as languages
splinter like a tree struck by lightning, the ties that
bind sent to smouldering like leaves, still
alive, reluctant to burn, but
burning nonetheless, with
their essence ready fuel
for the wrath-wrought flames.

Change wrings forth new terrors as
kindred are kin no more in tongue, as
the floodgates open and pour out laments
until the waters above the firmament run dry
and Sheol overflows, flooding the world with souls
as the earth is consumed by sin.
Last edited by Kale on Wed Jan 26, 2011 6:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Secretly a Kyllorac, sometimes a Murtle.
There are no chickens in Hyrule.
Princessence: A LMS Project
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This is a very well written "Dies Irae" sort of poem. The chaos that comes with the opening of the gates of hell is well described, the imagery vivid, which makes this poem quite enjoyable. No errors to my eyes.
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Kyllorac -

There's a good reason why I haven't reviewed this - you might call it somewhat irrational - but I prefer to review things where I can find at least one good thing to say.

Here, I can't.

This poem does not interest me in the slightest. Partly because all the drama is utterly predictable - hence boring - and partly because there is no discernible character to the piece. Nothing to connect with. Nothing to tell my why I should care. And it's ridiculously overboard in its drama, too - not just with your word choice, but with the archaic phrasing, which Gal already told you off for. I don't care if you think like that; what matters is whether it (a) has any purpose other than pretentious intelligence and (b) that it distances a modern reader from the text in the worst possible way: pompousness.

The chaos is predictable chaos in terms of word choice - torn, tossed, struck, wrathful, ruin, shudder, shock etc etc etc - and that defeats the whole purpose of chaos - the unpredictability of it. If your imagery is not new, then you're not going to grab the reader - you know this. The biggest joke in the writing is the orderliness/unoriginality of the words disguised sloppily as madness.

And any poem should have something fresh to tell, something cathartic for the reader as well. I read this to the end and wonder what the point was. What am I supposed to gain from reading it? Aesthetic pleasure? I hardly think so. Intellectual insight? If there is any, I missed it entirely since your words disinterested me to the extent where I was unable to linger on them much at all. Emotional satsifaction? What emotion - other than madness, which one might argue is as much intellectual as emotional anyway (and madness, in its very incomprehensibility, is distancing)? 'Earth is consumed by sin'...so what? Why does it matter, on an individual level. Stop talking about societies and the macroscopic if you can't link it down with the most basic level of our existence - the individual human nature.

At the end of the day, this was a load of words on paper and there is some consolation in the fact that you can, quite easily, toss it out.

Navita



One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex