As you painfully established, I am no poet. (I'm actually one of those dreaded commercial fiction authors.) But after you bashed me - and a deserved bashing it was - I went through your portfolio and found this, and I have to say: wow.
The technical skill here is obvious: the thing is bloody reversible!
In terms of content, it reminded me a bit of the work of Ernest G. Schachtel, a psychologist. (Of course, that's just my interpretation. I don't know if you're one of those "the reader defines meaning" or "the writer's meaning is objective and absolute" people.)
First stanza, when you say "passing years and days/are silver sounding bells", I felt a pang of nostalgia for memories past, memories that I never seemed to choose but ring in my head nonetheless. And while I despised myself for indulging that nostalgia, indulging those cliched moments we're supposed to cherish, some other aspect of the image of those bells softened the sting. I don't know; the bells seem to shrink into the small tinkly kind you shake between your thumb and forefinger. If they were vindictive brass bells, that might be a different story, but the silver bells work well.
"Returning joys are dreams/and age embraces sleep" - again, sticking with the psychologist this dredged up memories of, as well as my own experience... here's what I think/feel. The first line I've quoted here plays with the previous guilty nostalgia a bit, like when you revisit some aspect of your childhood, maybe visit a place or see a person you haven't seen in years, and it feels like you're 'awake but dreaming' - pardon the dead phrase. You've certainly said it a lot better than I ever could. It's a disconcerting feeling that seems both real and unreal, as if you're both in the past and present. And of course, the age embracing sleep struck a strong impression with me as well: that desire we have - the older we get the stronger it gets - that ache to return to the land of unconsciousness, where the world's needs aren't pressing in on us.
The bygone youth and love bit didn't strike me as quite as strong as the rest of the piece. Not in the first or second stanza. Don't know why. Maybe because I always found the 'youth and love' topic a bitter one personally; I tend to just attach the label of cliche to it, even if it is relevant. It sounds pretty, but I'd say that's where the content of the piece is weakest - still strong, but relatively speaking, weaker.
Moving into the rest of the second stanza, while the first was a bit 'achy' for me, what with that damn nostalgia and all, the second feels... well, liberating. The turn-around is quite genius, both emotionally and technically speaking. This is especially evident in the last two lines compared to the first. In the first, while the poem moved from hope to a more pathetic image of men hiding inside their shells, afraid of the waking world and the future, the last two lines when reversed are obviously reversed in their evocations. The little twist of men of shells to shells of men is clever, considering the poem up until this point has been set to convincing the reader (or at least me) that we are, at times, only shells of men, yet that hope is there to fill us, give us some sort of substance, a substance that transcends the pathetic nostalgia of memories. It is a substance that seems to forgive our perceived cowardice for hiding in our shells. It is a substance that doesn't seem to judge as the world and its imposed values do.
If I'm way off the mark on this one, feel free to upbraid me, but that's what I took from it. Great work, though I still think that middle section (end of first stanza and beginning of second) could use a bit of reworking.
Cheers.
