Sonnet of a Failed Mother

Sonnet of a Failed Mother

She gave birth to her child
Oh loved him she did
Her words were so mild
Feelings were soon rid

She lost her soft emotions
Her hair soon was gray
Lost were her notions
All she did was pray

She drank herself blind
Sold her body and soul
Comfort she didn’t find
Her being took the toll

Time didn’t do her a thing
Funeral bells started to ring

I really, really want people to stop critiquing this, as I known it isn't my strongest work at all

Hullo there!

Reading this, one thing jumped out at me right away--your rhyme scheme. That, for multiple reasons, is something you do not want to happen. The whole purpose of rhyming is to subtly support the flow of a poem--to make it glide along more smoothly, to add a lilt.

Here, though, the rhyme scheme hinders the progression of the poem. See how you have to keep inverting lines to get the last word to rhyme? It just makes reading it awkward, and the poem comes across as unconvincing and amateur. That's a shame, too, because there's always something original and interesting to say about family relationships, and mothers in particular, because of their complex familial roles.

What I'd like you to do, if you have a chance, is to try to rewrite this without any set line length or rhyme scheme. It's incredibly difficult to write a good rhyming poem--most published poets nowadays can't pull it off! So what you should do right now is work on developing your imagery, your word-choice, and your style.

Take, for instance, this stanza:

She lost her soft emotions
Her hair soon was gray
Lost were her notions
All she did was pray

Now, this pretty accurately conveys the fact that the mother has become old, jaded, and has turned to religion. But let's take a closer look, yes? First, the adjectives you use: "soft" and "gray." Relatively common words, yes? And the verbs: "Lost," "was," "Lost," "were," "pray."

What you should try to do is use stronger verbs. Instead of saying that her hair was gray, say that the color (maybe pick one--gold is a color generally associated with youth and purity, so that might work) had seeped from her hair, or had washed out of her hair, or something along those lines. They add more dimension to the actions.

I'm beginning to ramble now, but I hope this has helped a bit. I'm really intrigued by the despair you convey in the woman's situation, and hope you can come up with an equally intriguing vehicle to carry it. ^^

Well, Fandilocks already got most of the nit-picks, but there was one glaring thing that I can't ignore: this isn't a sonnet. It has the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet, but the number of syllables per line is off. I would know; I read too much Shakespeare .

Now, the point of the Shakespearean sonnet in his plays is usually to highlight love of strong emotion; it brings poetry to events that call for poetry, and it makes the lines sound surreal and important. No offence, but when I read this, it was not quite surreal nor important.

You can change that, though, by doing one simple thing: change the line. Shakespearean sonnets are supposed to be in iambic pentameter. Just in case you don't know, "iambic" is a way of saying an entired line where the syllable pattern is unstressed-stressed-unstressed-stressed, repeating throughout the line. "Pentameter" describes a line with ten syllables. So, a true Shakespearean sonnet has the rhyme scheme you currently have, but every single line must be iambic pentameter to be a true sonnet. An example of a iambic pentameter line is thus:

"I looked up to the star-stabbed night of gold."

If you read it, the stresses of the line fall on every other syllable (looked, to, star). Just a note on stresses: the stress rarely falls on words like "the." Those words are simply not important enough to be stressed.

So yea, you learned something today! I'm sorry if I didn't help much as far as the poem goes...it's a great idea, but if you want it to be a sonnet, it has to be iambic pentameter. The thing with iambic pentameter is that it's hard to write; the impulse is to write iambic tetrameter (which has only 8 syllables per line). But, once you start writing a lot of pentameter (or read a lot of Shakespeare ), it becomes more natural; in fact, the pentameter was designed to be like a normal sentence or phrase in length. Then again, the English language has condensed a lot sense then .

Keep writing! Sorry for my generally unhelpful rant. But, hopefully you learned something. PM me if you have any questions!

This poem was pretty powerful. I got a little bored towards the middle, and i had to think about the rhyming for a minute on a couple of them, but other than that it was a pretty good poem. And like elephantwalrus said, it isn't really a sonnet. (well, it didn't really seem like it to me.) But i just think that you should keep writing poems because you have a way of making it powerful in a way that is kinda hard to explain. but good job.