The Day Imagination Died

On one holy, frozen night
by the dew of morning light
Mankind broke His one delight
and so the wonder died

Suppressing urge religiously
Expressing hate for fancy-free
So Man's peace had come to be
Here imagination died

Wonder, fancy, art and love
fell to reason, truth above
Focus on but what we know
To us the keys of life bestow

Now I lay me down to sleep
'Ere to sense, my soul to keep
Lay your weary head to rest
Sure that knowledge all is best

By logic's brutal hand alone
stop the music, burn the prose
Break the heart, we're not alone
It's no match for reason's bone

All is dead, all is dead
Alleluia Lord, amen
No wanton wish, no holy dreams
All's exactly as it seems

This the day our hatred bred
Where minds are clean and sin is fed
Can you hear the rally cry?
Do you see the end is nigh?

Gone is the painter’s tainted glass
Gone the writer’s lyrical verse
Gone is the pulse of human life
Gone is the love for God above
Gone is all
Amen

hi!

it is a good poem and above all a fresh one. though i thought the message was repeating itself quite some time yet i enjoyed it. and i thought it was a bit too one dimensional at times. yet a good job done, i must say.

keep it up!

-torsa

I swear I could have read this in a text book, and it could say it was written three hundred years ago and was famous as hell. It's splendiferous!

the day
the music
died.

Bye, thanks, tisbe awesome.

I actually haven't read the whole poem yet, but I read the title and I just started laughing. It reminds me of that line from "American Pie," the song. "The day that the music died...Singing bye, bye Ms. Ameican Pie... That'll be the day that I die..." How funny, it probably doesn't even apply, but I thought that I would share.

"I like it, I like it!" I really like this poem, but I have some suggestions that you might want to try out. Hope they help...

1st stanza => Beautiful, very visual. I love the first two lines they give the audience a real sense of forboding and visual effect. This stanza flows very well, but I feel like “wonder” doesn’t fit. I see the problem with replacing it though, it makes sense where it is, but it still feels out of place to me. Maybe try it with “wonderous” or “sensation” instead of wonder, but it is always up to your own opinion if you want to change it.

2nd stanza => “Suppressing” and “religiously” are spelt wrong. In the first two lines, I get what you mean, but they seem forced or even to lose the point of what you are trying to say. Maybe if is it read “Suppressing artful urge religiously” and “Expressing hate for fancy-free creation or something just a little different. Yet even if you reworded like that the voice seems different than in the first stanza. It’s like you changed your voice and went from an omnipresent narrator, which was wonderful in the 1st stanza, but you seem to be included in this stanza. - - I don’t know it’s hard to explain. Let me see if I can show you how it might be more aligned with the 1st stanza.
“Religiously We suppressed the artful urge
Expressing hate for fancy-free
So Man’s peace at last had come to be
That here blessed imagination lived no more”
You might read this and be like, “Okay lady, that’s so not what I want!” But my point was to show you that you can rearrange the wording and keep the meanings you had before. The foundation is there in meaning and format, it just needs to be polished. By the way, if you like what I wrote, first of all, thanks, second of all, use it if you want to. I won’t remember it tomorrow.

3rd stanza => Great meaning and wonderful way to transition into an expletory voice, instead of introducing new items like you were doing in the last two stanzas. However, you might want to change the second line to “fell to reason, truth from above” or “fell to reason, truth upheld” but that is just an opinion option. However, it works the way you have it and I like it either way. The last two lines of the stanza kind of lose the momentum though. I am not sure how to fix these lines, but you may want to be more specific with your meanings and maybe include something to the effect that the focus or hope for knowledge now comes from science instead of imagination. Think about it, mull it over, and come up with various phrasings and see which fit the best.

4th stanza => When you use the first person in this stanza it seems to break apart your distance from the poem and for this poem I don’t think that is actually best. To me, as a reader, having the narrator be aloof and set apart from the issues in the poem, helps me to sense that the narrator disdains them. I feel like he doesn’t want this new “knowledge” to replace “imagination,” but when he is brought into the poem, I feel he is apart of the problem of ignoring the destruction of imagination and that seems like a major switch in the theme of the poem. If it were my poem I think I would try to make this guilt a universal theme, to ecompass all of mankind. Example:
“Now we lay us down to sleep
‘Ere to sense, our souls to keep
Lay your weary head to rest
Sure that knowledge all is best”
It is up to you, but think about what I said. I do think it is a switch in the theme, but maybe that’s what you wanted to do. Remember, it’s your poem and you decide where you want it to take your readers.

5th stanza => The first line is PERFECT! But you lose something in the rest of the stanza. Again the meaning is there, but I think you should rework your phrases to flow better and to line up with the rest of the poem. Maybe try something like:
“By logic's brutal hand alone
Stop the music, burn the prose
Our breaking hearts are not alone
Their ache is no match for reason’s bone”
And possibly think about rephrasing the second line of this stanza, but I am not sure as to how you would want to do that. This stanza is great, you can just feel that this is the point where you are really getting to the meat of the poem, with the emotion and directness.

6th stanza => I like this stanza as it is. The flow is good, even though the lines are short and a bit choppy, but I think that’s what it needs to heighten the sense of action and outrage within the poem. There are just a few technical things I would change. Amen needs to be capitalized and I would add an exclamation point to the end of the first line.

7th stanza => I think that I would switch the first two lines of this stanza to lead into the last couplet better and rephrase them just a bit.
“This day our minds are clean and sin is fed
This the day our hatred is bred”
The last two lines I like a lot. It is a switch in the mood, but a good one and a real rallying point for closing your poem. I would suggest that perhaps you rephrase the last line a bit, with something like, “Do you see, for the end is nigh?” But I’m not sure if that would be an improvement. Play with it and see what you like.

8th stanza => “There is no strife,” seems a little strange here. I think I would give a little bit more imagery. This is an example, do with it what you want:
Gone is the painter’s world of tinted glass
Gone is the songbird’s eerie cadences
Gone is Inspiration’s beating heart, that is life
Gone is the transcending love of God
Gone is all, Amen
If you don’t want to change it that much, then maybe just consider using something like, “There is no song,” instead of “There is no strife.” Also I would switch line 3 and line 4. Life is a phenomenon within this plane of existence, God is beyond, in another plane, so work your way up to the grander scheme with each line.

All in all, I really liked this poem and I think it is one of the best poems I have read in quite a while. I do think you could polish it some, but remember that the ideas and suggestions I gave are just my opinion and don’t think that I didn’t enjoy your work as it is now. Do try to do some more things with it. Have fun with it and see what other great ideas you can come up with. Thanks so much for sharing and keep up the excellent work. If you want me to look over anything else of yours I would be happy to oblige.
-Brooke or BamickAZ

Thanks for the responses! This site is so much better than the other places I'd seen so far online--it doesn't take forever to post, and the people who respond actually have useful comments!

In regards to the "one-dimensional" feel it sometimes holds, I can see that in it.... I've been thinking about various ways that it could go, so if I get any grand ideas on how exactly to expand on this, I probably will.

I'm very humbled to hear it sounds like a poem that could be in a textbook! Haha, though to have been written three hundred years ago is... scary? Funny? Odd? All sorts of things!

It was funny; when I finished writing the poem, American Pie started running through my head. I don't know if the song influenced the poem any, as I didn't think consciously about it until after the poem was done.... But fo' sho', there's a resemblance!

And BamzickAZ, in particular; your comments help very much! Very much appreciated, they are. Not to worry, though you yourself admit to feeling like rambling, it's great to see my poem broken down like that. It's like we're disassembling the thing to put it back together in a more effective form.

And I spelled "suppressing" and "religiously" wrong?! *clutches chest in pain* I made a spelling error, heavens, forgive me!! I can't believe myself for doing such a thing, really. (Just kidding, though it's not often that I get corrected by spelling, haha )

*weakly* Oh, yeah? Well... uh... er... You spelled "spelled" wrong! *fakily sticks out tongue.
By the way, did you know, according to Google, spelt is a "hardy wheat grown mostly in Europe for livestock feed"? Sorry, random digression; thought you'd like to know.

Oh, I'm having too much fun now.

Despite the difficulty in conveying in words what you think can be done differently in the poem, I think I get what you're trying to say.
--And if you're curious, I read it and was like, "Okay, lady, thanks! That puts things into perspective!" (Sadly, I really *did* think "lady"--but that's another story)

Lastly, I find it terribly ironic you too notice that in the final stanza there is meant to be a build-up, haha! I originally intended that, but I realize now that the order of rhyming threw off my original plan.

All in all, the comments are very helpful! It makes me want to tinker with the poem! I'll see what the tweaking does for it.... And if nothing else, I'm going to fix those bloody spelling errors!

~Tarver

You're very comical and you have an energy in your writing voice that is to be envied, but I am more stoical and I know it and since that is where my writing strength partly lies I will not envy you yours. Still, make use of your exuberance, it is very uplifting to your readers (or at least to me). Glad you liked my comments and thanks for commenting on my story, "Sylvin." I'll look for your next post.

Amen to that.