The Eternal Dance

The Eternal Dance
By Dragon Rider

Innocence, Forgiveness, gaiety,
Pure, joy, and love
Genuine and natural and light are the pleasing positive 9
Seduction, revenge, reluctance,
Tainted, woe, and hate
Ersatz, and anomalous, and darkness are the inadequate negative 9

Battling to domination, the 2 conflict unfaltingly and unceasingly
The dance perseveres incessantly
The white and black swan
The child and the jezebel
Soon to fall as one

The dancer cavorted across the sky-lit sky
Her dance was blithe—like a child’s
Her dress replete of white feathers
And blond hair twirled into a bun
Azure eyes dancing like gay blue flames

Twirling insanely, ricocheting off the floor, tumbling gracefully

Transformation

The day-sky variancing into blackness
The dancer transposes from a brilliant white
To greyness
To an utter black
Hair spills out an unfasatidious, adumbral brown
Eyes a smoky shady twilight
Her route now tantalizing
. . .
The eternal dance
. . .
Infinity

I was really captured by the title of this piece of poetry, but when i read it, i was really amazed at the extensive vocabulary you used. Maybe I'm just not a good writer but i found reading your poem a little tiresome to read because of the variety of descriptive words you used which i found hard to interpret straight away. Your piece of composition involves great detail, and i love your storyline, i interpreted it as a section from The Swan Lake. I also have a feeling that you love dance and i just have to tell you, that i absolutely love dancing! Anyhow, your poem was beautiful and illustrative, definitely something i would recommend for all the good writers out there to read. Keep up your amazing talent!

I really like the title of this piece of poetry, very good!
Some things I felt you described too much, the usage of long words didn't seem to fit well, but the story line was brilliant and apart from the words I thought it was great, Keep going!
Love,
Evenslily xxx

Dragonrider,

OI! What are you doing? Rip those abstract words out of your poem altogether! What a weak start compared to the rest of your poem!

Innocence, Forgiveness, gaiety,
Pure, joy, and love
Genuine and natural and light are the pleasing positive 9
Seduction, revenge, reluctance,
Tainted, woe, and hate
Ersatz, and anomalous, and darkness are the inadequate negative 9

What is this? Abstraction after abstraction, when you could be using images? xD To be honest, I'm not sure what you're going for here. I'm not sure what you're going for with the pleasing 9 or the negative 9 - all I know is that this reads like a ton of frosting onto the cake - the meat of the issue - which is your next stanzas. Seriously, this doesn't contribute anything. Just a list of words, words, words. No images here. No sound. Rewrite this using images!

Battling to domination, the 2 conflict unfaltingly and unceasingly

The use of the number 2 here is jarring. Remember poetry, not text messages.

The dance perseveres incessantly
The white and black swan
The child and the jezebel
Soon to fall as one

This is why I was being so hard on you before. Why didn't you start with this? This is beautiful! And you're using images quite well here too. The "soon to fall as one" part is a little cliche, but I can almost forgive it.

The dancer cavorted across the sky-lit sky

Sky-lit sky? Like lamp-lit lamps? Or grass-grown grass?

Her dance was blithe—like a child’s
Her dress replete of white feathers
And blond hair twirled into a bun
Azure eyes dancing like gay blue flames

Great again! See! Images! This is what you should be doing

Hair spills out an unfasatidious, adumbral brown
Eyes a smoky shady twilight
Her route now tantalizing

Woah, the word choices here. I had to look them up. It takes a lot for me to do that.

Overall, needs a bit of polishing and work in some places, but I enjoyed it. You certainly made the dance quite tantalizing indeed.

~ As always Audy

I'm going to disagree with Audy here a little bit by saying that I actually liked the abstract words at the beginning.

dragonrider wrote:Innocence, Forgiveness, gaiety,
Pure, joy, and love
Genuine and natural and light are the pleasing positive 9
Seduction, revenge, reluctance,
Tainted, woe, and hate
Ersatz, and anomalous, and darkness are the inadequate negative 9

I love some of the description here but don't overdo it! I also think some of your grammar here is slightly off in terms of comma placing and such. But don't take my word for it, I'm not the best when it comes to laying out my own poetry. What I will say for this is that I think the '9's need to be written as words.

The rest was really nice in terms of imagery and description but try not to get too many 'big-people words' in there. One or two (as long as they create good imagery) is fine, but if you add in too many it can put off the reader.

Overall, great job and keep up the good work! I look forward to reading more of your work!
Icy

I am a little supportive of IcyFlame here. The use of abstract words was brilliant and you do not see much of it in poetry, or is that just me? Anyway, the abstract words in the very first stanza made me slow down and re-read what it said. My guess for me doing that is because I always expected poetry to have a natural rhythm. When I tried to find this poetry's rhythm, I will admit I was quite confused.

But when I read it back to myself, I enjoyed the way you described the battle of the "9's". One thing I would like to point out though, whenever you use 2 or 9, since these are numbers with only one syllable, you are able to write it out. It threw me off a bit when I read all of these great abstract words and then the number two pops up. That is really the only thing I felt I needed to restate, the other grammatical errors are pointed out by the others, so I have no need to be repetitive.

Battling to domination, the 2 conflict unfaltingly and unceasingly
The dance perseveres incessantly
The white and black swan
The child and the jezebel
Soon to fall as one

I particularly enjoyed this verse the most. It keeps stating the different between the two nines over and over again, but it was the wording that is used to show the contradiction that made me want you to continue. However, I would suggest that you put a verse describing the "violent dance" (you could say something else; this is just an example) between the two nines before you put, The dance perseveres incessantly. That is just my personal opinion though. And I think that jezebel should have a capital J, and maybe you should change unfaltingly to unfaltering; it seems to blend a little better in the stanza.

Overall, great poem. I loved the abstract words and descriptions, but do not get carried away with them! Some of them greatly help the imagery and the others...eh, more or less. Good job! Keep writing. :]

I have to agree with Audy here.

Innocence, Forgiveness, gaiety,
Pure, joy, and love
Genuine and natural and light are the pleasing positive 9
Seduction, revenge, reluctance,
Tainted, woe, and hate
Ersatz, and anomalous, and darkness are the inadequate negative 9

This, in my opinion ruined the rest of the poem. What a weak start to such a beautiful poem! It didn't give me any visual aids, just a jumble of words and emotions all not making real sense. If you were aiming to add effect, you didn't succeed by using this strategy. I'd try to give more visuals than raw emotions next time.

There isn't much else to say. It's just caught me completely off-guard and I'm afraid I've just left you with nothing to learn from. For that I'm sorry, but I just can't comment anymore.

Thanks for your opinions you guys. To clear some of the confusion (well, true I could/should have cleared some of it up), what I was trying to do in the first stanza was to describe the differences between the two so you guys can "get" the dance. Like gaiety (or gay--joyous) to describe the carefree lightness and "fun" of the dance and then describing the "darkness" of the dance with those other words. Just light and darkness basically. And the rest of the poem was actually "describing" the "eternal dance." Thanks though!
Dragon Rider