To a Fellow Lady Knight

Hey there Megsug! Wolf here to review on behalf of the May Poetry Exchange.

I love this poem. It's meaning, it just so wonderful. You could look at it in a more literal way, it's about all the princesses in fairytales. Or you could look at it as a more metaphorical poem, and it's about all women. I particularly like thinking about it as the later, due to the fact that I think it makes a wonderful metaphor. It shows that people will pretend to be things they aren't, but don't let that get you down, because if you wait long enough then someone worth your while will come. I just think that's beautiful.

One thing I do find is that this doesn't seem to flow very well. I don't know if that was intentional or not. But even if it was, I think the poems image and metaphor would come across a lot clearer if it flowed more.
This could be done by using assonance (aka repeating the same vowel(s) again and again throughout a sentence/stanza/section of writing). Or by moving your line breaks. For example...

Your mistake was seeing through
the aluminum he calls armor
and the Shetland he thinks
is a Clydesdale.
It was funny to see him parade about,
a pigeon pretend to be a peacock.

Or

Your mistake
was seeing through
the aluminum
he calls armor
and the Shetland
he thinks is
a Clydesdale.
It was funny
to see him
parade about,
a pigeon pretend
to be a peacock.

It's the exact same words, but I moved the line breaks so that the lines where more even. The two still have a very different feel due to the length of the lines, but they both flow more than the original.

I thought that "was a kiss that killed the joke." was phrased beautifully! Just gorgeous. You have very good word choice throughout the piece. Although this is my favorite.

One thing I will caution you about is that it's difficult to see how the second stanza ties into the poem. I can see that what you mean is to call the man you were talking about in the first stanza a jester. But that was only after a little thought, and I'm afraid that some people might not get it.
And once someone understands how it ties in, it doesn't seem very important. You just called him a pigeon pretending to be a peacock, so why go and call in a jester pretending to be prince charming? I think it's a very nice stanza, and I don't want you to go and get rid of it or anything like that. But I do think its meaning/wording could us a little playing with.
In most poems I probably wouldn't have bothered mention something like this. But your other stanzas are just so powerful and precise and meaningful, this one kind of sticks out in comparison. (so the fact that I'm bringing this up at all is actually a compliment)

I really like the third stanza. The way that it, in a way, portrays how most "lady knights" want to find their knight. They want to find him so much that they're willing to pretend that someone else is him.
Wonderful stanza, wonderful.

And then we come to the end. A very lovely end at that. The only thing I could say about it really isn't that important. I think that "or cause" would be better as "and cause." Because it kind of pulls things together. The knight and a cause. I guess in some ways you could argue that she doesn't need a knight to have a cause, so the two shouldn't be tied together. But so many women want both, that I think it is more touching to say this character you've been talking to all along will find both at the same time. So it goes either way, although I prefer it with "and."

Amazing poem Meg. I love it. And that ending, breathtaking. Wonderful work here.
Keep writing!

~WW

DANG GURL THIS IS GOOD

Hi! I'm here to review for the poetry exchange!

Sometimes, the shortness of your lines kind of made the poem feel a bit choppy. Some of the lines work really well when they're short, but some of them make me cut off the voice in my head because my eyes have to jump down to the next line so quickly. Lines I would combine: 2&3, 10&11, 13&14, 15&16. If you add the next line on to the end of the former line, I think the rhythm of the poem would improve.

I like how the last two stanzas are both telling the lady knight not to do something, but I think that the opposite would help this poem. Telling a lady knight to be passive is not something I would do, for fear of sword in face syndrome, so perhaps you can find a way around the "don't"s. The last stanza, especially, struck me as odd because that's more of a "damsel in distress" type thing to do rather than a lady knight thing to do.

Grammatically, the first stanza is structured in a way that makes the lady knight telling the other one to see through the horse. Add a second verb to that sentence so we don't have an invisible mount going about.

a pigeon pretend to be a peacock.

Hi megsug! Another Lady Knight, Knight Nite, here to rescue your fair poem awaiting an Exchange!

Okay, that was silly and probably made no sense, but here goes.

Overall, I think this is a lovely piece. It's not exactly an uncommon theme(I reviewed something with a similar premise over Review Day), but the way you write it makes it feel fresh. I also think you did a lot of nice things with the sound work, such as the p alliteration in the first stanza and the "flimsy mockery and mock humility.

First stanza: I second Audy about the "seeing through" part. Otherwise this is lovely.

Second stanza: It doesn't quite make sense to me as written. The thought...is a kiss? I may be a poet, but I'm still a little confused. I'm thinking "the joke" is what the speaker sees, and "the kiss" is what the subject honestly feels. I think it might be smoother as something like.

Seeing you kiss him
as if this jester could be a prince charming
killed the joke.
(alternatively, I stopped laughing
or Made me stop laughing
or It stopped being so funny)

The third stanza: I was going to critique the choice to end on weak words (is, and) but it works with describing the shield as weak. The stanza also kind of looks like a shield if you look at the first line and the last two.

Fourth stanza: Another quibble: the "sleep" part makes me think of Snow White, which is a little too passive for a Lady Knight, don't you think? I get what you're saying here (that she shouldn't waste time or energy on this man), but I think it could be less passive-sounding. Also I don't like the repetition of "for".

Suggestions:

Climb back into your tower
and save your energy
for a knight
or cause
worth fighting for.

Or, to remove a "for":

and save your energy.
Seek a knight
or cause
worth fighting for.

Might also be cool to invert "cause" and "knight", making the latter seem less important.

Overall, I really liked this. Feel free to bug me with questions or whatever. This is my first exchange so I'm not sure I did it right. And as always, keep writing!

Hey Meg!

So, we've got a speaker (a lady knight!) addressing her fellow, thus, another lady knight. The first stanza states that the Lady's mistake comes from seeing through a shoddy disguise - this whole poem actually gave me a "Don Quixote" vibe, so I imagine that the "he" in this poem is very much a character like Don Quixote xDD Thus, in that sense, it kind of makes sense that the speaker would be amused by him and not wanting the "show" to stop. As a reader taking a moment's thought, I might surmise that if you see Don Quixote as a hero - as a romantic with his flaws in not being able to see practicality, but still someone who dreams big and is happy and brings joy to others, then in that sense, it makes double-sense what the speaker is saying in that first stanza. However, I'm not quite sure what the intentions are, because the rest of the poem seems disconnected from this idea.

In the second stanza for example, we have "a kiss that killed the joke", so I can definitely see the contrast of kiss/joke. A kiss is oftentimes a serious, heartfelt thing, and if we have a man who is joking around and jestering, and we kiss him all seriously, it would be like a balloon deflating, no? At least as far as the jokes go! So, I can sort of wrap my head around the comparison of Jester as a Prince to kiss as a joke. We also get that the speaker finds this comparison funny, and we get a sense of her tone with "pigeon pretend to be a peacock", but what's unclear or what doesn't match up is this conversation between the two Lady Knights, where we are clear with how the speaker feels about this character, but we're not clear as to how the "Fellow Lady Knight" feels. We only know "your mistake was seeing through the aluminum" --- but when someone sees "through" something, they see the truth, they see beyond "airs" so it is to my understanding that both Lady Knights agree with one another, they both see the "jester" putting airs as "prince charming".

So, the third stanza contradicts this, though? It seems as though the speaker is arguing with the Lady Knight because "Don't think you can hold up" seems to imply that the "Fellow Lady Knight" whom the speaker is addressing, seems to be encouraging the jester's behavior.

The end stanza supports the idea in the third stanza and seems to sum up the morale of this story, not to settle for whichever fool comes along, but to wait and be patient for a man worth your while (or a cause worth your while, the feminist in me likes this inclusion).

So yeah, I'd say fix up the wording there in the first stanza. Instead of "seeing through" maybe NOT seeing through, or "Your mistake was being blinded by...!"

I hope this helps,
~ as always, Audy

Hey Weymouth here to review

This is good, I like many of the word choices and I also think that the irregular stanza length fir the rhythm very well. I like how you start of the poem with the words "your mistake", as it begins the idea of having someone to blame right off the starting line. However, there are a few things in here that could be fixed, such as "a pigeon pretend to be a peacock." which I think should be "a pigeon pretending to be a peacock." i also am not sure about the last stanza as a whole, but especially the line "sleep," i think you could extend that a little and make the second line a bit shorter.

All in all, really great, and I hope you write more soon