Young Writers Society

This is a somewhat brief poem, but I still think you were able to capture a lot of emotion in it. That being said, I think you need to expand more on it, maybe on the lion and eagle parts. Breaking it into stanzas would also help.
I do like the repetitiveness of it, but if the in between lines had a bit more substance, I think I'd like the repetitiveness more; when half the poem is repeating words, it gets a little much. Besides that, it's a nice poem. I hope this review helped. Happy Memorial Day weekend!!!
-alliyah

Hmm, hey Zhia!

Was this for an assignment? Did you have a form you had to stick to or somethin' like that?

I'm going to review it as if it's just a standalone poem that you were lookin' to work toward being published or something similar, okay, so take my suggestions from that place.

The first thing I'd wonder about would be what you wanted people to feel when they read this poem. What did you want them to take away into their hearts after they read the last line? What did you want them to remember days later? Or what did you want them to realize? A good poem, I think, changes something in us, and when it does, we often remember that change so we can remember that poem. It's way harder to do with poems than with stories because we spend less time w/ a poem, so we might feel very intensely changed for a small moment, but it seems easier to forget.

So we have to fight especially hard.

Write down, somewhere on a notepad or something, what you wanted people to feel from this poem.

And then look at this poem again. What words support the feeling you were trying to evoke?

I'm going to bet that not very many of them do. A lot of the words in this poem are either really vague or just filler/function words. We have the image of a lion or an eagle in various poses, but those are very very static images that, without knowledge of what they're supposed to "mean", give us very little to feel, know what I mean? haha

The good thing is you have STRONG vague words to build up a general emotion, and you now just need to inject some vivid imagery, or a sense of movement/narration through the poem to really capture your readers.

I hope these thoughts are helpful to you.
If you have any questions or comments, please PM me or reply to this review.

Good luck and keep writing!

Hannah

Hey Zhia,

I've not met you before, welcome to YWS! I'm just going to dig right into this, overall I really like the choice of title that you have here. As I was reading, I couldn't help but think this had more of a musical/lyrical feel to it, with the repetitions that acted almost like a musical refrain, no?

I like the idea of the spartan shield, particularly as a symbol to victory that prescribes its people as tough protectors and emphasizes that aspect, rather than the warrior/conquerors, though I'm sure the Spartans were both historically! The idea was only briefly touched upon for the first few lines in the beginning and after that I did think that it was kind of bland though, in the sense that we get that there is a lion and an eagle that is symbolized on the shield, but we don't really get any people or emotion in this. As a suggestion, there could've been a seen of a battle, or some images of the Spartan people protecting their homelands. Or even just writing from the point of view of the shield, where you have the clashing and blood and the strain on the metal/wood as it confronts all of that, might've been interesting to explore either in revisions or in future poems!

I didn't mind the repetition of the glory, riches, family bit - as that is somehow to be expected in a piece like this, but with the "That one small symbol" repetition, it really seems vague to me. No one really knows what symbol it is referring to, is it the lion or the eagle, or is it the spartan symbol, or is it something else entirely? I'm not so sure. Perhaps that could be cleared up a bit?

Anyway, those were just some of my brief thoughts on this. Let me know if you have any questions about this review, or if you wish to chat this one up sometime! I hope this helps.

~ as always, Audy