Hey Paula08,
I'm here to answer your summons to review this. Sorry it's so late.
First off I'd like to say that I like how short you're keeping this. From what I gather, this is a poem where you're trying to say, basically, that Lavender is the color and smell of sadness. I'm not completely sure about that. I think what you do well is work within the boundaries you provide yourself, and you seem to have provided yourself with a lot of them.
I'm going to provide you with a link to some resources on the site where you might be able to find out more information about how to format poetry for the current publishing center. There are a couple different methods, including yours, but I think you might want to know about it just to ensure you're picking the method you want and not the one you're stuck with. Here's the article I wrote up about formatting poetry. Monster also wrote up a couple articles and those are linked at the bottom if mine doesn't make sense. How to Format Poetry
Onto the review. Personally, I agree with Arkhaion about the poem. You're using a lot of words that seem to have the wrong connotation to match with the situation. To show you what I mean, I'm going to do a paraphrase of your poem line by line to show you how I interpret what you said in that line. I'm putting it in a spoiler so it's easy to identify and you can hide it when you're done to make this a little shorter.
Doing this for most poems is a bit clearer. The reason this one is so tricky is because the words you're using don't really connect to one another, so taking it line by line like this makes the whole thing sort of unravel because none of it is really saying that much.
Don't get me wrong, I think you've got a really good subject. I just think you went about it a little awkwardly and ended up without really saying what you wanted to say. Instead of trying to be poetic about what you're trying to say, just talk to us. Tell us what's going on, and what you want to say. We all understand our language, and that language is rich with connotations and denotations which can expand our understanding of each other and the world around us. If you're trying to say that Lavender is the color of storms, then go into that depth and detail to explore that idea, develop it through your poem and share with us how you got there. Right now, the poem is unconvincing.
Some of the words you're using such as "dearth" seem to be there for the single purpose of confusing the reader. As a writer, we have to be able to come back to our work and explore meaning through it too, so I'm familiar with running into times when you really want to sound good rather than be good with meaning. I think the biggest thing that helped me understand the difference was something I read once in an interview by Robert Frost. He said he got a lot of poetry sent to him by young poets, and one of the tried and true ways to tell if a poem was good or not was to look at the rhymes, since they always come in pairs, and see which one is better. With this poem, I would say "breath" and "collage" are probably the two words you started out with, especially considering "dearth" isn't pronounced like "breath" but "death" is, which means you misspelled it. Having a revolting mirage just doesn't make much sense, while an astounding collage does, so that is the dominant word. In the second stanza we have "Shade" and I would say "Glare" because you were probably going for laid instead of lad which means you had to tack on there when you realized it was supposed to be a different rhyme, and leaves glare as the dominant rhyme even if it wasn't written first potentially.
Overall, being able to pick apart your rhymes like that is a problem. If you have a good poem with good rhymes, you can't do that. Rhyming and putting meaning together is a very difficult thing to do. I would suggest you pick which one you want to work on first.
Either you can work on learning how to rhyme better, and get a larger vocabulary from exploring connotations of words you pick to rhyme, or you can work on getting a clearer meaning through your poems. They are both going to be something potentially necessary and beneficial in the end, but right now, I'd say your meaning suffers more than your rhymes, so I would suggest you switch to alliteration and internal rhyme rather than putting up the barrier of end rhyme for every poem you write, and work in making a clear poem that really reaches into your own gut and drags out your innards when you write it and read it back. Those are going to be the emotional ones that really hit home with the readers too. "If it doesn't shock the writer, it doesn't shock the reader" after all, so try to make yourself feel the emotions you're putting into the poem, even if it's not a real thing that happened. That will improve your clarity and meaning as you work on developing rhyme later.
If you have any questions or want some more advice, feel free to hit me up. I'd love to write in a titan pad with you some time and see how that goes.
Aley
Points: 1883
Reviews: 806
Donate