I love this poem so much. You have a story here (which a lot of modern ballads are a bit lacking in in favor of adhering to the conventions of the form), and it's a solid one. I really enjoyed reading this, and I felt that the ending was just perfect, being happy but not sappy.
With that said, there were a few lines that the rhythm tripped up in. This line in particular stook out like a sudden reef the first time I read through:
As he one day did swoop to see
The fix for this one s pretty quick, simply move "he" to after "one day", and I'm honestly puzzled why you went with this structure rather than the more conventional one because the conventional one works just fine when it comes to the flow.
As it stands, the current structure requires the reader to stress "he" when the word is not typically emphasized when next to a word like "one", and so it feels rather unnatural to make it read so.
Looked up and spoke one word
My quibble with this line is that immediately after, she speaks even more words, so while "one word" works wonderfully from a rhythmic standpoint, it doesn't make much sense in the flow of events.
I think, considering you have the crow whispering back in reply, going with "hard-heard" would make more sense since it would tie into the softer volume of the crow's reply.
“I’ve been trapped below the sea
This is another line where I feel the rhythm could be tweaked by swapping "I've been" from the start to the end of it.
But all this I can bear, my love
I also feel a different conjunction would be better than "but" since, as far as conjunctions go, "but" tends to get stressed when it's used, which throws off the intended stress of "all". "Yet" would work, as would "though", and help more naturally shift the stress onto "all" where it belongs.
Something else I noticed as I was reading through a second time was that your punctuation and capitalization were quite inconsistent, particularly with regards to quotation marks. I would recommend sticking to prose conventions rather than having them at the start and/or end of every line as it makes keeping track of which of the characters is speaking easier.
Points: 72525
Reviews: 1220
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