Young Writers Society

hi there,
firstly welcome!
Secondly good job!
This is not a bad poem and it really paints a great picture about the garden.

Your grammar and spelling is fine but the use of all those ellipses isn't the best. Once you have used one or two the rest just become pointless. A lot of the times you don't need them in there and it would work just as well without them, especially the ones on the end of the lines.

Okay the last line

your mind and soul
will be at peace...for the garden is peace.

Hi there!

Spelling and grammar:

You have 'i' in the first line, then you have 'I' in the rest. I think you might have meant them all to be capitalised.

'The garden you have been longing
for so long.'

You are missing a 'for'. You long FOR something, FOR so long—

The garden you have been longing for
for so long.

Apart from that, you just repeated 'long' in 'longing' and 'long' itself. Consider rephrasing.

You also wrote Chaotic, then chaos. Choose one. And it is not a good idea to recycle a word like that too much—it detracts attention from the entire poem.

Poeticism:

You have one rhyme, which really grates. You can't just throw in a rhyme—there is a reason for everything in poetry. You just made 'true' and 'you' jump out and poke the reader in the eye. They don't have any more right to do that than many of your other words, like 'tranquil' or 'pure'. I would delete the rhyme.

You seem to hug the ellipses. They are overused in this poem. Try a dash, semicolon, or some other punctuation mark to vary the charm a bit.

Word choice:

Don't stick to the sort of clichéd 'tranquil', 'pure', you-know-the-ones words. Find a new way of expressing it! Do something memorable with the language!

Imagery:

'When i saw your memories, your
dreams, your soul...I saw a garden.'

This was good. Simple and visual. (Though I would have put in a dash instead of ellipsis.) But then you went on to ramble about the garden with largely useless words and expressions. Perhaps get in a different angle. Speak of (not roses) ivy, cacti, ficus, tulips, and remember the language of flowers! A posy can contain a world of meaning. Yarrow is war, bamboo is longevity, cornflowers are delicacy. Tell a story in plants—you started with a garden, now tell us more about it! Show us rusty arches clutched by canary creepers, show us the vegetable patch choked in plantain. That says as much as calling it 'pure yet tainted'.

Originality:

You have a good starting idea, very good. But you have to build on it. You are using overexercised words. Take (for example) 'obsequious' for a walk, instead of 'servile'. But beware of something like 'oleaginous', which has grown so fat that its legs can hardly support it anymore.

Overall:

I want more out of this topic. You started off well, but you didn't exploit the possibilities of your image. It still needs work to grasp my attention.

Nice poem. I like the metaphor. I'm just not sure the point where you break the lines makes complete sense in the first stanza and in the second stanza, you use a lot of adjectives like beautiful, tranquil, chaotic, pure, and tainted. They're nice words, but they're not that descriptive and I can't quite get an image in my head which is what you want to happen. Finally, the second-to-last line in the second-to-last stanza doesn't make the most complete grammatical sense. I believe an 'of' is missing. Again, I love the metaphor and I really like the poem. There's a lovely voice to the words that I love. Hope this review helps and if you have any questions you can pm me. Welcome to YWS!
-tgirly