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125,008 Literary Works • 672,836 Reviews
Hi there, Pencil. While I don't have much to point out, there are these few things.
Very nice rhyme!
Nice, but way doesn't quite agree, grammatically speaking, with lay. These lines could just as easily read, "Hope is the light that gets us by/Even in spots where shadows lie".
See where you've accidentally left out some letters? And there you have it- my two cents. This is a good poem and can be made outstanding with a few tweaks.
-fire
Thanks fire! Yeah, about all of the typos, my computer was being stupid. Will fix it soon.
Hello Pencil2paper, a few things here:
I like that you are giving us images. That is nice, but are they a little bit too cliched of images. Stars and candles are used a lot, so maybe you could make us think outside the box a little.
Again these ideas are kind of tired. There is nothing new to my mind. I can gloss over these lines and it wouldn't matter.
You are starting to give us some good and new images, though you could still veer away from things that are too common. The lantern is probably my favorite part. Your last two lines are a little stretched in terms of meter.
Interesting, and I think you are starting to think outside of the box here. You could use more of this. I think if you try to experiment with more lines like these, you'll find your poem to be more thought-provoking.
Avoiding cliches like the plague
Above is that good ol' advice (put in ironic terms), but it is very true. By using images that have been used a billion times, you are saying nothing new, which creates boredom. Using cutesy things like the sun and moon and stars just seems forced and uninteresting. Good poetry lets us see things (even as abstract as hope) in a different light. It reveals things to us that we didn't see before, and the best way to do that is to break from the everyday comfort and drag us into areas that are unfamiliar. I hope you will go that route with this poem because you could make something really nice out of this.
Beautiful.
Thank you!
Hi there.
This is my honest opinion. It's filled with good intentions.
I enjoy your premise. Hope is a complex thing, and many poems have been written about it. It is this that makes this poem even more difficult to write about.
If you write about something like hope, that has been written about many times before, you need to make it stand out.
While your symbols and light sources are easily related to (everyone knows what the sun is, etc.), perhaps come up with some that aren't as conventional as these to make your poem stand out.
You have the sun and the stars. You have electricity. Good. But general. Get more specific. Think of people and how light is hope to them. For example, a desk lamp. I'm in college. I use my desk lamp a lot. It's so I can study. My desk lamp can give me hope for a better future because I am learning by its light.
That might seem weird, but you're going to remember that metaphor, right?
That's what I'm talking about. Make your poem stand out from the rest with more specific similes than what you've got right now.
(there's a typo in the last line of the third to last stanza (if the last line there is part of the poem))
The last line: "This is the juxtaposition of hope." should be omitted. It doesn't work (unless you just put it there. Then make it more clear that it's not part of the poem).
You've got potential. Keep writing.
I agree completely, and the whole desklamp thing isn't wierd at all. As far as the last line, it wasn't supposed to really be part of the poem, just sort of an afterword. Thanks magpie!