Fight For Sunlight

Hello.

Kudos on attempting a structured poem. Rhyming is extraordinarily difficult and having rhymes that flow this well is difficult to pull off.

However, I still noticed the rhyme once you changed your syntax to accommodate it. "Pitch dark down here" is starkly different from the previous four lines, which are much more poetic and contain more poetic devices. That line is blunt, getting the meaning across in an overly jarring way that is at odds with the beauty of many other lines. Once I read that, I started noticing the rhyming, which isn't what you want for a structured poem.

The message is a nice one and I find it much more subtle than the average message poem. You don't hold our hands much about what you're actually referring to, letting us fill in the meaning. That, for me, is a critical aspect of poetry because while it is meant to describe a feeling, it is also meant to be genetic enough we can add our own meaning.

I would try to be less blunt, actually, and keep the poetic language you have at the beginning and in the middle. When you use that language, you capture an image much more strongly than last four lines in your first stanza in particular. Those, to me, are the weakest in the poem. They might set up everything, but they are so straightforward in a poem that is otherwise nearly pure metaphor. Keep to the metaphorical throughout.

Overall, this is a pretty solid poem. The rhyming is mostly subtle and the language is very pretty. Just make the meaning a little less obvious and this'll be pure magic.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

~Rosey

Hi there! I'm Elinor, and I'm here to give you a review.

So I thought that this was a really interesting idea for a poem, and I definitely think that there is a lot that you can do with this going forward. I especially like the use of a tree as a metaphor for the larger theme.

But what I think gets you in this draft is the adherence the the rhyme scheme. It feels forced and parts and makes this seem juvenile, and you'll have more freedom to develop your voice and have a smooth rhythm. If you read this aloud to yourself, you'll also notice that the structure is a bit off, and the different amount of syllables makes it clunky.

I would also delete the dots in between each stanza, because it just makes it look messy.

Because of these structural problems I couldn't focus on much on the story you were trying to tell, but as I said, it's a good start.

Best of luck! I hope I've given you good things to think about.