Young Writers Society

Hey Cole,

So I think most of this poem is really good. I like how you keep the tone of mystery throughout it and really explore, or try to explore, the specific. I like that this is a story that's specific enough to identify characters and plot, but not specific enough to make it unrelatable.

I only have a few things to say really. The main one is a problem with your tense. "I didn't know that gabriel would come to me two years ago beneath the old bridge..." has a time problem with it. Can you see the problem? The problem I'm having is that your speaker didn't know something that happened in the past. How does that make sense? Did the speaker forget? Did they not realize who gabriel was talking about? What's the deal here because it sort of makes the whole stanza moot if he didn't know something they remember happening. We know they remember it because they talked about it, so what's going on?

I think what's going on is you have two points of view here and they're conflicting. You need to change your perspective to just from the past talking about future events rather than talking about what your speaker remembers, from the point of view of the remembered person in the past. It should be time related to how far in the future gabriel comes to the speaker, or have a different subject. You could change the subject to "I didn't know gabriel ment you when he had come to me two years ago beneath the old bridge..." or something like that, but it needs a bit of a fix.

The only other thing I really want to comment on is that you have a couple things in this poem which go over my head, and I'd like to share those with you so you can decide if you want to change the words or just leave htem and have people look it up. "Marstellar" is one, the description of "eucharist" and it took me a minute to pick up on "lillied" but I also have a headache, so take it form a tired person's perspective.

Overall, good poem, but watch that "two years ago" bit and consider changing it.

Hi! I'm here to give you a review.

I would like to start off by saying that this poem is absolutely brilliant. It was greatly written and also the emotions where brought out perfectly with the good imagery you used. My personal favorite line was : I didn't know that I would get to thumb away / the dark water on your eyes and face before bed.

Although you didn't use a rhyme scheme and there was no particular rhythm when it came to the lines in the stanza's, it still flowed very well, and this was because you chose the right words to repeat and you also used them in the best places. For example, when you repeated the word 'virgins', it really gave it the right amount of emphasis for the reader to really think about it. In addition, the repetition of 'I didn't know', really emphasized the fact that the persona feels in awe about how things turned out to be.

I do have to ask though, the last two stanza's, did you make them two lined one purpose? I would suggest you go over the structure; maybe as you started the poem with a two lined stanza you should end it with one as well, but make the sixth stanza have three lines instead of two.However, that is not necessary, it is just something that I would have done

Overall, great poem, love the style and tone, I look forward to read more.

~RS