Hi DoubleRiders, here to review another one of your poems for Review Day.
SO I don't mind the formal language for a poem/prayer like this - as this is how some people are most comfortable praying anyways. It's a bit difficult to understand as an average reader, and I don't really know what the word "oblation" means - but overall it's fine.
You use mostly imagery that is fairly familiar with Christian audiences - darkness vs lightness, heavens, calvary, oceans - I think you could push yourself to do a few that are a bit more "out of the box" or maybe use some of the old images in new ways. Because without something new or something that grabs the audience emotionally, it's more of a prayer than poetry. An eloquent prayer itself is fine, more than fine, it's beautiful - but not quite poetry if that makes sense.
The main message I'm getting is that the speaker is trying to come to terms with someone's earthly death and is trying to find hope and comfort from looking at the cross and the hope of eternal life.
Some inconsistencies: In one place you capitalized "eternal" and then uncapitalized it elsewhere - I know they're used in different senses, but not all readers will catch that, and might get hung up on the inconsistency.
One main area where you could work a bit on is
Line length consistency
this poem feels a bit all over the place for line length, and that can hurt the flow when you've already got a nice rhyme scheme going on.
Extended metaphors
Some your extended metaphor language specifically the lines using 'hearts' doesn't quite make sense -> try visualizing each line (not each sentence, but each line) and see what happens. For instance "On calvary we present into thy hands our heart"
so much going on here that's just taken for granted/logical steps are being skipped - > is the speaker on calvary presenting their heart? are only the hands on calvary? why would they hand a heart to someone who has their hands nailed to a cross so they can't recieve it.
You see what I mean? Just go through following each line, and then maybe each image, and see if you can clean up the continuity a bit more. I think that'll especially help readers who maybe aren't as familiar with these traditional Christian images.
I hope you keep up the religious poetry! Looking forward to your next poem! Feel free to let me know if you have any questions about my review.
~alliyah
Points: 144550
Reviews: 1227
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