Young Writers Society

Hello there! HBC here for a review!

First, Thank you for the notes at the bottom. Helps me understand the meaning of the poem! This poem really shows how much you like music. And this poem is beautifully written! It expresses that music makes one feel a range of emotions.

Also the grammar in this is great!

Have a wonderful day, and keep on writing!

Heard you were planning on writing a sonnet, this is great!

Hi, Dragon. I thought I'd have a shot at reviewing a bit of your poetry. It's not my usual haunt, but I've had a bit of experience writing sonnets so I thought I could be of help.

It's a sweet little subject for a poem. I like the fact that the language is very ambiguous, because poems should be hazy around the edges and open to interpretation. Most of your lines are somewhere around the ten syllable mark, which is correct form for a sonnet. I also like that it feels fresh and simple - you don't use fancy words just for the sake of using them.

However, there's lots to work on. I am slightly confused that you've called this a sonnet, because it lacks many of the defining features of one. It's got fourteen lines and has the right aesthetic appearance, but it doesn't follow any kind of rhyme scheme aside from the couplet at the end. There are also rhythm problems. I'm not going to get into iambic pentameter in this review, but there are lumpy bits in certain lines that I can address. I'll talk about rhythm in more detail later.

Rhyme, however, is my biggest confusion here. If you're going for a Shakespearean sonnet, the rhyme scheme should be ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. I'll paste a (very well known!) example here to make it clearer:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (A)
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:(B)
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, (A)
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: (B)
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, (C)
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; (D)
And every fair from fair sometime declines, (C)
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd; (D)
But thy eternal summer shall not fade (E)
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; (F)
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, (E)
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st; (F)
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,(G)
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (G)

It is a fruit, which is beared by a tree,

A tree of true desire;

It is a wind, which dances playfully,

What particular subject is this poem on?

It is Music, of course; the world’s universal swan

Hello, DragonNoir.

So I'm enjoying the way you're exploring the different aspects of music, starting from desire to warmth to sadness to memories to new colors. This gives me a rather abstract feel when I read this. After all, to think about it, this is hugely based on metaphors.

A quibble I have is that you're kind of giving away what the poem is about in the end. This could be just me, but I prefer to sit down with a poem and slowly come to interpret it--perhaps differently from what the poet actually wrote it for. One more quibble in the last couplet is that the "world's universal swan" seems to be forcefully placed here--it was jarring and I'd suggest creating a buildup to it.

So I've noticed that in each "part" of the poem, some of the lines begin with the word that ended the previous line. While I like the style and consistency of this, I feel as if the repetition leads to a clunky jump from line to line. Maybe it would help to figure out to let the lines flow well together.

I'm also feeling as though I can't quite sense a thread joining the imagery together. They feel rather disjointed, unable to form a cohesive whole and I'd like to see something that connects them together--though it'd be great to also showcase their differences.

Overall, this is a great first sonnet--and I like the topic too So hope my review helped, and let me know if you have any questions!