Note: I wrote this a while back and I need some help to better it. Thank you to anyone who leaves a review.
remember the cold nights
you sat upon your bed, shaking
thinking there was some way out
but you're trapped
your door to your room is locked
and your windows are too
you're trapped in what they say is your mind
they say it'll urge you and laugh in your ear
whispering the song of death
you try to cover your ears,
try to sleep at night,
but the voices only get louder
and the colder your room will get
you'll shiver and fight
trying your very hardest to escape,
to be happy,
but you can't escape.
nobody can.
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
140,224 Literary Works • 673,047 Reviews
Heya, Rin! Casanova here to do a review for you! Anyway, I'll be breaking this up into sections so I hope you don't mind. To the review!
Aye, here I have a couple of things to talk about. The first thing is narration. You're doing the listing again, giving us the details in,"yeah, you should be this and you should be that." And it honestly takes away from the poem. The next thing is the formatting. There's not stanza, there's no real shape to it. I would suggest playing around with white space, meaning less of it. To do that you just press shift+ enter- it makes the lines closer together. Anyway, onward.
Here I find you have your stronger images. The song of death would def be something I would suggest going into more detail about, though, because that's an interesting prospect at least to me. It's what really caught my eye whenever I read through this poem, and Id like to hear more about that. At the moment it's a side image, but I could see it going a bit farther than that. Anyway, onward.
Here I find that you have the same issues as before, with the narration and everything. I would suggest trying to tell your story a bit more through images instead of narration, as it really takes a bit away from the poem.
Anyway, that's all I have to say on this one and I hope it helped.
Keep on doing what you're doing and keep on keeping on.
Love, Matt
Hey there! clogs here to review!
This is kind of weird, because you start off in past tense, but quickly switch to present tense. See, this part
is all in past tense. But the rest of the poem after that is in present tense. I think you should pick one and stick with it. Saying "remember" at the beginning kind of makes it necessary to make the rest in past tense, but if you removed that word, then it would make sense to change the beginning to present tense. However, I kind of like the past tense. The fact that the reader is being asked to "remember" the events of the poem makes it pretty interesting. It's up to you how to fix that, but it does need to be fixed.
I feel like these lines kind of overuse the word "your". It becomes tiresome to read. I think you could definitely change a few of these to "the". For instance, "the door to your room" sounds so much more natural. You can also say "and so are the windows" to remove the "your" in the third line.I think that changing those things will fix that problem.
Sometimes the punctuation could use some work. I get the sense that you're attempting to punctuate this as you would prose, but not quite getting there. For instance,
Without the line breaks, it would read like this:
There needs to be another comma after "shaking" to make this flow naturally. I feel like that's what you were trying to do in your poem. Add punctuation to flow with the reader's internal voice. Even the ends of lines don't excuse you from adding punctuation.
This also just kinda reads as a run-on sentence. Maybe try varying your punctuation a bit and add more than commas. Unless, of course, it was a stylistic choice. Then carry on.
I feel like you could have dug a lot deeper with the imagery here. Right now, it's just not really grabbing me. The images are somewhat generic: cold nights, shaking, locked room, etc. I feel like I've heard this somewhere before. Try being more descriptive to create a solid image in the reader's mind, and more importantly, emotion. I should be able to feel the terror of the person who is unable to sleep, and right now I don't really feel that. For instance instead of telling us that the room is cold, tell us how it freezes your bones and makes you curl up in a ball, trying desperately to find warmth within yourself but failing. I'll leave you with an article on imagery from our very own YWS Knowledge Base to help you, since it explains it a million times better than I ever could.
Imagery
Some of your wording is a little weird. For instance, in the first line, the reader is asked to "remember" something, but it never really amounts to anything. (Which, by the way, is a reason to change the poem to past tense, so that maybe now it's revealed that the person in the poem doesn't have to deal with this anymore. I like that, because it gives it room for progression instead of just description.) Also, this line:
feels out of place to me, because it's in future tense. To me, it implies that something will happen that will make the room colder. I'd change it to something like, "and the room gets even colder".
Overall, I think this is a pretty solid poem, but there's nothing that really makes it stand out. I think with some TLC, it could be really amazing!
Thanks for sharing this with us, and never stop writing!
Hello! Tigerlilly here to review!
This poem is very interesting. I like the structure and lack of punctuation because I feel it gives the poem a bit more character.
One thing I would change about this poem is that at the beginning you start off in first person but end up in second. If I were you, I'd change it to stay 2nd person. For example (and you don't have to change this, it's just a suggestion) you could change the first couple of lines to say:
"do you remember the cold nights
where you sat upon your bed, shaking
thinking there was some way out
only to find you were trapped"
Again, that's just my suggestion and you totally don't have to take my word for it. It's your poem after all, not mine. Anyways, I really enjoyed this poem and I hope to hear more from you. Keep writing, and have a nice day!
Thank you! I appreciate the suggestion because I see what I did. Like I said, I wrote it a while back and needed editing, but I'm incredibly thankful. The lack of punctuation and capitalization is a style choice and I feel it adds to the poem as well. Thank you again for the review!
No problem! I enjoyed reading it!
Wow. That was....very scary! You did a good job with the mood, the feeling, and it really draws the reader in. It certainly did for me! There was only one thing. I don't know if you were attempting to make some of the sentences rhyme, cause I did catch hints of that is some of them, but not frequently. So I'm just confused about that. Other that that, you did a great job!
Aw thank you so much! It means a lot. I wasn't trying to rhyme at all, actually, haha. I was just focusing on structure and mood; nothing more. I'm really glad you liked it
Hey hey!
Raindrop here to give you a fast review!
1.I know the punctuation is something you can choose to do or not to do but still I will leave it here.Let's go on.I prefer starting with a capital letter. (opinion)
i remember the cold nights
i sat upon my bed, shaking
thinking there was some way out
but you're trapped
/suddenly you change the first person
It starts with 'I'
like you are saying it in first person then it changes to something different.It just confused me because you start with your own self and continue talking for someone else.So I cannot tell who are you talking about./
your door to your room is locked
and your windows are too
you're trapped in what they say is your mind
they say it'll urge you and laugh in your ear
whispering the song of death
you try to cover your ears,
try to sleep at night,
but the voices only get louder
and the colder your room will get
you'll shiver and fight
trying your very hardest to escape,
to be happy,
but you can't escape.
nobody can.
I think there is nothing more.The lines are connected.It is fine even without rhyme.Go on!
whoops, just realized i did that. this was a poem from a while back.