Petals

Hello FarDusk! I always find it cool when people write fantasy-themed poetry, so I thought I'd drop by to leave a review.

My first impression was that this poem seemed mysterious, with a kind of ethereal setting and atmosphere. My interpretation is that in this setting, the Weave controls life or fate, and each individual life is a "node" on a woven fabric. The third and fourth stanzas mention a "garden" where similarly, individuals' lives are 'stored' as plants.

The first two stanzas seem to emphasise the fragility of life. Lives are "carried and pulled", suggesting a lack of individual agency, and when the threads grow thin they are "cut" by the Weave. Ending the stanza with that line has a sense of abruptness, portraying the unpredictability of life in the control of this larger force. Meanwhile the second two stanzas seem to show life with a bit more agency. The individual lives are individual flowers with a "face", as opposed to the faceless, anonymous nodes of the first stanza. The last stanza seems to have a very hopeful tone to it. It's the first time the speaker uses "I" and "My", introducing a personal element to what was previously a more general, broad-scoped poem. The line "fleeting, yes, but floating" is really good as it turns what was said in the first stanza on its head, showing that the impermanence doesn't necessarily make life bad for the speaker. "drifting closer to the soil where I bloom again" also implies a cyclical flow to life, a sense of continuation where in the "Weave" stanzas there was an ending.

In terms of building, this contrast makes me wonder how the Weave and the Aerenglass are connected. They both seem to serve a similar function but the poem clearly shows them to be distinct. Does the garden in the Aerenglass receive a soul when the Weave "cuts the thread"? Or are they competing life/death myths from different cultures in your setting?

Something technical I like about this poem is how you use parallelism with "fleeting and floating" . . . "carried and pulled", among others. The repetitive rhythm and structure of these phrases conveys the sense that the workings of the Weave and the garden are normal, that they seem to be part of a natural force, kind of like the tides are for us in the real world. I also like how you play with the words "fleeting" and "floating" in different stanzas as it gives the poem a sense of development even though it's not a narrative poem. It also adds cohesion to the piece, which can be tricky when the poem's subject and imagery are drawn from a setting that readers aren't necessarily familiar with.

Overall, I feel this is a nice little exploration of agency and the meaning of an individual's life in the grander scheme of things, as well as the idea of death as a new beginning as opposed to an end. I can see this working as additional lore to an existing story, or maybe something more plot-important too, if it describes the feelings of a specific character. (Ooh, or maybe as part of a hidden history the protagonists need to uncover!)

Hope this helps, and keep writing!
-Lim

Hello, FarDusk!

All right, so the first stanza hits me nice and soft and gives me the sense of chill. Nodes on the Weave made me picture little stars of nerve endings with like an axilla or whatever it’s called, and there’s like a ton of them, in like a black space background.

The second stanza seems to be some kind of turn for the worst. The threads and the weave and cuts the thread, so not only that it bends, it was then cut by this weave person.

Aerenglass seems like an interesting new word to me and gives me the sense that it’s some kind of fantasy setting, which is then supplemented by the garden tangled and quiet each blossom of face and roots, retaining memories. This gives me a sense of a magic garden that has history.

I think I saw that you were creating this poem, which is set in a setting world that you created and for sure one thing I can say is I am definitely intrigued. This world seems very deep. I am getting this sense of this deepness from the proper nouns in the poem And then you’re writing is very arrhythmic and beautiful so this is like a nice preview to your world. However, I’m not really sure of anything that’s happening.

It seems that the voice of the poem is some kind of plant. And in a fantasy setting that could either be a special type of sentient being that’s a plant and has sentence or I’m missing the mark and this is somehow symbolism for something.

Whoever this is, It seems like they are on the rise after some kind of hardship.

I don’t really know what to tell you about how to improve this. It seems very pointed to a certain knowledge based that I don’t have, but I’m trying to bet that you’re going to be able to get something out of this text that I am sending you. I tried to give you my initial reaction and then my deeper interpretation and that’s for you if you want to take any of it or not thank you so much for writing this. I had a great time reading it.