Young Writers Society

Hello there, @whatchamacallit! This review is very much belated, but I thought you'd appreciate a surprise review this review day.

So let's get started!

I had to reread your poem a few times to grasp the meaning, so I'll break the stanzas down in this review and go over my thoughts on each individual one.

Light reflecting off a lake
the sunset isn't real.
A drop of water is all it takes
to fracture your perception.

Words you have proclaimed,
morals you would never break.
The moment an action causes strain
you disregard, forget, replace.

Shadowy nighttime dream lands
weakened with the passing time.
But just for a moment reality stands
forgotten, displaced by distortions.

To all intents, time is uneven
but the clock will proves each second's equal.
Is there anything left to believe in
If you can be fooled by something so prosaic?

The world is convinced of its reality,
self-righteous, egocentric, arrogant, vain.
Don't become lost in the lies, the sea.
For sooner or later, water always evaporates.

A/N I'm not totally sure if the rhyming is working, please let me know what you think about that.

Hey there whatchamacallit! Tuck dropping by with a poetry review for you today in honor of NaPo. Let's get into it!

Right off the bat, I can identify the first stanza as the strongest. You use a metaphor of water distorting a reflection to illustrate the point that life is an illusion. It's the strongest metaphor in the poem, and I get the sense that the poem was based around that one stanza.

However, the next stanza feels much weaker. It doesn't continue the narrative and feels as though you attempted to create a stanza that serves as a synonym for the first, in essence. The imagery and description isn't present there, and the amount of synonyms are almost burdensome. In particular, the last line contains a bucket list that is completely dumped on the reader. In my opinion, it is an ineffective means of communicating.

Moving on to the next stanza:
I had to read this a few times to fully comprehend it and digest it. I liked the message of it and the way that it was deep and profound. It's exactly my style of poetry, so I may be biased, but I quite liked this. The one way I think you could improve this is by kind of expanding this idea. It would make it a bit easier to swallow and more accessible, if that makes sense.

And for the final stanza, the final two lines were powerful and provided a great end to this poem. It tied all the themes together and provided a strong sense of finality. My only critique is that the list in the second line felt somewhat exhausting. It was, once again, a list of words when it would have been more efficient and powerful to communicate more succinctly.

Overall, I think the flow was a little bit hard to follow because there wasn't an established syllabic pattern. The rhyming scheme also wasn't perfect, so it might be your best bet to completely drop that and focus on establishing a rhythm. Even something as simple as lines 1 and 3 longer, lines 2 and 4 shorter would help to create a sense of flow and rhythm. That is my biggest recommendation, aside from the little stanza-by-stanza critiques I provided.

This was a bit of a new review style for me, so I hope you found it helpful! I apologize if it came across as too harsh; I wanted to give you as many starting points as possible for revisions. If you have any questions about this review just let me know!

Best,
Tuck

Does a poem need to rhyme for it to be a good poem? Not really. In the regards to logistics, I'm not entirely a stickler. What I like is the feeling I get from something, and THIS was an interesting one.

That first section grabs my attention already, and if I have to use my sophomore grade English interpretation, it's setup to say that the realities we're experiencing are very fragile, if all it takes is a drop of "water."

The second one is a bit easier to interpret, of course I've made promises and have strong morals, but what if they get tested because of my own actions? How easy is it to toss away those morals in the moment? Everything is always easier in thought.

The third section essentially made me reminiscent of my dreams. I've always been a vivid dreamer, which is scary in its own right since I've been distraught before. But after waking up, they just fade over the course of a few minutes, and I rarely remember them, but the moment I'm in those dreams, I forget I'm not in the real world.

The fourth and time! Now I think this section is my favorite simply because of that concept. Time passes differently every now and then based on our perception, even though on a clock it never changes. A second goes by when a second goes by. It is such a blatant and simple concept, we tell ourselves time is definitive but why does it sometimes feel different?

The last thing to take away here in the last section is also interesting. I'm not sure who the "world" is that it's mentioning, whether it be society or whatnot. The illusions that keep us going are easy to fall into, because it's what we want. It's what we want ourselves to be, or it's what we have shaped for ourselves. Everyone's illusion is different, and it's better not to get caught up in yours or other's. Why? Because in the end it'll shatter anyways.

All in all, it was a great poem. If you really want my opinion on the rhyming scheme, I will say it's quite nice. I like how it doesn't flow perfectly, it keeps me from blanking out like I normally would. It's a firm mix between poems that don't and do rhyme.

Anyways, best of luck, thanks for sharing!

Hey there! Ethan here for another review.

You have a very interesting poem here, reminds me a little of Descarte's philosophy. As for whether or not the rhyme scheme is working, I think it's okay. As far as I can tell, lines 1 and 3 of each verse rhyme, and lines 2 and 4 are unrhymed? I think it works well enough, and the important thing(at least, in my mind) is that the rhymes feel natural and un-forced, which you accomplished very well. All in all, a solid poem! Keep up the good work!