—Purgatory
Gray stones and gray sky
(One born by wind,
The other weathered by it)
In a wintered forest
await their disappearance.
—Birth
Spring-melt streams
Made torrents of molten gold
by spears of sun
Striking through leaf-budded branches.
—Inferno
Endless yellowed fields of grass
Ripple in waves
Of sun drenched air.
—Death
A leaf wrent from its branch,
Twirling and tumbling to the wind,
Like a scarlet-dressed dancer
To the beat of a drum.
—Silent multitudes
It was a cold day when we left,
Calling farewell from trains and boats.
=
It was wet when we arrived;
Muddying our boots on the ground
As we stepped upon the deadened land.
=
We returned with others,
Laying ourselves to rest
on the ground or on the walls
Of Lorraine, La Cambe,
Bayeux and Ardennes.
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Canary word: Present
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125,028 Literary Works • 672,774 Reviews
**My Thoughts**
Now, I have no idea what this word was supposed to be (or is), but when I search it on Google, absolutely nothing popped up... so... I don't really know what to say.Hey IamI, LZ here with a review! I really enjoyed all these poems. They're all well written and somewhat short, so I can read them all quickly but still get your message! Now, onto the review.
**Capitalization, Grammar, All That Jazz**
There was only one mistake I noticed in all of your poems.
I really like how you used bot full capitalization and punctuation. I don't know why, but to me, that just makes it easier to read.
**Comments**
Purgatory
This on is SUPER good. It's very well written and I love your symbolism. I don't think you need the parenthesizes, though. They sort of break the flow of the poem.
Birth
This one is also fantastic (heck, all of them are)! I love how you compare the sun rays to gold and spears.
Inferno
Also amazing. I love how short it is, but you say everything you need to say.
Death
This is the one with the confusing word, but besides that, it truly is a great poem. I especially like these two lines (probably my favorite of all the poems):It's just really beautiful.
Silent Multitudes
This one is definitely my favorite out of all of them. The way you hint at it about it being about war and soldiers, but you don't actually say it is just so amazing. I wish I could do that! I also like how you used specific places and not just mentioning graves or death. This one... ugh its so good. It may be my favorite poem of all time.
**The End**
So, as you can probably tell, I LOVED these poems, especially the first and last ones. They're just so incredible. Well, I hope you have a great day, IamI, and keep writing!
I'm glad you liked them! you're review put me in a very good mood. There isn't any real significance to that, just thought I'd thank you for putting a little blip of brightness into an otherwise mundane day (people do tend to like it when their irrationally large egos are massaged, but I digress). the 'wrent' mistake was just a misspelling of 'rent', as the past tense of 'rend', which means to tear apart (I have a feeling you already no what that word means, but my expository instincts demand that I define it) because apparently I actually have to look through my works thoroughly and not just rely on spellcheck, who knew! Also thank you for your advice against the use of parentheses, I wasn't sure about it when I was writing it and I think I agree that it disrupts the flow, I'll just remove them.
Have a great day!
Hi IamI,
I'm here with a review.
Let's start with the first poem.
What I liked was your use of punctuation. I couldn't find a melody to it. I believe that might as well because of how short it is. As well the line where it says:
"(One born by wind,
The other weathered by it)"
It's quite confusing. What do stones have to do with any of these two? As well it should be "grey".
Moving on to the second poem.
This poem was more focused on description. It's quite vivid as we understand pretty well what it's about. But this line:
“ Made torrents of molten gold”
Only made sens after reading the second one. I think that maybe switching there places will make it clearer.
And now the third one.
This is the shortest of them all so I don’t have much to tell you about it. I liked that it’s very simple. What I would like to point out is that it doesn’t feel like the inferno. It could esily be missunderstood with a hot day of summer. Maybe you could add words like fire, hell-fire, burning or blazes. You could also make references to Hades, Underworld or Underworld.
The next one. Number four.
I like the reference to the leaf. What I would like is that you precise that the colour of the leaf is brown or red. If we didn’t know the title I wouldn’t have thought it was about deaf. I also think you should add a setting to it. We can easily mistaken it with a normal day.
And now the last one.
It’s the longest out of all your poems. The first stanza is great. A lot of people associate cold with sollitude. In the second stanza we have the same idea of bad weather. What bother me in this stanza was that you used we. If you want it to be about solitude you should use I. The same thing for the third stanza. If you use we there are at least two people so it’s not really solitude.
We come to an end. Overall, I liked your poems with a phew things to fix.
I hope my review helped gou and didn’t offend you in anu way,
MoonIris
Thank you for your review! I'm not offend, though I am slightly confused (especially at your interpretation of the last poem, but we'll get there)
The first four poems in this were me trying to connect nature and the images of the poem with the concepts in their titles. I'll go through each of those before moving on to the last poem.
The idea of the first poem is that this state of nature (an overcast winter day) reflects the nature of purgatory, as does the stone and the overcast sky, both will eventually disappear, if slowly. The same is true for my choice of inter as the season, it is the time before there is any change, everything is waiting for it. that got little poetic at the end so if you need me to clarify don't hesitate to ask. Also, I use american English, so it would be 'gray', though honestly I like the British spelling more (actually until a year or two ago I used it just because i thought it was better, not realizing you can't just pick and choose which spelling you want. ah, those were more innocent times...)
Anyway, on to the second, one. The analogy here is between birth and spring, since you didn't comment on it I'll just assume you understood it. As for your suggestion, I considered switching the lines but I like it more this way, I want to leave on the image of the sun spearing through the budding branches, it feels better to me.
now to three. The idea here is that the image described is much like hell (or at least how I think it should probably be envisioned) empty, dry, and punishingly hot. out of the poems in this group I think this is defiantly the weakest of the group, but I disagree with your suggestions for reasons I previously stated.
So the fourth poem is about death, and how fall is the season of death (for me, out of all the seasons, fall has the most poetic potential, it is 'the dying time (I came up with this line just now and I'm writing it down so I don't forget), but it's a time of such beauty it prompts some interesting ideas). Anyway, there is death in the poem, I suppose you could say the leaf is dying, or at least that's what its symbolizing, though I suppose that isn't biologically correct.
Now onto the final poem, if I could lift my facade of non-confrontational understanding for a moment, I'm genuinely confused as to how you solitude from this, I apologize if I sound slightly aggressive. This poem is about world war two, the locations mentioned are world war two cemeteries. the collective 'we' was the collective view of all the soldiers as they traveled to the front lines, where they died (hence the 'came back with others' bit).
Thank you again for your review (really this just gave my ego a chance to do what it does best: talk uselessly)
Hi. I apologize if my review was a little confusing. About the last poem we didn%u2019t learn about the second world war so I didn%u2019t inderstood it was about that. Now it makes more sense. I%u2019m glad I gave your ego a chance.
Hi! I saw your poem in the green room and the description intrigued me- I too have a habit of writing poetry when I'm supposed to be in class/doing work! I like how most of these poems seem to be following the same general themes of nature and life- although the last one, "Silent multitudes" did throw me a little because it contrasted with the rest of the poems in its use of first-person plural narration, and while it still makes use of plenty of nature imagery, it seems to leave the entirely natural setting and enter into modern human civilization. This contrast may have been intentional, though it's hard to tell due to the brevity of the rest of the poems.
and which powerfully convey the intensity of the sunlight and the motion and color of the leaf as it falls respectively. (These were just my favorites, each of your poems are rife with evocative and beautiful imagery, which is an incredibly impressive feat for such short poems!)That being said I did love your use of nature imagery, especially in the lines
I also had a few questions about your capitalization in the poems- right now, you have only three lines that begin with a lowercase letter- -despite the punctuation suggesting that other lines also start in the middle of a sentence. Was this intentional? If so, why?
I also noted your use of the word "wrent", which I didn't recognize. Is this an alternate spelling of the word "rent" (from the verb "to rend"), or perhaps the word "wrenched"?
Overall, I think that these poems are strongly written, and the imagery you employ is breathtakingly vivid. While they already pack a powerful punch in so few lines, if you ever decided to expand them, I would love to read it!
Thank you for your review! The lines you listed were not intentionally left uncapitalized and I will go through and fix this later, since I'm supposed to be doing schoolwork now. The contrast between nature and humanity wasn't intentional, these were just the five I happened to finish and since I put them in the same collection I thought I'd publish them as one work. The verb 'wrent' is a misspelled (or spelt, I'm American so I say 'spelled, but honestly I think spelt sounds nicer) version of 'rent' which is the past tense of the verb 'rend' I'll go through and fix this as well.
Thanks again for your review and have a great day!