Hi there LadyBug! Lim here with a review.
First Impressions and Interpretation
I thought this was an interestingly worded poem. The first mood I got was an ominous one, with some undertones of melancholy. Then the speaker’s desperation and feelings of helplessness are revealed as the poem goes on, which emphasises the mood of sadness.
The way the poem is formatted feels very tidy and helps enhance the patterns that repeat between stanzas, like the one short line in the middle and the use of numbers.
I interpret the subject matter of this poem as being about the connection between two people, the speaker and the addressee. The speaker starts off musing about the addressee’s place in their life and then seems to fear that the addressee will no longer visit/ be with them one day. The phrase “the biggest mistake i have yet to make” is what gives me this impression, as well as the phrase “how many”, implying that the speaker thinks the addressee is putting up with their mistakes in a way and wonders how long that will last. The second stanza seems to focus more on the positive side of their friendship/relationship, with images like “twinkle”. The third stanza shows the speaker communicating directly to the addressee and asking them not to leave.
Structure
I like the amount of ‘movement’ that happens from stanza to stanza. The way I read it, each stanza develops the topic and takes it in a new direction, but without straying too far such that the reader can still see the connection, if that makes sense.
Something that doesn’t seem to have a regular pattern is the sound devices and the rhythm. For example, “bloody, bloody knuckle punches” is the only place where a word is repeated twice for effect. That makes it stand out a bit. Could it be that the speaker is hammering in the largeness of the mistake they have “yet to make”?
The comma in the first line also feels a bit awkward since there are no other lines where punctuation happens in the middle of the line, and I’m not sure what it’s meant to do there. Is it to make the train feel more surprising in the text? Or is it marking a dramatic pause?
Word Choice
I definitely had to google a number of the words here, like “malapert”. Without looking it up, I thought it was something objectively bad because of the “mal-“ suffix, but knowing its meaning it seems that the addressee only introduces a kind of stubborn/obtrusive nostalgia, like the “unannounced train”. If you’re looking to communicate that very unambiguously, maybe another word might be better there. If you’d like to keep that ambiguity then – hey, it works.
Something else I noticed about the word choices is in the ‘happiest’ part of the poem, which I think are the following lines in stanza 2:
comforted now only by the sparks of a fire,
half as warm and bright as your twinkle.
Compared to other parts of the poem, the language is simpler, and the words are shorter (“sparks” as opposed to “pulchritudinous”). I noticed there was a change in tone there, like it became softer and less brooding for a moment, which was really neat.
Voice
Something I like about the poem is the consistent voice. The poem represents numbers as “1345” for example as opposed to something less specific, as well as mixing both abbreviated words (“you’ll”, “doesn’t”) with longer more formal phrases (“november has arrived”, “i will keep you”). These are unusual choices, at least to me, and they are done consistently throughout the poem, so they create a distinct voice for the speaker and make them appear like a real person.
Overall
I think this makes a good contemplative and dramatic poem. It tells a story and creates a voice for the speaker in that narrative. At times the quirks and idiosyncrasy of the language makes it a bit hard to find the rhythm, as I mentioned in the Structure and Word Choice sections, but overall, it still works, I think.
Hope some of this helps and feel free to ask for more feedback!
-Lim
Points: 41664
Reviews: 542
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