Have Faith

Hello SparkOfDoubt! PumpkinCat here with a review of "Have Faith"! I just want to let you know first off this is one of my first spiritual poems I have read and I think you did a great job on it! Here is the things I noticed that were a little bit off: Your Flow! Great poems give great flow and they give more meaning to the poem! I couldn't tell what it was but somewhere in the poem the flow was a little bit off. Anyways Good Job 7/10

This is a short and simple poem with deep meaning. It could almost have a duel meaning. I found no spelling errors, good job. The words all flow together nicely. The rhythm may be a little off, but seriously, who cares. This inspirational poem definetly tells a complete story, even though it's short. Good job, and keep writing.

I don't have access to a computer right now so I'm using my phone to post this review. Sorry in advance for any funky words I might use. Chalk it up to swype.

Anyway this was a neat little narrative poem, that reads like a vignette from Dante's Inferno. I'm a more fiction oriented person but I have to admit, some poems are appealing for the simple fact that they are shorter than stories. I want to structure this review by going over what you did, highlighting the things that work and end with areas that you could improve on. Your first line states "I saw you" thereby instantly introducing 2 characters, the speaker and the"you". We get action in the second stanza, in which the speaker calls out to the you, letting us know that the you is someone important to the speaker. Theres a turn in the third stanza in which you dangle the possibility that the speaker might end up arty the gates of hell. Then you bring the action to a nice, gradual close with the fourth and fifth stanzas.


Things I like:
Like I said, you basically tel a full and complete story in just 5 stanzas. Along the course of the poem we get a sense of longing between the speaker and the you. Tensions rise along with our concern for the speaker as worry that she (or he, perhaps) might end up suffering the same date as the condemned you). Theres an assortment of student emotions coming into play here which is difficult to do in shorter poems.


Thing to work on:
I feel like a broken record because I say this in almost every critique I give, but theres just not enough specificity here. Phrases like "the gates of hell" and "at the feet of god" are just too broad and too generic to be interesting. (I also have a thing or two to say about using the weird hell, but il address that later). Remember that these aren't just any old gates of any old hell, but it's your gates to your hell. Give us something concrete, something unique about them that no other version of hell has.
The same goes for the rest of the poem, the hands for death to take, the feet of god, these descriptions are just too vague for the reader to form a clear and detailed image. Thats the down side of telling a story in a poem, you have to be more economical with your words so you can't give out as many details as you can with prose. For revision I suggest trying to incorporate one specific image into each stanza. Think of yourself as a film director and you are giving each image a closeup.

Now for what I mentioned earlier about the word hell. There are certain words which, when used in poems, carry so much weight that they trend to tip the whole thing off balance. Words like hell, death, love, soul, god, devastation, anguish, ecstasy etc almost always have a sentimental charge. They make the speaker come across a preachy, melodramatic or both. When you use these words you give the impression that you are either trying too hard to illicit an emotional response or that you are teaching a lesion and personally I don't think thats what this poem wants to do. If a poem teaches a lesson it should be subtle. If it brings an emotional response it should come as a martial consequence of the images you reflect, not from the speaker telling us (our using not so subtle clues) how we should feel.

All in all I think you have the skeleton of a good poem on your hands. You just need to flesh out out a little, even if it's at the risk of making this poem considerably longer. And most importantly ask yourself what this poem wants to be about. And note, the desires of the poem are not always the same as those of the poet.

I hope this was helpful. Please contact me if theres anything you need me to clarify.

Pretty good poem you have there, unfotunately I'm not the least bit spiritual. But the last word is actually 'patient'.