My Heart is Alight

Hey there RavenLord! Tuck here with a review for you.

This is a really beautiful poem! It's a very fitting poem for the season, and there are some lines in here that I absolutely loved. "hands joined and heads bowed // pressing the past into each other's palms // and whispering of the future" is such a powerful procession of well-expressed thought. I also loved some of the concise but powerful descriptors here -- "chalice flame" and "crisp evergreen" are two examples that come to mind.

My first impression of this poem was the formatting and stylistic choice of using a typewriter-like font on an indigo background. While I think the deviation from YWS' default was an excellent choice to capture the attention of your reader, I wonder if the effect would be more profound, for lack of a better word, if you were to take it a step farther. For example, if you were to modify the dimensions so that the background filled the entire space (mostly because it isn't super visually appealing to have this "partial" background) and add some symbols and shapes around the border, you could create a cozy, atmospheric presentation of a poem with a very cozy and atmospheric vibe. I'm visualizing miniature snowflakes or small Christmas trees around the border like a Christmas greeting card. The tone of this poem may also lend itself to some curlicues and more advanced calligraphy on the text itself.

Moving on to the actual poem, the pieces of critique I have are superficial by my own admission, but will hopefully still be helpful! First, "plaited light" didn't generate the clearest mental image. I don't see plaited as something that can modify something like light, although that could be a personal connotative issue. Second, I actually had to Google what Baldur was referring to, as I'm not familiar with Norse mythology. This would likely be the case for many other readers, as it's a fairly niche topic that many are likely to not understand. This is not to say that you can't include this reference, but I wanted to make you aware that many readers may not grasp that reference. Finally, I noticed that you repeated "chalice flame" twice in this poem (once in the first paragraph and once in the third paragraph). I think it'd be more effective if you picked a different descriptor of this same object to introduce some new ideas so the reader has a more full idea of what this object is. I hope that made sense!

Overall, this was a really great poem that I could only find small and superficial "nitpicks" to suggest to you for improvement. I especially liked the way you engaged so many senses and used really powerful descriptors to communicate much information in few words. This is a great Christmas poems, one of my favorite that I've read on YWS, and I hope my suggestions were helpful to you! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

Happy Holidays!

Tuck

Hey there,

I first wanna say that this was/is an amazing poem you wrote, truly. Sorry if you are looking for words of improvement or anything like that. I don't have any this is great on its own.

"The crisp evergreen drags fine claws"

"On the last day we sing and as the chalice flame fades"

Are my two favorite lines, they really hit me in the feels, I felt every word. There was no wasted space or overly explaining or overly expensive meaningless words.

Really great job. Keep writing because your great at it😁

Aaah words cannot express how much I love the line "pressing the past into each other's palms" <3 <3