hero

What words did he use to break your heart? Why were you his enemy? Those are two questions that fill my mind when I read this poem. There are much more. Is this about a bad break up? It's a great begging for a series of poems since it makes you want to read on but as it is it has too many questions and leaves the reader unsatisfied.

Hi Mage, stopping by for a review for review day, so here we go!

Spelling & Grammar
I liked your consistency with the capitalization and lack of punctuation, so no issue there. I thought that the lack of punctuation didn't take away any of the clarity of your piece.

Grammar wasn't an issue in this piece either. The choice to leave "i" uncapitalized signified that the poem wasn't so much about the speaker but about the person the speaker is talking about, it shows how belittled them may have felt by the words as well - so that was a strong choice.

One issue grammar-wise is the last stanza. Try reading it as a sentence: "I didn't return the strike, because I knew how much words hurt, but you only wanted to defeat the evil witch" -> For me that doesn't actually make sense. The first two lines do, but I'm not understanding why the word "but" is in the 3rd line, what is "defeating the evil witch" negating from the first half of the sentence? I would suggest rephrasing or taking out the word "but" -> although if this is done, the 3rd line kind of hangs there at the end without connecting at all to the first chunk of the stanza.

As a formatting suggestion, I think it's a bit odd to have the "tildes" or "squiglly lines" in front and after the title - for me it makes me think the poem is going to be silly and upbeat or maybe even sing-songy when I see the squiggley lines right off the bat, but that is just a little nit pick. Overall formatting was good - the asterisks were fine as well in my opinion.

Word Choice

You switched the metaphor from the person doing the hurting ie. first stanza you say that the person drives a sword of words into the speaker's heart. to switching to the words doing the hurting (ie. stanza three "words hurt"). With poems that are so short consistency is essential. People aren't going to forget what happened 5 lines prior, so you need to make sure everything makes sense.

Your word choice is fairly consistent - going with this theme of a battle (strike, attack, glory) - the action description is alright as far as this goes - but I'd like to read a bit more emotional appeal. What sort of pain did the speaker feel from the words (embarrassment, shame, physical pain, mental or emotional pain, panic, anxiety, fear...) right now it's all a little bit too vague for me to really connect to the speaker - even though I've definitely felt pain at other's words, you need to describe that emotion a little bit more for me to connect with it.

Overall you lean towards being vague in this poem (not a bad thing by any means! you need to be general sometimes for more images and ideas to connect with the piece). You have three lines where you get more specific -> line 1 "pretending to be a hero", "i didn't return the strike", "you only wanted to defeat the evil witch" -> here I begin to see the story unfold. I wish there was a little more specificity, because right now I'm having trouble seeing the whole story together although this may be hard if you want to keep the length short.

Pacing/Flow

Good job keeping to 3 lines a stanza - that was consistent all the way through, and made the poem look fairly clean. Altogether pacing needs some work. When poems are short, and you're not playing with crazy formatting or rhyming, it's essential to make sure that the poem has good even flow. I would strongly suggest writing out all the syllables of each line, then trying to make the lines somewhat consistent - this makes a world of difference when you read it, because everything just feels and reads cleaner, and readers don't get distracted by odd pacing. For instance, although visually the first lines of each stanza are the same length, by syllable they're very different. 1st line: 8 syllables, 4th line: 6 syllables, 7th line: 7 syllables. I would see if you can make these a bit more consistent. Also lines 6 and 9 are particularly clunky and long. Line 6 is thirteen syllables long. And the phrase "into a million little pieces" is very much a tongue twister.

While visually your poem looks consistent, when read aloud, it becomes tough to get through it smoothly. If you could incorporate my consistency in the syllable count (it doesn't have to be perfect in that category by any means, but a little more would go a long ways) and if you could maybe use more assonance and alliteration - I think it would bring this poem to the next level.

I'll just give an example of how to add more assonance while I'm here as well:
In stanza 1 you successfully use a lot of the "o" sound: "hero", "your", "words", and "drove". That's great! Sounds border-line rhymie. If you could end line 3 with that long "o" it'd be even better, but what you got sounds okay.

In stanza 2 you have the potential to do the same thing you have the words: "glory", "your", and "broken" -- if you moved "your" to the end of line 5 it'd mimic the structure of stanza 1 and we'd be in really good shape. You could do this, and really highlight the assonance by changing stanza two to something like the following:
"you didn't claim glory
you understood the attack of yours
broke me to torn fragments"

There are of course many ways your could rephrase to get the "yours" at the end - that's just a suggestion.

I would also note that every line has either the word "me", "i", "my" or"you" except line 1. Line 1 sort of sticks out, maybe because it begins with the word "pretending" - if you changed it to start with "you pretend" rather than "pretending" it would flow better with the rest of the piece I believe.


Overall Impressions

So now that I've got the actual form of the poem addressed, I can address what I took away from the poem. I need to say that the last line thoroughly confused me. I read the poem, thinking it was a break up of some sorts of friends or people in some sort of relationship, and then I got to the last line and was like "what??" -> "defeat the evil witch" is just such strong language. I re-read and considered that the title and first line mentioned a hero. I'm reconsidering if you're meaning for this poem to be a metaphor for someone who really hurt the speaker, while being hypocritical or self-righteous. Or if it's supposed to be a story of literal heros and witches and spells - like the movie "Frozen" or something like that. The last line just really through me off, because it didn't seem consistent with the rest of the poem I guess. A witch just says to me "magic" and "evil" and for the speaker to refer to themselves as someone "evil" and "magical", I'm just a bit lost in how that follows. [This could be me being totally confused too, and maybe others were better at understanding this] I would suggest working more magic into the preceding stanzas, so it's not such a shocking/odd ending.

Overall I like the concept of the poem. Although it's surely been said before that "words hurt" - I think you start to take this concept into a unique direction. I'd like a little bit more emotion and specificity played out in the words - but I think you have some good work here, there are of course things you could do to take it to the next level - but that's how it works with any piece of writing

I hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions from my review!

Happy Review Day!!

~alliyah

Hello! Here to review!

At first I thought this poem was about a break up. Maybe the 'hero' thought they were doing the right thing for you by leaving and that is what you have referred to as the 'attack' and the 'blade of words' was the hero's speech. Maybe the hero did you wrong and thought it was easier to let you go than work through it and that was what had you broken 'into a million pieces'. But even though you were broken, you didn't strike back because you still loved the 'hero'.

That was my idea until the last sentence. That doesn't fit my interpretation so now I'm stumped. I don't know what to think of this poem at all. Who is the evil witch? You? Them? Was striking you down a way to defeat the heroes own evil? I'm not really sure.

cool hero stuff like spiderman and ubermensch manny wooly mammoth ting. anyway i like ur poem coz of da way u dismantle heroes n make da villain da hero. par examplar, u mention how dey pretend 2 b heros but they shanked u. also u call out dem cowards 4 dem words from dem mouths. i liyk da intentions behind dis poem. 2 impruv, id say make it longa and xpand on heroism coz it deserves 2 be dismantled. glory 2 the green goblin!!!

Desu Kawasaki my dood

This is Kaos here for a review!

I thought that this was a cool concept for a poem, and that's pretty much as far as it goes for me. I didn't really find anything interesting other than the ideas that it held and the themes that played through it, which are strong, but they can't hold a poem up on their own. We see that this plays with morality of heroes and villains and that heroes aren't always the best of people and villains not always the worst. I wanted more of that feel that heroes can be more than just angelic and everything of that sort and that villains have more layers to them than just that they're 'evil'.

Something that you did in the poem that I found weird was that it switches between 'you' and 'the hero' as well as 'the villain' and 'I', if that's even how they match up. That's what got me tied up with this poem is that I didn't know why the speaker was talking about their self and the other person in this poem in third person. It doesn't really make any sense and I would rather you pick one of the two and stick with it because it tends to disrupt the flow of the poem.

I found this to be very cliched and I didn't know if you really wanted it to come off that way in that there's a hero and a villain and everything of that sort that follows along with it or not. I think that you could play this to your advantage and help set up the atmosphere and tone of the poem with this, which leads me to my next point.

Imagery. There's a lack of imagery in this poem which is something that you're heavily missing out on because I can see there being potential cliches being thrown in there with descriptions around them like expanding on the evil witch or dragons and adding more layers to these cliches. Adding something new or adding a new perspective, which is something that I want to see you do with this poem because I think that it can potentially do that with stronger impact rather than just what you have now.

There's a lot of potential running through this, but the execution doesn't live up to the themes and ideas that it's trying to get across. I would like to see it told with the usage of more poetic devices as there's kind of a lack of them but I think they'd help it feel more like poetry. Something to make it more vibrant.

I hope I helped and have a great day!

This is amazing!
I don't know what to say....

Hey! I am here to drop a review

Here is my interpretation of the poem :

A hypocritical 'hero' attacked a person in this case 'you' because in his mind 'you' is the 'villain'. However, deep down the hero does not own up to his actions because s/he knows they were unjust and wrong. S/he just acted upon what he felt and thought would hurt the 'villain' the most at the time. The 'villain' being the victim in this case is the actual hero as s/he decided to not retaliate.

I really like the concept as it perfectly captures irrational thinking and self-justification to ones own actions, without even thinking about the effects.

Slight things I would change is the first lines in stanza 2 and 3.

the hero didn't claim glory

the villain didn't return the strike