Young Writers Society

Hi there MidnightMuse! I thought the topic of this piece seemed ambitious, which caught my attention, and I was interested to see your take on it

First Impressions

The poem as a whole feels kind of conversational, almost like I am hearing someone talking to me, even though there is some more ‘literary’ word choices like “alas”, “consumed”, etc. I found that the rhythm was quite variable across the poem, the lines sometimes long, sometimes short; sometimes more regular and at other times more irregular, almost like spoken conversation, again. The first part has an ominous, kind of Gothic atmosphere, but those images fade away as the speaker gets deeper into their own thoughts.

Glows – What I liked

In the still of the night
As the moon casts its eerie light
I am consumed by my thoughts
Of life and death, love and loss
Themes that haunt my every waking moment

In this first stanza I appreciate how there are links between the concrete and specific (the current time when the speaker is speaking, the moon imagery) and the more general, such as the abstractions “life and death, love and loss”. I also like that there is a context given specifically for the speaker, who apparently thinks about these things often in their life. I think this is a good introduction to the poem because it balances developing the speaker’s story and showing how the poem might be relevant to the reader as well – since these themes are things we do encounter day-to-day, and the reader might recall times when they have also been ‘haunted’ by them.

I also appreciate how the themes and narrative are developed over the course of the poem. For example, although the speaker is urged to unravel the mysteries of life, they find themselves unable to do so and have to settle for a “small measure of peace”, and so on. That helps present the theme in a more nuanced way. By the end of it, I get the sense of the vastness of human existence/ experience and how it impossible it seems to know it all within our short lifespans.

Grows – Ideas to try

Something that I would suggest when writing your next poem or revising this one would be to try experimenting with different kinds of rhythm. There’s a lot of possibilities there! Usually, poets tend to stick with one type of rhythm within a single poem, but there are also cool ways to transition between types of rhythm within the same poem. For example:

In the still of the night
As the moon casts its eerie light
I am consumed by my thoughts
Of life and death, love and loss

These four lines have a sound pattern that depends on end rhymes (night/ light, thoughts/loss). Perhaps if you wanted to move from that to using alliteration *instead* of rhyming to convey that ‘hey, the topic is shifting, so the rhythm will, too’, you could leave a line and start a new stanza after that. Or you might do away with the rhyming, or you might add end rhymes to all the lines in your piece according to this same AABB pattern. As I’ve mentioned, there’s lots of options! In my opinion, it’s generally best when the rhythm matches the kind of mood you want to convey, for example, a rhythm that feels slow when you want your speaker/ poem to sound sad.

Overall

I think you’ve shown you can develop a theme within a single poem and also use poetic devices well, such as the raven imagery to create atmosphere. My thought is you could take this further by playing with stanzas, sound devices and rhyming vs non-rhymed lines, for example. You might go looking for ideas in this article, perhaps – sections 3 and 4 give examples of how to use a variety of sound devices to create rhythm, and I’ve personally found them useful before. Poems about ‘big’ intellectual topics like existence and how humans as a species deal with them tend to interest me, so this was a nice read c:

Hope this helps – and let me know if you’d like more feedback!
-Lim