Young Writers Society

Hey there, Storm! This is VP with a review.

I think this poem is a really neat work of fantastic origin. Even though it's short, we learn a lot about this man in your poem. (Or, at least, from my interpretation of it.)

Most likely, this was a younger Knight as his friends were "comrades" and they felt they had not the time to save his corpse. An older, more honored Knight likely would've been rescued, dead or alive. As he died in battle and was likely younger, then I would suppose that he wasn't the best of Knights-- not a good fighter, probably more than a little clumsy. This is further proven by the condition of the armor, described as "dull". As Knights are normally depicted in shining armor, he failed to take care of some of his essential gear.

Alternatively, this could have been a distinguished, honorable Knight with a Squire that didn't care for his armor properly. The joints wouldn't move, and the knight was killed; his "comrades" were chased away by a horde of enemies.

Either way, he's still dead. XD

(If needed, you can ignore my odd sense of humor.)

Seriously, though, good poem. I like the wording, and the balance "Good night, Sir Knight" seems to give off (to me, at least) is really good. It sets the tone as something more peaceful, maybe a little sorrowful. 5/5

Huzzah! This is interesting and definitely gives me fond memories of the Knights of the Green Room.

A few thoughts:

1) Good use of more archaic word choice to add to the more formal / fantastical mood of the piece.

2) Good use of repetition of the "Good night, Sir Knight" at the beginning at the end - this made the poem sort of come full circle and I really love in poetry seeing poems bookended like that with similar content at the beginning and the end.

3) It's an interesting theme of reflecting on the metaphorical rest -> ie. death of a knight who was left to die without anyone paying tribute to them. The poem acts to rectify that by giving a remembrance through poetry. I could absolutely see this scrawled in a little tale about knights or a gravestone even. The poem implies a much broader story that it is apart of which is kind of fun to imagine.

A few critiques:

1) I think the title of "sir knight" is a bit odd? I'd have to do more research, but is that actually the way people addressed knights? I'm also feeling a bit distracted to be honest by the night / knight pun, and I don't know if that was intentional or not - but I don't think that a serious poem like this ought to be punny if that makes sense.

2) I think you could definitely do a bit more with imagery and adventure in the middle section - the poem seems like a death / reflection / mourning poem (neat theme!) but we don't really get a sense of conflict / adventure. The mourning and sadness of losing the life of the knight would be even more impactful if we had a greater sense of who they were -> what sorts of battles did they wage, what sort of person were they?

3) I'm a fan of being creative with punctuation/capitalization in free-verse poetry, however a big proponent of punctuation and capitalization choices being made intentionally to convey meaning. I think that putting a period at the end of your piece after "Rest well" would nail down the finality and conclusiveness of the final line. It seems like it'd be very fitting, and the same is true for the first line as well.

Overall
Overall, there's nothing on the technical-side that I see wrong from this poem, however it does feel a tad vanilla and I think could be livened up by a bit more poetic devices or imagery in the middle section - giving the reader a bit more of that implied story so that we can more directly sympathize with the death of the knight.

Nice work! I'm looking forward to reading your next piece!

- alliyah

This review courtesy of