Hi Ox! I saw this in the poetry jam WFP... *tries to remember which one* and thought it was lovely, so here's a review!
I can see you've gravitated towards imagery in this poem – a lot of painting the scene through the senses, and you did well keeping the ocean theme consistent throughout its entirety. It feels raw and loose and trusting, which makes me want to sway along with the lines, flow wherever the poem is leading. Overall I found this most pleasant~
I'll review this from top to bottom, so hold onto your hat.
The opening line is wonderful. It immediately transported me to a view of sunlight reflecting off the ocean sea line.
The salty wind whispering in my hair
What is it whispering? You chose the word whisper where you could have instead used tossing/ruffling/lapping/playing etc., so why is it whispering, and what does it have to say? Word choice shapes a poem's entire character, since every word has its own distinct meaning. This idea of wind whispering is interesting because it personifies this natural element, so yeah, if you wanted to further enrich what you're trying to say in this poem, you could try expanding this. c:
A wave of the golden sea gently rocked me
The boom swayed to the rocks and win
This feels a little repetitive to me. "Gently rocked" and "swayed" are very similar, so maybe you could replace one of these with a less conventional way of describing the picture you want to create here. Also, it seems like you wanted to have the word wind after "rocks and" in this later line. Win doesn't make much sense for me in this context.
The second stanza doesn't seem to serve much purpose, other than to add to the image of this beautiful scene. I would suggest either removing this stanza entirely or modifying it so that it has something to contribute to the meaning of the poem, which seems to be letting go and trusting that you are coming home. It might be interesting to focus this stanza on the detaching aspect of the poem.
Ooh~ The third stanza is particularly nice with the waves' embrace transitioning into being taken to where the speaker belongs. It really feels like the waves are coming in to wrap around this speaker before pulling them out to this place. There's a real ebb and flow sensation going on here, which of course fits well with the ocean imagery.
Oooh, and the fourth stanza you introduce the idea of individual insignificance. This progression adds an almost spiritual element to the poem (which I happen to think works). There is, however, a lot of gleaming and shining and glistening repeated, and it starts to feel like a bit of an overkill around this point for me. You could try substituting these adjectives by comparing the aspects/objects of the scene with things associated with gleaming.
e.g. Instead of "On the gleaming deck" it could be "On the pearl-slick deck", since pearls are known to be shiny. idk that just popped in my head, but yeah! You can get inventive with it. :3
The last stanza definitely feels like a conclusion, so nice job there. The whole time I wondered if the "glistening home" was a specific location that the ocean was transporting the speaker to, but it happened to be the entire ocean itself. By the end there is a sense of completion, of arriving. Lovely.
My final suggestion is a grammatical one, but before you start throwing chairs in my general direction hear me out first: with poetry it isn't necessary to capitalise every new line if it isn't the start of a new "sentence". So like with...
The yellows meddling with the pinks and oranges
On that glistening horizion
... you don't need to capitalise "on", since it's technically a continuation of the line/"sentence" before. I mean, artistic license, but there you go.
Okay! I think we're about do—
Oh wait, I forgot about the title. The title is fitting because it almost represents/foreshadows the goal of the poem, the destination, as the speaker pulls safely towards this glistening home. Yay~
Alright, that'll do me. I hope to see more poems from you, Ox! c:
— Coffee
Points: 2387
Reviews: 92
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