Young Writers Society

Right I edited stanza 4 according to you b'bob. Or could I call you bebop?
However, after I had written it, I thought that the last line might sound like that rhyme in The Merchant of Venice- when Antonio opens the right box. Please keep me informed.

Oh, bravo! This is a excellent effort and no mistake, I can tell it's been put together with a great deal of thought and solidly exercised technique. I don't mean to condescend when I say your years belie your skill by a large margin.

Now, onto the nitty-gritty stuff!

Your rhythm, so often something that young poets struggle with or have no knowledge of whatsoever, shows you have taken a great deal of care to apply a great deal of skill: the first three verses are generally good, and verse three especially is inch-perfect in my opinion. After that you start to wander somewhat - verse four was a bit of a mess, and while verse five was an improvement, it too was a little disjointed. The final stanza was definitely a return to form, however: an excellent ending. You must clean up verse four, as it lets down what is a well-formed rhythm in the rest of the poem, but apart from that I sincerely congratulate you on a difficult poetic tool superbly used.

Your language, too, I appreciated: this may be partially because I love old poetry, old words, old styles, which this poem seemed to capture somewhat for me. That may not be what you intended, actually, and you may what to address it so it reflects your own voice more, but I quite like it. You do fall into one danger on occasion, however, which is that you mess around with word order and sentence structure to fit in with your rhyme. Your rhyming is something I'm quite pleased with in this poem, but if you force sentences into strange forms in what is quite a conversational poem, you do risk making it sound forced. Most of the poem is free from this, it's just something to look out for in your writing in general. Read over it: if there's anything that just sounds odd to your ear, it's probably somewhere you've warped reality to fit the rhyme!

Just a bit of sheer praise before I'm done: I loved the ending. This:

"In the midst of the street, I stand with a frown-
Orpheus' lover has been taken back down. "

Now when I leave my doorstep, I
shan't look into that waiting eye.
Peeping from beyond the curtain, it
is by some pain-wrought passion lit.

But though I let my mind now
wander, I shall not bestow - it doesn't actually rhyme: bestow rhymes with "moe" and "no"
upon that starry gaze a glance
and keep my heart at steady stance.

But oh! The fire in that eye
that I perchance did once espy.
Let that flame not die before
I come to learn its secrets more.

We march so swiftly through the day that
our many fancies are thrown away at
crucial moments- before secret councils can be ended,
for frivolities they are oft suspended.

But framed behind the window-pane,
that gaze has shifted like wind-blown rain
and now some storm has come about,
for the curtains all are put to rout.

And though I had only just begun
to turn, this game is all but done.
In the midst of the street, I stand with a frown-
Orpheus' lover has been taken back down.

Wow.
That was an absoloutely great poem.
So cleverly written it was ridiculous.
PUBLISH!
AH!
And I actually have not much of a clue of what his poems about.
Its so awesome I don't even care.
KEEP WRITING!