Young Writers Society

Hi! This is my first review as I am new to YWS, so anyone feel free to tell me if I am doing something wrong!

I feel that this poem is really descriptive of the topic you chose, and it was a very interesting topic. I enjoy how you began with the volcanic eruption, and then ended with how regretful the people were that they had gotten caught up in this natural disaster. Another interesting point in this poem is how you compared the volcano to a monster, and how it had lost it's temper causing the eruption.

Very intriguing poem, and I feel that you did a great job.

Heyhi, RLShaw. I see this is the first work you've posted, so welcome to YWS! I hope you like it here!

I think you've gone for an interesting topic with this poem, and you've done quite a good job of showing us the fear and terror of the Vesuvius explosion. I really like the refrain, and the way you twisted it in your last line - obviously, the preserved remains of the town are the most famous thing about Pompeii, and you're alluding to that nicely.

In terms of improvement, I have a couple of suggestions. Firstly, I think it would be good to take a look at the rhythm of the piece - that is, the flow and pattern of the words. My number one tip for working out whether a poem flows naturally or not is to read it out loud - if you find yourself stumbling over the words in particular places, those might be places that need a little rewording. (Obviously, there are cases where you might want to break the natural rhythm on purpose, to evoke a feeling or underline a point!) For example, in this piece in particular, I stumbled a little over your second line, so I'd consider taking another look at the phrasing there.

Second (although actually, now I think about it, you might want to look at this before you refine the rhythm like in my first point...), the descriptive words you use. I see you've gone for a repeating pattern of sets of three adjectives ("black, demonic, dusty", "young, innocent, fragile"). Repeating patterns like this can be really powerful, but I think in some of these lines, you could perhaps find a slightly more suitable word for the situation. For example, "dusty" is a good choice of word, because it's illustrative of something about the smoke in a way that helps us picture it. On the other hand, I'm not so keen on "murdering" - we already know that the explosion is deadly from other lines in the poem, so I'd be tempted to look for something a bit more specific to describe the lava. Is the lava 'creeping' up, or 'rushing' up? Is it 'glowing' or 'blazing', and so on?

Overall, as I said, this is a pretty good poem about a pretty cool topic. I hope the points I've highlighted above are helpful, either for reworking this poem, if you decide to do that, or for future poems you might write. I look forward to seeing more of your work on YWS!

Hello! Jaylin here to leave a quick review. I see this is your first published poem so congratulations on your first submit and welcome to YWS! Your poem is great but has some errors that I can help you fix. I have actually made the same errors which is somewhat ironic to me that I will be critiquing the same errors I possessed once upon a time. First, I will start with the lengths of the lines. There are several lines in this poem that are significantly longer than the rest. Make sure you count out your synonyms in the poem or leave it balanced. I will demonstrate this technique at the end of this review. In the first line I think you should change petro

cool