What I was doing there wasn’t quite clear. Genre: Villanelle

Oh! I see you've written a series of villanelles, those are fun to write and hard to execute (at least in my experience!). Some of the wording got a bit awkward in here (specifically that line "They shout at me, "Be brave!" but I'm in fear." and "I try my cowardness not to reveal") I know you're trying to preserve the rhyming, but the phrasing here is quite unnatural in a few lines. Still I like the thoughts expressed and this theme of an individual's experience being stuck into a war like an animal without much consideration for their humanity - it's an interesting one to explore in poetry.

I also wanted to add that I enjoyed the humor you imparted into the piece - it makes a heavy subject a bit lighter for the reader and also keeps the piece from seeming stale or boring.

Well done! I'll have to take a look at some of your other villanelles.

alliyah

Hey Radrook

I absolutely love the villanelle structure. This is one of the ones that I love to play with and break the rules or follow them as it suits the poem. For me, I think I'd give this particular one a 5/10 though.

You have the structure right, mostly. You don't really have the iambic pentameter right for how I read this poem. "not to reveal" is unstressed unstressed stressed unstressed when all of iambic pentameter should be unstressed stressed throughout the entire thing, but I often ignore the iambic pentameter myself, so I set that aside when I was first reading it anyway.

The rhymes are there, and I love how you picked the theme of weakness in the spartan army, that really fits well with about half your rhymes, but you seem to run out around the point where you start talking about stuck pigs. But anyway, onto the review.

I think the poem has value with how you manipulate the characters in the story. You have warring sides and you show those sides through the types of actions we see, for instance, begging for mercy, the crazy of people crying like stuck pigs, and so forth. It shows why this individual has a right to be afraid without shoving it in our faces. That's done very well.

I feel like the poem could use some work with how you play with the structure. If you're not going to do iambic pentameter, then just drop it all together and focus on better rhymes because this poem needs those supporting rhymes. In this case, you have several forced rhymes such as the use of "squeal" since that completely blindsides the conversation, it's a metaphor that works well with what you're doing, but it's introduced out of thin air and that stanza feels like it is not a part of the rest of the poem because of that. You can tell the stanza was set up around the word in order to pair it with your b rhyme, and that's not how that should work.

The other thing that makes your rhymes feel forced is this jerky syntax. You're not using a standard tone here, so your language choice and where you're putting your verbs creates a weird sentence structure which makes the poem hard to read and puts too much emphasis on the rhyme.

So I'd strongly suggest you rework the same theme with different rhymes. Try picking out a rough outline for your poem before you write it so you can weave the story with the words you're going to use and pick words you want to weave into the story from the beginning to the end rather than using these jarring metaphors near the end in order to bring your villanelles up to quota.

Personally, for me, I know a poem's rhymes aren't working if I have to restructure how I say things in order to put the rhyme in the right spot. That's when I go back and look for a different word to use for my rhyme. I might have one or two weird syntax choices in my poem, but that's a cap for me.

Anyway, I like the characters and story in this poem, and I'll keep looking through your stuff.

See you around
Aley

"Why must my mind, for slaughtering, be geared?" - reads better if you put the commas in there around for slaughtering. Everything thing else is dandy

Hi, Lives4Christ24 is here for a review.
I hope I don't offend, I just want to give constructive criticism to my fellow writers.
So, you are Radrook and write super long and helpful reviews. Naturally, I can't find any fault with your poem. I really like and think that it funny. The cartoon, comic strip thing is a nice touch. I like how neat and professional your format looks.
I hope I get to read more of your work in the future.