Young Writers Society

Hello Ringo! Welcome to YWS as well. If you have any questions, or need help with something on the site, feel free to pm me. ^_~

Solace in religion she soon found.

I think this sentence explains the heart of your poems syntax (otherwise known as sentence structure) problem. You're using what is formally called an anastrophe, but can be recognized a lot easier by, "You sound like Yoda." Why talk like this? It sounds so much better to say "She soon found solace in religion". And a lot of your poem has weird structure like this, or it sounds grammatically bizarre.

I'm trying not to get too nit-picky on the language though, because I think before you focus on the language and more intricate parts of poetry, you need to figure out your subject. you're covering a large portion of time: from this child's birth to his mother's death. This causes a lot of problem for the poem itself because you're so focused on telling the story, that the reader gets neglected in becoming apart of the emotion. An important part of poetry is that the poem makes the reader feel, or think, or believe something. It has to affect the reader some how. I think the best way you could do this would be to pick a specific time period in one of the character's lives (son or mother?) and focus on that. Through imagery, metaphor, good word choice, you could tell us the story of how the son ruined the mother's life, how the mother feels, and how this makes the son feel. I think you would do best to grasp on to the moment of the son at his mother's funeral. The feeling that he ruined his mother's life is a strong one and could make an amazing poem.

But, if you would like to keep the time period longer, you're going to have a lot of work to do. Here is a poem by Ezra Pound that tells a story over a large amount of time, like yours: The River-Merchant's Wife. You can see, Pound wrote it so that each stanza is about a specific time, and he uses precise word choice and vivid images. All of his stanzas lead up to the important event: the husbands return. So how can you write your poem in the same fashion, and have it lead up to, with energy, suspense, and interest, the mother's death, rather than just tell about it?


I hope this helped! If you have any questions or would like more explanation on something, feel free to Pm me.