Honesty

Hi, SacredPen! It's not too often that I come across respectable rhyming poetry, but this is one of those exceptions, and I'm impressed. Nicely done! The arrangement of your poem is sensible and decent, on top of heartfelt and emotional. It is a beautiful and dramatic piece to read, as you cleverly and expertly discussed the topic of regret, laziness, and a lack of self-esteem while in the midst of a rhyme scheme that generally remains sensible and organized. The Earl Gray tea thing is absolutely wonderful, and I appreciate the metaphors and figurative language you incorporate into this piece. Whether basic examples like walls and barriers, to something like the "happy" on a birthday cake, they are incorporated to good effect. The poem also has a fantastic narrative flow that keeps its core ideas in focus while expanding upon them, yet never straying from them. This particularly applies as the poem becomes darker and sadder towards the end, as the narrator battles with their frustrations and regrets. That was perhaps my favorite part. The beginning, with words like "rancid" and "saddens," captures the tone of the piece, but the speaker remains ever wistful and almost in a dream-like state, particularly as they contemplate drinking tea and fleeing to England. And then the major ideas and tone of the poem become truly darker and more tragic, which provided a solid transition that emphasized your key ideas and made this poem all the more impressionable in my mind.

On the other hand, I must admit that I was confused at times by your poem. Your rhyme scheme was awkward, and there were multiple parts when you ended up composing slant rhymes ("world/Earl," "seem/dreams"), or just didn't make a lot of sense. While the content of your poem is impressive, it is these rhymes that were problematic. Too, I also felt that there were some components of your poem that were ambiguous or unnecessary. "For 'tis" feels too extravagant while also leaving your subsequent train of thought handing on what turns out to be a dependent clause. This does leave me hanging a little bit, and the fact that your trains of thought tended to overlap didn't help much either. While I think that you were tending to be experimental by removing a lot of periods, commas, and punctuation marks at the end of your lines, a lack of clear organization did hurt this poem. I ended up running between trains of thought without a clear idea of where they began and ended, and that shift sometimes proved jarring. Of course, incorporating pauses without using punctuation marks is incredibly hard, and I'm impressed with the fact that you were able to try. However, in the end, it didn't work, and I'd suggest separating different ideas with these said periods. That'll improve the smoothness of the work, and I doubt that it will significantly detract from the experimentalism of the poem. For what it was worth, however, it was a good effort; and you did, at times, succeed.

That's about all. Thanks for this poem! It was well-written, nicely composed, and I enjoyed reading it from start to finish. I love the emotions and vivid language throughout this piece, and perhaps it would be nice to see even more of those unique expressions of feelings and the core concepts of the piece, to improve it even more in that regard. While I suggest that you work on your incorporation of a rhyme scheme and punctuation, I was marginally surprised and impressed by the nature of this poem, and I like your writing abilities. Well done!

Hello.

So, I see this piece is trying to go for rhyming couplets, but it falls down in quite a few spots. Part of this could be because there are no stanza breaks (to get a line break, hold down shift+ enter— that'll get the two lines stacked on top of each other; then, when you hit regular enter, there'll be a space between) so I can't tell if/when the rhyme is ever supposed to stop.

As it is now, because the rhyming is so inconsistent I'm struggling to really get into the poem. I'm focusing on the structure instead of the content, which is a bit of a problem. Structure is there to enhance the finished piece, instead of detract from it.

Emotions wise, I feel this starts off moderately well and tapers down as the poem continues— we begin with awesome, vivid imagery and it dissolves down into lists that have some punch thanks to the pre-established images, but could be so much stronger if they were expanded upon. The strongest bit in the later half of the poem is "just like the 'happy' on my birthday cake" because it's such a grounded representation of everything you're feeling. There's a distinct thing I can picture, a distinct conflict between expectation and reality, which makes it a really nice line especially with a rhyming poem. That's where I find all of this really shines, along with the concept of "being edgy" that the narrator thinks they should be.

So, all in all, the biggest gems in here are the real moments that have a "picture value". As in, they generate a picture in my head and tie into cultural concepts that are or are not reached. The rest of the poem could use some work, but you've got an original streak in here and the potential to get something really nice.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey

Too good.Specially the ending lines were awesome.