Hell to the light

Hello Skyy! Dogs here with your review today. Ok I really don't have too much to say about this piece because it is pretty good. I like how smooth you write, thats a great writing style to have and can come in handy sometime. Most the time you use good vocab but sometimes you lack great imagery, which is the biggest thing I look for in writing.

Ok so the first line is good, a tad bit cliche but simple and introduces the reader to the topic. I'd actually subsitute "shift" to "trip" but thats more up to you.

I like your next line, it's a true fact and setting up that you need hard work efforts to achieving anything. I really do like the part about the "debt of sin... devils twin" that reads incredibly smoothly and it gets your point across easily.

Everything pretty much in the first stanza is very good I do say, I would actually maybe like a couple lines more creating a bigger image for us to see. What is the devil's gates like? How do they compare to the hallway to heaven? Those simple small things would create a clearer image in the readers head.

Ok, third stanza you need to start breaking some things up. I think you can get away with long lines in the first stanza but I would highly suggest cutting them into two different lines. Especially with commas. So maybe try:

"After the fight and fall we may begin to see the light,
we begin to treasure out sinful fright,"

That flows easier and looks cleaner. I'd also shave off some words in that first line, you seem to have a jumble of just useless words in there. Try: "After the fight and fall we begin to see the light" or maybe even just "to see light." It'll help with the rhythm of your poem.

Interesting last line. I definitely like it because it creates a sense of lying immorality in our world, but that they learn from their lessons. But it leaves the reader with a question, does the lesson you learn from improve you as a person? A good kind of cliff to leave this poem off of, an incredibly effective ending. All and all I think this is a great piece and i only have nit picky things to say about it. Let me know if you ever want another review, I'd be more then happy to read more of your excellent work . Keep up the good work!!!

TuckEr EllsworTh

Skyy,

Kudos to you for working such a challenging rhyme scheme! This piece looks like it's intended as more of a didactic poem than one that is meant to scare or evoke emotion, I prefer the latter, but that's just my personal take on it. It's still pretty good as an experimentation with forms and style, it's got that oldish Dante thing all happening here. The message is pretty clear, and since the nature of this piece is more didactic than imagery-base, I'm just going to go through the technicalities in this.

In your first line, I would nix "the", because the poem actually is more fluid without it. Now for your word choices:

flight/shift: With these two word choices, you actually create two different ideas that don't quite say the same thing. You want to make sure, especially with poetry that your word-choice is as precise as can be. On the one hand, you have this idea that good/evil is like a "shift", something you can just turn on or off, and on the other hand, you have this idea of flight and ascension.

If you decide to stick with "flight", I can see the "flight" word-choice trying to convey this ascending imagery - like we want to ascend to the light, but then if that was your intention I would change "shift" to drift, or rise, or climb - you need a word here to help with this meaning you're trying to create, and shift is rather more obscure/weak.

Now, if you decide to stick with "shift" - I would change "flight" to "fight" so that you have the same rhyme and flow, but you end up with a different idea: not an ascension, but the notion that going from evil/good is fickle and a struggle.

In your second line, I would nix "bargaining of material" - it becomes a mouthful that actually ruins the flow, and it's a bit unclear what you're trying to say.

Your third line seems a bit forced with the rhyming there. Rather, it's not so much the rhyming aspect sin/twin works okay (although I would suggest: sin/kin -- nearly what you're trying to say, except less obvious) but the execution is forced -- it's as if you're batting a horse with a stick, trying to make it stay on a particular path. "hard labour i needed to pay the debt" is a completely different idea from "it makes us the devils' twin" -- and grammatically, there's a misplaced modifier. Grammatically, you're saying that hard labor makes us like the devil, when what you mean to say is that sin makes us like the devil. But "sin" is not the subject here. I would play with that line a little more.

Your next two lines go well together, but the "through and through" part doesn't make sense.

"think our mind and motion" is unclear.

your last two lines work perfect! A fitting end to the piece. I would change "learnt" which is not a word, to "learned" -- even though they're not perfect rhymes, they ARE slant rhymes, so you can definitely get away with it!

Good job and keep writing! This was a tricky piece to write!

~ as always, Audy