To hell or heaven I am walking
Not to fast, but surely so
Dragging behind my chain of life
but I know not which way to go
Days of drugs, nights of sex
Limping along with constant regret
I've stumbled through the years
holding on to things I cannot forget
Always asking and praying
to the one I'm not sure is there
Hoping and wishing, desperately needing
all my answers to be clear
I'm walking down a vast road
of silence and shadows galore
But am I heading to an abyss or home
I can no longer tell anymore
The road I'm walking it scares me so
because I know not which way to go
but I walk at a constant speed of slow
through a path of leaves and melted snow
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Canary word: Present
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,805 Reviews
This is Yams here for a review!
There are no stanzas in this poem so it would be nice if you chopped it up so we could see where you cut them off/started them. It seems like you did have stanzas but the formatting of YWS messed it up from what I see with the rhymes. If you cut it off every four lines, it's even. It adds to the overall structure of the poem. The imagery in this poem feels bare-boned, but in a nice way where there is imagery and description where it's more needed.
I might as well just jump in.
I feel like the first line would be better with a comma after it. In the second line, "to" should be "too". The "but surely so" part felt like it was added in just for the rhyme.
This stanza was nice. The rhyme fit in well. My only nitpick I have is that it flows better if you put a comma after "sex" and "years".
The rhyme "galore" and "anymore" feels forced to be and pushed in there unlike the rest of the poem, which feels very on point with its rhymes.
Have a great day.
Thanks for the review. I did originally have the poem split into stanzas, but couldn't figure out how to keep it that way. I ended up leaving it as is. As for the punctuation problems I tend to not use them much if at all. I don't feel like they're needed much. About the rhymes that seemed forced, I write my poems in one shot without editing. It's kinda like free styling. Whatever is the first thing that comes to mind is what I write, and the words I've written were my first thoughts. Thanks again.
You might be pleased to know, Apollo, that Robert's Frost poem was not meant to be an inspirational poem, but rather a rumination on a friend of his that had gone off to fight a war. That Frost feels more in line with your visibly Frost-inspired work, The Road I'm Walking.
Nitpicks - 'on to' is onto. I'm also not sure the word 'galore' is tonally appropriate for this work. Reading the poem out loud, some of the word order feels unnatural - 'hell and heaven' and 'I know not', f.ex. 'I'm walking down a vast road' could be improved by replacing 'walking' with a different verb - 'travelling', perhaps.
I appreciate how you use no punctuation. This makes the work feel more tired and non-stop, rather like the narrator's journey. And boy, is the narrator's journey the focus of this poem. The volume of -ing verbs make the walk sound like a work in progress.
The rhyming of the poems final four lines are the nicest sounding part of the work. The melted snow at the end calls back to another one of Frost's works and my personal favorite, Stopping By a Woods on a Snowy Evening.
This work has a good, steady rhythm to it - most of the time. Sometimes, the lines don't flow into each other as well as they could - 'cannot forget' stumbles into 'asking and praying' in a rather clumsy fashion.
Overall, I do rather like this poem. Keep it up.
Thanks for reviewing. I do know the story behind Robert Frost's poem. I understand the problem with the word galore. Ever since the first open I wrote it'seems become quite a recurring word, and seeing how most of my poems are written in one shot it tends to pop up a lot. As for the word traveling it does sound better, but as stated before I write in one go and it didn't come to mind at the time. I love my last stanza and I'm very proud of it.
You're allowed to change things, you know! Just because you wrote it that way first - and that you wrote it in one shot - doesn't mean that's the way it has to be. No one's perfect their first time. (Whether perfection is possible, well, that's a different question.)