Head and heart throbbing
Why did you have to leave me?
My heart is broken
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
139,487 Literary Works • 672,577 Reviews
Hi TheBlueCat! Thanks for your review request, I'm sorry that it took me centuries to get over here - I was training for the Writing Olympics, and then have been competing in them all week, so have been neglecting my normal reviewing.
Any who, let's get started!
Form
I find haikus to be one of the trickiest forms of poetry to do well in. So kudos to you for taking on this ancient poetic form. I will mention right off the bat, that haiku purists would not call what you've written a haiku, because it's not about nature, so doesn't meet one haiku's base requirements. If you're interested in knowing more about what makes a haiku actually a haiku @Kyllorac has written an incredibly indepth article about it: Things to Consider About Haiku
That being said, the issue with haikus are that they are just so short! Every single word, and punctuation point really gets scrutinized and needs to be perfect. And you have very little room to make an emotional or imagery connection. -- My review might seem a bit nit-picky as we go on, but that's because there are three lines and fifteen words here, so I'm going to sort of dissect them.
Your syllable counting and formatting worked well for this piece, I think the poem would look cleaner with end punctuation on the first and third lines, since they look blank in contrast to the question mark ending in line 2. That or you could lowercase lines 1 & 3 so as not to run into the problem of the lines looking unfinished.
Word Choice
In short poems unless there is a specific reason that adds meaning, I always say to avoid repetition of words. In this piece you use variations of the word "heart" three times (if you include the title) and variations of "break" twice as well (title, and "broken" in line 3). So I think those words maybe should have a second look at. Because when a short poem has the same words multiple times, it makes it seem like the author ran out of thoughts, which in three lines, I would hope didn't happen!
I'll also put a short note about word-economy. Make sure the words you do use say as much as possible, if there are any unnecessary words, I'd delete them so that you can use those syllables to say more.
Here are words that I thought were unneeeded in this piece, and could be replaced so that you can say more in this short poem.
By just changing a few words you could have the same meaning but have 7 more syllables to play with, that's about half the poem! Also for a haiku, I would advise to even use the title to get additional meaning in there. Rather than letting the title repeat something already covered in the poem, maybe allow it to say something new and fresh. Like a name or a reason why they left or something about the subject or speaker.
Narrative & Emotional Impact
I generally put the poetic appeal of a poem into two categories - imagery/sensory appeal or narrative/emotional appeal, ideally a poem has both, but often will use focus on one or the other in order to engage readers and make the poem mean something.
In your piece there was no use of imagery anywhere - it's a short poem, so I know that's hard but you might want to look into that. The single best word in the poem was probably "throbbing" because there was a bit of sensory description in it.
I think the poem's main focus was narrative and emotional engagement. Almost everyone has gone through heartbreak at some point or another in their lives, so plenty of opportunity to engage a reader's emotions from that point of view. Unfortunately I didn't fell very engaged with the emotional side of this piece because it lacked specificity. I don't know any details about the speaker, about the person they loved, about why the other person left, or any of the details of the story. The one detail we have is that the reader feels "heartbroken" but that without expansion, that ends up being a sort of hollow description.
While you certainly don't need to go into every area of specificity within the conflict (nor would you likely be able to in a short haiku) I would advise to at least add some detail that gives this poem specificity and thus personality and connection. The detail could be as small as a the color of the subject's eyes, or the last thing they said, or it could be as big as the reason they left or what the speaker plans to do next.
As we have it the poem's 1st and 3rd lines say about the same thing, and the 2nd line can be inferred from line 1. Actually once you've read the title of this piece, nothing new is really said. So I would say you have a lot of room to work with, remember every word counts - if it's repeating something the audience already know just delete it in this short of a piece!
I've written a longer piece on why specificity is desirable in poetry that you might take a look at (I also apologize if I've shared this article with you before, I just find myself referencing these ideas a lot) - I think it might give you some ideas on how to develop this piece to the next level. Specificity in Poetry
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think you clearly have latched on to an emotion that a lot of readers can connect to, and you have all the tools ready to write a really lovely haiku, now I'd just love to see you develop these ideas a bit more and show the reader why these emotions are important or why they are heartbroken.
Thanks again for your review request! And if you had any questions about this review, please reach out! Nice work here BlueCat, I look forward to reading more of your poetry soon.
best,
alliyah
Thanks for the review! This was my first try on a haiku, so it was kinda a shot in the dark. If I get around to writing more(which hopefully I will!) I will definitely consider all your advice!
You're welcome! And nice first haiku in that case!
Nice haiku!
I enjoyed reading it, and it's pretty accurate in describing the train of thought and emotion for heartbreak! Even though it's short, it packs a lot of feelings into seventeen words.
One thing I thought you could maybe improve is the flow? The first two lines matched in tone, but the third line kind of appeared right out of the blue (at least for me).
It's really great, and keep writing poems!
Thanks for the review!
The 5-7-5 syllable count is there
Sweet, short and to the point
Very nice for an attempt.
For the next haiku, if you decide to write about the same topic, try and be a bit more descriptive of how that feeling felt. The first line started off strong, the second line played out the reasoning why, but the third line could have finished a little stronger.
Try and refrain from repeating words.
But besides that, all in all, it was a pretty good haiku. Keep writing
Thanks for the review!
This is short but I can relate to it so much. I don't know much about Haikus (if I spelled it wrong sorry). The title completely explains the poem, or more like the poem explains the title. Anyways I feel like you have described heartbreak accurately. I absolutely loved this poem, I could relate to it more then I would like to admit. Keep up the good work! I would love to read more!
Thank you!
Love it!
Thank you!