Young Writers Society

Heya, Christian, this is Cas here to do a review, and considering the topic, I won't relent.

I'm a christian, and I believe in God. I find things like this cute when I see the groups at my church do them as a Sunday school thing, but not so much here. And here is a few reasons why- it's spiritual. it's poetry, and it's praise. All three things(if you do them) that should be taken seriously. Anyway, onward to the review.

The first thing you do here is repetition. You only have one break away from the repetition- and that's the line,"Who has risen against the odds." And it got old by the time that I finished reading this. I would suggest adding more than just,"He is," to the beginning of each sentence here. Anyway, onward.

The next thing was the lack of originality here. There's practically nothing here that's original material using to describe one of the God heads- Jesus. Most of this is quite literally found in most versions of the bible. "Love", "Light", "The calm in the wildest storm," "The lamb,... get my point? That's all(and the rest of the poem) said in the Bible, so it rather left a bad taste in my mouth whenever I read it. Anyway, onward.

The next thing would be the lack of imagery. When you use bland factual statements like,"is," in poetry, especially in cases where you're using lots of them- you tend to do nothing with it. You're leaving out your voice, your creativity, and it's practically taking the easy way out and a shortcut to pop out a five second poem that people's going to like because the relate- not for the over all quality of the poem. I would suggest using imagery, or a narrative, or something to that magnitude, because this is just daunting, repetitive, and overall I took no emotional hit from this whatsoever.

Anyway, that's all I have to say on this.

Sincerely, Cas.

Flow: First three lines flow very well. Sort of even sounds like a rule-of-three, which is very good. The next three lines are alright too. "Who has risen against the odds" sounds a bit forced. It might be that the metre doesn't quite fit for the sake of the rhyme. Give that you haven't had a strict rhyme scheme so far, but a pretty good rhythm, it probably makes more sense to go with a less exact rhyme that fits the metre better.

Message: This seems fairly box standard. For me, I don't read much about religion, so it's not that repetitive, but I imagine there are probably a lot of things very similar to this that have been written. There's only one Jesus, so probably only a limited number of things you can say about him. However, you are a unique person, so your personal experiences in relation to Jesus are probably also unique. I suggest talking more about why Jesus is your saviour. It would be far more powerful if I understood why this emotional connection existed. Especially for me, an agnostic. Make me care about something I am definitionally ambivalent about

Structure: I think this could be fun to split into three stanzas of three lines. It might be a bit cheesy, but poetry in times when all poetry was dictated by religion (ie pre-1600ish) was full of little numerological tricks. It could very easily just be me being a nerd, but I think referencing the trinity would be a nice nod to the tradition of religious poetry. (or some other religious reference, I don't know many).

Hope this helps,
Biscuits

Hi, Lizzie here. I enjoyed this, even without being religious myself. I like it's beat and simplicity. I think that it might flow a bit better if it was split into 2 stanzas, right after the line "He is the calm in the wildest storm," as that was where I paused naturally. Additionally, it's where you get more into Jesus' relationship with God rather than his individual characteristics. I would also expand the line "He is the creator" to "He is the creator and redeemer" or something similar. The lines before this had gotten progressively more complicated as the poem went on, but this line seems to cut slightly short. My last suggestion is really small but I would change "Who has risen against the odds" to "He has risen against all odds." You repeat the word "the" a lot in this poem, which is fine, but I feel this simple change would help the poem go more smoothly. Overall, I really liked this and would love to read more from you.