Warning: This work has been rated 18+ for violence and mature content.
Youth is like a lily
Bright and clean and pure
But it wilts away quickly
Sitting on the graves of its forebears
Purity is like a rose
You'd like to redden it in love's blood
But it falls apart in your grasp
No matter how you scramble and cry
Strength is like a yew
It grows best over graveyards
But is only decoration
Until someone cuts it up
Memory is like an ivy
It grows on the walls of artifice
But breaks them as it climbs
And after they're broken, it dies
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139,785 Literary Works • 672,767 Reviews
Hello! Just Jaylin hear to leave a quick review. I loved the poem and how mature it was. It was a perfect symbolization of the brutal ways of life. You did a awesome job relating this poem to how life has no sensor and shows no mercy. The figurative language in this poem was outstanding also. The third stanza was my favorite of the poem because how realistic it is. The world has a way of building you up then slashing you down again and has no care of the rubble left behind from it. My only complaint with this poem is that you are missing punctuation marks for when you end your statements. I thought you did amazing! Keep up the good work!
Thanks! The lack of punctuation was intentional and based on the poem's inspiration, and it's really supposed to be a narrative poem where the speaker is just generalizing to try to say "this is how life is" whether or not that's how life is so if that's not clear enough I might have to revise that.
Hello,
This is one of the more mature poems I've read on YWS, despite its conciseness and simplicity. You use simile very well, and your structure compliments your poem well. You convey your theme of loss in an interesting manner by examining a specific loss in each stanza. I'm intrigued by the second stanza, which appears to be about the loss of sexual innocence. The use of the word "purity" seems to evince that you have some moral feelings about sexuality, perhaps motivated by religious belief. I'd be interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the subject because it seems that any kind of moral sentiment is subverted by the last stanza, as it briefly touches on how memory becomes insignificant due to the ephemeral nature of experience. Have you personally reconciled objective morality with the insignificance of conscious experience, or am I reading too much into it?
Great work.
I used "purity" since "virginity" in a poem sounded kind of goofy to me and this was inspired by this other thing that's "Virginity is Like a Rose" and then the fact that most people don't seem to realize that the reason flowers represent beauty is because they're transient, not just because they're beautiful. That's it, regarding that word choice. Then the rest of the stanzas came about due to other events that I linked in, and the overall idea comes from what I consider to be the "sub-physical world" or the attempt of people to remove themselves from the physical world through symbols for it (which I consider to be sterile), compared to the real physical world that contains both growth and rot, birth and death. This probably needs a little editing.