Fire

This poem is amazing, you took something so simple such as fire and looked at it in a very philosophical way. Your imagery was captivating and really made me think. The flame comes across as a human life.

"Yet at the end, all the great tower of flame had to show for its brief spell of reality

Was ash. The crushed remains of a long lost personality."

I love this, it's quite sad really that in the end all we will be is simply a memory, beautiful.

wow!! very captivating!

Hi!

Let me begin by saying this is a wonderfully written poem and I love the imagery in it.

For the first stanza, I had no problems and I was actually kind of impressed up until I read "And flickered their golden tongues." I am not sure "flickered" is the right word choice for the actions of the flames. I understand the connection, but it's difficult to picture a tongue "flickering" and the number of syllables sort of throw the rhythm off as well. I would go with "flicked" and I would also change "golden" to "gold" for the same reason about the number of syllables and the rhythm.

For the second stanza, I, again, am in love with the imagery and your word choice, but you do use passive voice in it with "be snuffed" and "was burnt" and I feel like the entire stanza should be told in active voice to match the other verbs in the stanza.

I love the short three lines at the end of the third stanza because they are a good reflection of the shift of mood in the poem.

And I absolutely adore the fourth stanza with it's complete one-eighty turn into just pessimism and disappointment. It isn't entirely depressing, but it is very realistic and delivered well.

Overall, I think you did a wonderful job writing this poem. There are some things I would change, but you have complete creative control and don't have to follow any of this advice if you don't want to.

Keep writing,

Dianne E.C.E.

Wow! That's really impressive to make a long poem about one subject: fire.

This poem made me feel something. If you make another one, I will want to read it. When I made my poem, it was a lot shorter than yours, which was a pretty good length of a poem.

Keep making poems like this- I bet they would turn out to be great! This poem describes how fire is, and what it does.

There's actually nothing bad I can say about this . I don't care if somebody else doesn't like it, cause I think it's great, and you don't need to change much about it.

Keep writing awesomely,

Sunset101

Weymouth!

I really like the premise and the idea behind this piece, I think the metaphor and the image of the ash to help support the idea of losing a part of yourself is spot on, esp. with the way that a person can feel burnt out. I also think there's a lot of sincerity and emotion in the voice as well, I'm satisfied where I end up by the end comparative to where we started in the beginning, so a great arc and you do a good job leading up to the last line.

Some suggestions to helping this poem is to maybe to help weave some of your stanzas together. The first stanza is a memory of a bonfire. The second stanza is the process of watching the flame as the speaker ages. The third stanza is how this process is being compared to life. I think you can probably express the memory, the process, and the metaphor all in one stanza though. Perhaps even open it up for the readers so that we're in there more immediately, because right now we're almost at a distance and everything is told.

So for example, there's a difference between saying:

"I saw a fire when I was younger and as I watched the way the flames died out, it reminded me of how my life is like the fire in that I've also died out."


And

"We used to watch bonfires, father and I, and I would grow to see the flames move and die and feel myself dying too."

The trick of this is getting out of the head/mind and putting oneself in the speaker's shoes and really being in that experience.

Note: both of these sentences are real bad simplifications and generalizations of what you have, I know, but I wanted to illustrate the effect of what opening a poem is like. In the first we feel like we're told exactly everything step by step of what you're doing in the poem. In the second, we forget there are words on the page. Reader and speaker are of one experience.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions and if you want to chat this out or need tips for how to open a poem up if you're interested in going that route, I know it's difficult to conceptualize at first!

~ as always, Audy

This is really good. Unfortunately it is uber late where I am and my eyes are glazing over, so I will review this after some much needed sleep.
But it is really good and I enjoyed it.

Lovely, I think it speaks to a generation which has been riddled with issues. I'm sure most people at some point or another have felt this way. This may be your style but there is a bit of disconnect between stanzas, it works but it's something I seldom see. It is a lovely metaphor connecting the instability of fire with the human emotions, and is quite personal, some people might have trouble telling the world they were not fine. You are brave, keep up the good work.