Love's Challenges

Hello, Kanome here with a review for you, Doni.

I have to say, that I truly agree with this piece. If an effort for a love to exist, it takes two to make the existence of love possible. Not zero, not one, but TWO.

I love the wording in this poem, it has a rhyming beat to it that I can't really describe... but when I read it, there was a certain rhythm that made me want to keep reading to the very end.

I haven't seen anything wrong with this poem, so I think it's perfect!

Keep up the great work! I can't wait to read more of your wonderful poems...

Actually, I'm gonna read more of your poems
Keep writing!

Kanome

this poem is filled with emotions and is really romantic, the last stanza specifically is a eye catch. as i read from the previous review this was your first work here so for that part i would say its great- and you have even improved lately.
at some point in the middle the poem gets monotonous and we loose our interest, everyone has probably fallen in true love once in life , we know this emotion and define it in our words. however this definition cant only form the skeleton of a poem, we need some more...
sorry for the vague reply but i would leave it to yous part to decide what could supply that more[ as you are far superior to me and i haven't even earned the right to suggest something to such a skilled person as you are]
overall the poem is sweet and cute.. hope you make few changed to make it sound more likely
nice work
rituparna

Hello There!

Promised you I'd review some of your work so here goes

A poem about love. Being your first poem on YWS, I don't know if you are comfortable with this art form. Judging by this piece your pretty good at it. But, love, is not a good poem in itself. I for one have never been into love poems because of its predictable outcomes, but this, this is entire different. Love in death, and life in love. Clever. I won't lie, I didn't LOVE it, but I liked it. I enjoy irony, and good ol' figurative language. You have clearly brought that to the table. For that, good job!

The poem looks great. Its neatly divided and has a flow, almost flawless flow. Felt a bit strained, next time you can maybe keep it more loose and relaxed but you did write about a struggle with love so I guess its appropriate. I hope you got that...

Favorite stanza has to be your last.

"If the love is true,
even a separation is a union.
But if the love is untrue,
even a union is a separation."

Nice description. You have skill in poetry, pursue it. Maybe next time though, make me LOVE it. Make it original, make me intrigued.

Poems need originality. This one's a good take on love but I'm sure you have better tricks up your sleeve.

Poetry's a gamble, you can't win everyone, but you almost won me. Tricky task, I'm not the poetry type.

Good job!

Penlorde

Ah, another love poem. Back in poetry class, my lecturer used to tell us that writing poetry about love, death, and such cliche topics is grounds for failure. This might sound harsh, but when you're writing about topics that 98% of all poets are already writing about, you give yourself a whole lot of trouble, as you have to come up with a new idea or reinvention of the topic - just a general warning there.

On to the poem itself...
The looks good on paper (nice stanza structure) and it sounds good - it has a rhythm and there are not forced rhymes (thank God!) The poem is full of ironies and paradoxes, and sentences you wouldn't usually hear, like "Life is too short to take this step." Usually, life is too short to NOT take whatever step. So there are the regular juxtapositions here with love being compared to fire and water, love being loss and love being gain (well this one is more original).

So love and live (and hence death) are closely tied based on the poem, as a life is only truly meaningful if there is love in it - "A life without love is a waste". Also, the transcendent nature of love is explored, as love defeats death. A nice strange idea added though is that "love without taking life is a waste." Does this mean that love should be so strong that it kills? If so, then love is both life and death. It both gives and takes life, which is absolutely brilliant.

You chose a cliche topic but you didn't make a mess of it.

Hi, donizback. This is Pinkie here for a review. Excuse me as I put on my glasses. *puts on my pink glasses*

This poem is amazing. Some of the lines are beautiful and sing to my ears. You wrote something about love and it is very good. You brought some potential and good wordings on here. You did a lovely job on this poem and thanks to Annaclare who helped you with it. However, you have some errors on here. On stanza 4, line 1 and 2:

"A life without love is a waste,
and love without taking life is a waste."

This is a repetitive. You can't put a same sentence on each line. Maybe put something different on here, and it will be better.

Also, your poem don't have any message on here. I don't know what is the theme for this one. Maybe focus on one thing so we will know the message for this poem.

Overall, this is well done masterpiece. I enjoyed it a lot. I hope to read more from you. Have a great nice!

Nice Job and Keep on writing!

Cheers

Your reviewer, Pinkiegirl13

Here for requested review! Well, let's get started shall we?

Grammar/Wording:
Punctuation/Capitalization
In poetry capitalization choice is very much relative to the author's choice. So the only thing I will ever tell an author as far as capitalization is to make your choice and then keep it consistently. I'm not sure you really have a method chosen for the randomness of your punctuation. For example, you put a period at the end of every sentence and a comma before every contraction except in the first and last stanzas and in these two lines where you put a semi-colon "Love itself is the biggest question; itself is the answer to it." In those two lines I understand what you're trying to say, but it is very awkwardly worded. Maybe you could change it to "Love is the biggest question; and is the answer to it." Play around with it until it no longer sounds so strange. --- And also I would suggest putting a question mark (or even just a semi-colon) after line 2, and a period after line 4, and possibly taking out both commas in the last stanza. This would sufficiently make your punctuation and capitalization consistent as far as I can see.

Contractions
I personally really dislike contractions in poetry unless the language is very informal or the rhythm has a consistent amount of syllables that requires shortened words like contractions. (This is really nitpicky of me... feel free to ignore if you aren't a stickler for contractions...)
So, in stanza 3 it bothers me that you begin with "It's" after having such nice repetition of "It is...", "It is..." in stanza 2. I think there are two solutions to solving this line's problem:
1) Changing it to "It is the relationship insert "of" or "for" the souls" --> this takes out one syllable so you can expand "it's" to "it is" without taking extra room, and it continues the nice repetition you had going.
2) Changing it to "The relationship between the souls" --->This really doesn't change the meaning of the line it all, and adds new repetition and alliteration to stanza three because you begin lines 13 & 14 with "There" and "The".
I'd also consider changing "can't" to cannot for the same reasons of keeping a formal tone.

Word Choice
The word choice isn't particularly advanced, but personally I think this poem needed the simpler language to more clearly get the point across. My favorite line was probably the metaphor of love being a "river of fire", this is a very visual metaphor with multiple facets of meaning.

Other Suggestions:
To add to the visual appeal of your poem and also balance the ideas, you might consider making stanza 4, 4 lines (or expanding it to a 5th stanza and adding 2 lines). I don't so much mind the opening stanza having 6 lines, because it's like an introduction and the first 2 lines feel separate anyways as they are the only question in the piece, so the true stanza starts at line 3. But the 4th stanza just has a little bit of a random feeling with the extra two lines. It's by no means essential to have all of your stanzas be the same length but there are a lot of benefits to it; they make the poem seem like more thought was put into it if it looks like the poem has a form, it visually looks cleaner, it really helps the rhythm, and it allows each different idea expressed in the stanza have the same amount of weight given to relay their message so it provides balance to the poem. --> If you write more poetry, this is something to consider too.

My other suggestion is take a good look at your last stanza, and consider changing or editing. For a poem like this that is trying to relay a message about love it is very odd to have it's last word (the word that rings in the reader's ear after the poem is finished) be "separation". Do the last two lines really sum up your poem? Because to me they seem to contradict and almost have a different message than the entire poem and message that you establish. Your poem is about how necessary and beautiful love is but your second to last line says "love is untrue".. I mean the last two lines are very interesting and I think have a place in your poem, but they leave a sour taste in the reader's mouth with a sort of odd and pessimistic ending. Again there's nothing wrong with sad endings, and maybe this is truly what you're trying to express in your poem, but to me the last stanza just didn't have the note of finality and the "boom* there's the ending!" impact that I was looking for and expecting.

Content/Message:
Skimming through some of the other reviews you've gotten for this piece I think the best advice that was already expressed is to focus the message. You have a lot of good content, you have unique and non-cliche ideas about love, but you're poem just shouldn't be generically about "love" with every idea or poetic thought you've had about love thrown into it. It should be focused and after reading the reader should have a clear idea of what your ideas are about some specific aspect of love. Think of what you want to express and anything that doesn't fit into that message should be eliminated and saved for another time.

When reading this I enjoyed the language and thoughts expressed, but when thinking over it I'm not sure what I as a reader can take out of it as far as the message. (This is not because you didn't have a message in here, but because it was a little bit random and unfocused).Overall, I still enjoyed the read, even if it was a little unclear for me.

Good luck in editing and writing, I hope my review was helpful and if you have any questions feel free to PM me.

~alliyah

To be honest. I didn't really like it because it didn't flow very well. I couldn't feel a poetic rhythm and in general it didn't seem to have any direction. What I felt here was a lot of different statements and ideas upon a theme rather than a poem, and that you could have crafted it more purposefully. The impression I get is that you put the things you thought down without giving it within itself much thought. Not only content wise, but also how the words sit and flow.

In poetry how you taste each word and line is important. It has to balance with itself and the other lines around it. This doesn't necessarily mean even, but it does mean establishing its own unique structure that the reader can feel within themselves as they read it aloud or in their head. What you have seems not to follow any particular structure, for example each of your stanzas seems to want to approach the poem differently. Your first stanza focuses on short quick sentences, but then in the next one there are less lines, but they are also lengthened into longer statements.

Adding onto the chunkiness, the punctuation has a good try, but it isn't always correctly used. I don't think that this is at fault of your own understanding of punctuation, but rather how the poem is in the first place. With your selection of statements here, it is not smooth how they fit together, so I too, would have trouble placing the punctuation in order to smoothly glue it together.

Overall, I think you need to find precisely what you are trying to say and where you want to go with the poem. You need to think to yourself what it is you want to say at the beginning, and what conclusion/feeling you want to leave the reader with at the end. I think too many ideas that are only vaguely related (love which is a broad theme) are used here, and you need to take a more focused approach as to what you want to say. After that is established more clearly and your idea is more refined, you will need to work of your poetic layout; ie, making the words sound musical together. Giving them purpose, flow. The order in which things go in order to convey the story of the message, and how many words are in each line. You could also say things less directly, use metaphors and similes, or just hint at something rather than blatantly say it.

Of all of your stanzas, this one is the one that I liked the best.

It is a river of fire,
and you have to dive into it.
It is something which requires
your life to prove its existence.

Life is too short
to take this step,

There is only one gain and loss here.
The gain is love; the loss is love.

A life without love is a waste,
and love without taking life is a waste.

Hey don~
You have some gorgeous lines here. I think my favorite is:

The closer I get
the farther I am in love.

Love is a test
not a game for fun.

It is something which requires
your life to prove its existence.

It's the relationship between the souls
which even death can't aside.

There is only one gain and loss here.
The gain is love; the loss is love.

A life without love is a waste

Love itself is the biggest question

itself is the answer to it

The closer I get
the farther I am in love.

If the love is true,
even a separation is a union.

But if the love is untrue,
even a union is a separation.

Hi, donizback!

For someone that claims they're not a good poet, this is great! I love how you talk about the overuse of the word "love" (first stanza). It's a pet peeve of mine too and like you said, life is too short to throw around such a strong word. It diminishes it's true power. I especially love the last stanza... it is so true.

I honestly have no critiques or issues - this is great!

XOXO
Anabelle

P.S. Love the title