It Has Worsened

Hello, druhibhargava! This is a decent poem you have here - great job! It's emotional and powerful in the fashion by which you depict a scene of loneliness that the narrator is experiencing. Clearly, they're not in a pleasant environment, and the manner in which you contrasted their feeling cold and numb to the warmth of confiding and being with others is done well. It's a sharp contrast, and beautifully conveyed throughout the piece. Your sense of repetition is also fantastic, particularly in the middle of the poem, as you describe the narrator's sensations of hopelessness and abandonment in a situation where they cannot find help. My favorite part of this piece had to be "so cold/so numb ever before," as it's another case of evocative repetition that starts this poem on a high note by crafting the depressing and dark tone of the piece and emphasizing the core conflict. Naturally, seeing how the line is so pivotal, it would be terrible if you were to go about it in an awkward or inappropriate fashion, but that doesn't happen. It works, and you should be proud of that, because it's one of the crowning moments of this poem.

On the other hand, I think there were a few things that didn't work. First, I'd like to point out that capitalizing the first word of every line, which likely a formal rule pertaining to poems, is nevertheless something I don't exactly like. Usually, it feels odd because sets of different lines communicate different trains of thoughts, and interspersing those trains of thoughts, which I can compare to sentences, with capitalized words doesn't work that well. Thus, I'd suggest capitalizing the first words of lines that begin a particular train of thought, and staring all the other components of that train of thought in lowercase letters. I feel similarly about your usage of periods in this work, as it tends to interrupt your ideas and trains of thoughts and leaves me confused and unsure about the direction of the poem. In that case, I'd suggest ending your train of thought with a period, and incorporating commas in the remainder of the lines. For instance, "It isn't healthy anymore./Keeping everything inside,/Never showing a single emotion to another." could probably be made to "It isn't healthy anymore,/keeping everything inside,/never showing a single emotion to another.

The last thing I'd like to state is, unfortunately, not nearly as simple or easy to resolve. Basically, the poem didn't really jump at me. It was decent, and the emotional picture was nice. However, when it came to your ability to tell me a vivid and descriptive story, this fell flat. The descriptions of loneliness, warmth, and coldness, and being broken, are all nicely constructed, but weren't exactly unique. The ending was actually fairly nice, but wow, that was long in comparison to the other lines, and it didn't exactly end the poem on the firmest of notes. With that in mind, I invite you to experiment. Come up with metaphors, similes, use your senses, provide some context. What is the background behind this loneliness? What emotions, memories, and sensations can it be connected to? What kinds of figurative language, whether personification or hyperbole or everything in between, can make this piece come alive? I'd also suggest perhaps separating the end into two pieces, or finding another ending line so that this poem might conclude on a more evocative note. It just came across as a little weak and lackluster, and didn't really tie together the key concepts of the poem.

Regardless, all in all, this is a decent poem. I enjoyed reading it from start to finish, and I love your sense of emotional and character development. While I'd suggest working on your arrangement of thoughts and experimentalism (and that title. "It Has Worsened" seems correct, but a little awkward. Perhaps "It's Been Getting Worse"?), I'm still fairly impressed with what I see. Thanks for presenting this work!

Hello.

Right now, this piece is pretty "top level". As in, it does a good job of summarizing the generalities of the feelings, but it lacks the specifics to really make it pop. I'm faced with a list of feelings that would require me to bring a whole bunch of information to the game, when this piece could go so much farther and make me feel something instead of relying on what I could bring to the table.

The thing about poetry is it's so much stronger when there's something concrete about it. When you have some tension between an established external force, cultural norm, or situation, and the internal feelings. If this piece unpacked the situation and created that sense of conflict, there would be something for readers to hold onto and, in turn, feel more deeply.

Right now, there just isn't enough meat on these bones for me to feel satisfied. There's the potential here, for how the general sense of feeling alone and broken is relatable, but I don't know how to relate to it because the poem doesn't give me anything as a clue. In a sense, concrete details that ground the poem in reality are simply guides to tell us how to relate to the poem and what feelings to call up. When it's nebulous like this, it's hard to know what to think.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey

This is Kaos here for a review!

A small note before I actually get into the contents of the review. There aren't any stanzas here and I don't know if they were intended to be or not, so I'm just going to say that if you leave "~" in between stanzas, the reader will know more of what you're talking about and will be able to know the structure of the poem better.

I haven’t been so cold,

So numb ever before.

No source of heat,

Nothing to keep me warm.

I sit here by myself.

All alone.

There is no one to talk to,

No one to listen to,

No one to seek comfort from

No one is here at all.

It isn’t healthy anymore.

Keeping everything inside,

Never showing a single emotion to another.

It’s leaving me broken.

All of this is leaving me unhappy, unimportant, and unfixable.