Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
125,018 Literary Works • 672,855 Reviews
Oh me oh my. Let's dig in and review, shall we?
I suppose I'll go by sections of lines, since we've got no stanzas in this work. To begin with, though, I believe this is a quality piece of work and I actually like it quite a bit. With that stated, let's begin.
Lines 1-4 - I like your imagery, slight though it may be, but "warm moon" confuses me; it doesn't seem like a good combination of terms. To be frank, the phrase seems out of place with the rest of the terminology in the poem, which is rather cold in nature - not necessarily emotionally cold, but portraying of wintry things. I think that you did well with the alliteration in "jolly joyful jamboree" and (for once) don't think you absolutely need to add the proper comma between jolly and joyful, and I think even the slight redundancy with jolly/joyful is a nice little addition.
Lines 5-8 - There shouldn't be a comma after "vase" at the end of line 5; it's just an out-of-place pause that puts me out of the rhythm of the piece. That's a personal thing, but it's very off-setting for me, not to mention ungrammatical. I also feel like at line 7 ("Stop the living...") it needs to begin with some pronoun or other - "we" or "I" or "they" or "you" or something, anything at all - not only to maintain the natural rhythm of the piece but to be grammatical with the semicolon used in line 6. In line 8 I feel like the comma after "die" is also out of place and off-setting. I think most of my issues with this poem as it is so far are grammatically-based - and rhythm. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. You established a steady beat in the first four lines and then you add unnecessary pauses that throw the reader off.
Lines 9-12 - I think the comma at the end of line 9 needs to turn into a semicolon (both for grammatical reasons and for the very slight length to the pause it would add; again I'm trying to work with the natural rhythm this is giving me). The last two lines... confuse me. They seem out of place. We get this nice natural cycle in the first ten lines - life and death, roses, suns and moons and snowfalls, and then we get this moral-of-the-story kind of thing pushed upon us. While it's not AS out of place as it could be, I really don't feel like it belongs. If you're intent on keeping it so, however, I'll point-blank say that line 12 feels awkward with the "so" jammed in there to keep rhythm. It ends up sounding cheesy, to me. Even replacing the "so" with "as" or "this" not only preserves better rhythm, but it keeps the reader better within the poem and it isn't - for me - as jarring or cheesy as "so".
Overall, it's beautiful, it's wonderful, it's just those last two lines that really get to me. They get under my skin and itch away at me. Itch, itch, itch. Either that or I have fleas, and I'd like to think I'd notice those.
Keep writing. ;D