The harsh sun has set below the horizon,
and the night is strangely calm and still,
but the desert air has an ominous chill.
The village stands deathly quiet and dark,
apart from a hut in the center of the town,
huddled in the house, the people look
down.
A man stands in their midst reading an old scroll,
he is as white and pale as the night's full moon.
He looks up and whispers, “It will come
soon.”
The people all shift and murmur to one another as
he proceeds to read a verse from the paper roll,
the villagers gasp at the serpent coiled
on the scroll.
“Something is coming to scatter the sands.
To rake the earth with its flaming breath.
Coming to spread destruction and death.”
“Awakened from its one thousand year sleep,
it has come to seek revenge for a spell that was said,
and won’t stop until every last human being is dead."
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Canary word: Present
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125,021 Literary Works • 672,738 Reviews
Heya, Fel! Casanova here with another review!
To start off I would like to say this is interesting, and a bit better than your second installment of this poem. You combine imagery, a bit of emotion, story telling, and dialogue in the same thing. And guess what? You actually come out with something decent. This one I'll be taking bit by bit, or stanza by stanza.
Here your dreadful rhyming continues, but it's not too bad in this stanza. I like it somewhat, so props for that.
The,"looking down," part struck me as weird. Shouldn't they be cautious instead of hiding their heads in what seems to be shame? It feels like this was to keep the rhyme scheme going.
The last line seems to be just to keep the rhyme scheme going. I would say cut it,and the rhyming, and you would have something really decent.
Okay, here's where I nitpick. You first describe it as,"a paper roll," then as a,"scroll." A scroll is usually made of parchment, and not of paper. Two entirely different materials, and this seems to be only to keep the rhyming going.
I have nothing to critique on this line, I actually love them and think they fit well.
These lines seem to have meaning behind them, and the fact that their dialogue is even better. Keep THAT up.
Anyway, that's all I have to say on this one. I hope this helped, even a little.
Keep on doing what you're doing, and keep on keeping on.
Sincerely, Matthew Casanova Aaron
This is Kaos here for another review!
The parts keep getting weaker and weaker for me, and I've re-looked over it and I think that the second part is the most well-rounded in what it's doing. This one is my least favorite out of the ones that I've read, and I'll explain why. I'm not going to jump on you about the structure, but I will on the rhyme, which I still feel is a little elementary. What I mean by this is that it doesn't really try to do anything inventive or strong and is just there. It's basic, like rhyming "cook" and "book", and it's nothing really revolutionary, but the only reason I haven't been like "take it out" fully is because it doesn't really weigh down on the work either. It's just /there/.
I want to touch on the punctuation this time because it's something I haven't really. The punctuation of your work matters, it's one of those small things that eventually adds up and makes all the difference, so put more of a focus on it. Use it to your advantage to make things more powerful and to change them up. The difference between a semicolon and a period can change how things are read and perceived by the reader. The lines do a lot of building onto each other and I suggest to do this, have there be a base line and then the other lines add onto that. Another thing I suggest is ending lines as soon as they start to make them have more power or importance to them.
As far as the narrative goes, in this part we get to hear about the prophecy. The story that's being told itself gets less and less of something fresh and more and more into something that's been told before. Prophecies are a boring thing to implement into stories because they happen to have a lot of flaws running through them and they've been done from the inside out. It's generic and doesn't really do anything new, but if you did end up doing something new with it, I would be more interested.
Something like the prophecy being fake and just the thoughts of the people or it was someone trying to get publicity and that the serpent really won't end up taking that path. If you're going to take the route that I think you're going to, then why does the serpent want to do this? We still haven't seen inside the head of the serpent or what its motives are. Why was the serpent asleep for one thousand years? Did this happen before? There are a lot of questions and holes that still need to be answered and filled. The prophecy in itself is nothing special, so there's nothing really to comment on it.
I hope I helped and have a great day!