gifted child, great student, good son

Hi, Eulogy! Awesome poem! This really encapsulates the "gifted kid" experience.

Your entire poem, in my opinion, flows really well, but I especially adore the connections between parts i and v. You set up that the speaker isn't allowed to feel negative emotions. It pays off wonderfully in part v, where the parents (I assume) get onto the speaker for being tired. I like the irony in part v too, connecting to parts iii and iv. The parents say, "you're always slacking," but the reader sees that this is blatantly false.

Keep it up!

This is ambitious. I want to open with a few questions and thoughts, not as prescriptions, but as points of conversation. There’s a core in this poem that really wants to be seen. but I think, at times, the structure and voice struggle against it.

i.
You open with a thesis of expectation: existence as prophecy. It’s effective in its directness, and the rhetorical repetition of “great” comes close to home. It carries generational weight. That said, the rhythm feels so tight, so controlled, that I wonder if it could benefit from less constraint. Stylistically, tonally. The insistence becomes overwhelming, which may be intentional (?), but there’s a line between showing overwhelm and numbing the reader. Is the tone meant to reflect indoctrination? pressure? or conviction?

The final two lines here gesture toward a kind of capitalist perpetual motion machine, "great people do not take a break," and this felt like your most biting moment. What would happen if you let the poem pause here? Now, it rolls directly into the next section without enough time for the reader to metabolize that brutality.

ii.

This is one of the strongest sections, I think.

Naming becomes anchoring. You tie language, identity, distance, and expectation in a way that’s clean but emotionally loaded. “Expulsion” is such a clever word choice, it turns birth into violence. That tension of naming-as-salvation versus naming-as-cage is so potent. If you were to revise anywhere, I’d suggest looking at the latter half (“so far from your birthplace... namesake”), since it leans a little too much into abstraction, and it might benefit from one concrete image. What does that “shred of self” look like? Is it literal or metaphorical?

iii.
This is where the rawness steps forward. Your repetition of “my accolades, my honors, my awards,” mimics the cadence of a resume, but it’s hollow. Intentional, I assume. Still, something about this stanza feels like it wants to break form but doesn’t yet know how. I’d love to see you let this section fracture a little more, maybe stagger the lines or distort the syntax. The content here is about unraveling, but the poem’s shape doesn’t reflect that unraveling yet.

iv.
There is brilliant use of ellipses here. The disjointedness mirrors how institutional praise often sounds: impersonal, cut-and-paste. but there’s also a danger in relying too much on this tactic. It can dull the effect if overused. The “schorlarly” typo, if it’s intentional, was such a good touch. If it’s unintentional, consider keeping it. It adds humanity. I do wonder, could this section be formatted like a performance review? What if you experimented more boldly with typographical mimicry, like italics for teacher comments or line breaks mid-phrase to imitate scanning a document? I think that could be interesting here.

v.
This was quite the closing. Your dialogue here is stark and intimate, and the shift into “he” was particularly effective. It's distancing the self just enough to see how painful it’s become to inhabit. I think as well that “the life-light” is a strange, uncanny phrase. It’s slightly awkward, but in a way that works. I think what’s missing right now is trust in that strength. You don’t need to stylize every section equally.

Hm. Yes, I liked this overall, but I see areas you could revise. Each Roman numeral almost feels like a new piece altogether, cohesive in tone but not necessarily connected through a visual or sonic logic. That’s not inherently bad, but it raises a question about intentionality. Why five sections? Why this structure? Why this break between iv and v, which feels like a hard shift from indirect commentary to dialogue and a kind of theater of internalized abuse? Questions, questions. Narrow down what you want to accomplish with this.

Hope this helps.

hello! i liked this poem.

It vibes well and feels almost graphic at times.

I think the weakest stanza is iv. It isn't bad but it could be better.

It needs to exist for the poem to flow and to prove the gifted/burnoutness of the perspective character. but it could've probably been written in a clearer way. I'm not sure what that would be, but if you ever do a second draft of this poem its something to keep in mind.