Sweet Carcosa

Hello, My Friend!

Pleasure to meet you! I am Raven, and after stumbling on this gem in the older works of the Green Room, I hoped to bring it the attention it deserves with a quick review. Hope you don't mind!

To start, I'd like to admit that I am lacking the context of the stories you mentioned (though you have very much piqued my interest!), so I do hope that won't impact this review and it still serves you well.

And my gosh, is this poem A-MA-ZING!! Carcosa, this place or entity—what feels like this embodiment of sin and madness, and what a purpose it serves! The contrast between the narrator's experience in their youth and adulthood feels so stark and really spoke to this realistic, very fine line that exists in reality as well—the line between responsibility, and just living a dull life.

*ahem* As far as a technical review goes, I don't really have anything to recommend! Great metric, wording, and of course substance. This was awesome!

As far as some favorite lines and parts go, hmm...I would go with:

When I was young, I dwelled in you.
As I grew older, oh how I rue,
those days I hath forsaken you.

They thought that they were liberated
Each slip and crack in masks, they hated
Everyone a prisoner of their own design
O sweet Carcosa, I wish to be thine

I had never heard of Carcosa before, so when I read your comment, I was excited to put The King in Yellow on my reading list! I really enjoyed this poem as it was beautifully written and provided fuel for my brain to conceptualize amazing visuals. I have hyperphantasia, so those types of poems are the best in my opinion. For this poem, I imagined Carcosa as an island covered in fog and whenever it receives a visitor, the fog bends to adjust to what the visitor would like the most. So, Carcosa looks different to everyone. I would also like to say that I relate to the feelings that this poem speaks to. I know what it is like to feel trapped by the expectations of this society and having to hide one's true self to be accepted. I have long since abandoned many of these expectations and have been on a journey to return to Carcosa. I loved the way you described people hiding themselves as using white masks and being dictated by grey reasoning. I found the color choice for the masks here quite interesting as white is usually associated with purity, but also with erasure. People seek to present themselves as pure and without sin, but that is ultimately a lie. We erase ourselves when we do not accept that we are flawed and will be so for the rest of our lives. To embrace our flaws is to be human. I would say that the color white here is also quite a fawner color. White is well known to reflect the most light out of all the colors, meaning that it can be interpreted as desperate to please. It wants to showcase all the other colors and refuses to absorb any of them, leading to an ironic lack of color. People are so focused on pleasing others that they lose their color in the process. I hope that we can all embrace Carcosa and not be so preoccupied with unimportant opinions. I loved this poem very much and hope to see more of what you write.

Critiques: Add a comma to the first and second lines, "O sweet Carcosa, I call out to you, please take me in./The Land of Madness, Death, and Sin".

In the ninth line, I suggest to change "The others" to "The lost". "The lost lied calling your prisons thus".

In the third line, change the tense of rue to rued as you are speaking of the past. "As I grew older, oh how I rued,/those days I hath forsaken you".

In the tenth line, add "than" and remove "the". "None are more free than those they called prisoners".

In the fourteenth line, add commas and change "when" to "where" for subject agreement. "Where there, I for your madness, pined".

In the fifteenth line, to make it sound less clunky, say: "All the people hid behind white masks". You don't need to say there again as you just referred to it in the last line.

In the twentieth line, add "the". "Each slip and crak in the masks, they hated".

Oooo this is gorgeous and haunting! Love the last two stanzas especially. Well done! <3

Carcosa has been on my mind ever since I read The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, which is quite the interesting collection of short stories for anyone interested. So I thought I would give my thoughts on madness using the voice of sweet and lost Carcosa.