on cold nights, the wind blows around your house
singing flute tones in the dark
waiting to ensnare (those who walk out into the snow, listening for music
) in winter the night grows with the ice. so do our dreams (
they walk in the dark and push through into the frozen trees )
- when the border between years grows thin, so do all borders -
listen to the howling, but do not listen to the words
do not follow the music so far that you
cannot find your way back < when the sun begins to rise
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Canary word: Present
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,805 Reviews
Hi paperforest! Just stopping by for a short review today - but feel free to ask me questions about my review if I miss something you wanted thoughts on.
First off, I'm digging the unconventional parenthetical mark placements and especially how it connects with the ideas of capture/listening, ice/indoors, night/day and borders. I think the most evocative line is "when the border between years grows thin" - I really love that, and think that line alone could have given to an expansion of a whole stanza.
The poem has good continuity where it starts and ends with sound, wind, winter imagery - and how the "sun begins to rise" brings a little bit of warmth to the end.
Mainly what I took away from this poem was a mood of unease and of exploring or maybe being forced into new liminal spaces - this came through in the punctuation too - where the sentences are trapped between parenthesis, and yet we find out at the end the speaker (or the speaker's dreams/words) are following or leading the sun. It was a little bit difficult to follow the logic of the middle stanza and trace out the connections - how do dreams connect to music and borders - as a reader I can guess, but I think you could spell it out a little more.
The last stanza had a little bit of a pied piper vibe, and also the same feeling I get reading Robert's Frost "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" a sense of foreboding that the speaker and reader shouldn't follow the wind and winter howling, but should look somewhere else.
Thanks for sharing your poetry!
-alliyah
Thank you so much for the review! I'm glad that you liked the formatting, it was really fun trying to find the right place for it to give the desired effect, which seems to have mostly worked. You're probably right about the middle stanza needing clarification and expansion of the ideas that are stuffed into it, I'll remember that for the future!
You're welcome!
Hi @paperforest I am here to do a review on your poem, first I think this is a good length for how long the lines are.
What Line I like most
I love this line, for there is so much to behind it, I am getting a grate image in my head right now, along with all the sounds, all in all I think the hole thing after this line was grate just like how I imagined it.
What is looking really good
I must say you are really good with describing things, and that's a big part of writing I feel, I think of how you put some line, I must say how you put it all is really good, but there is always a small thing that I will always go through, i must say though that this poem was lovely all the way through.
What need a little work
I am not really shore about this line, its a bit wearied to me, I think it could be a bit better, I think its just one word though, so I will put it down in suggestions for you, and what I Do will be in bold.
Suggestions
on cold nights, the wind blew around your house
Okay so that is all that I can say about this, if I came across as being really harsh and just unfair I am so sorry pleas for give me, So keep up the grate poem writing, I think you did a grate job here, I am looking forward to reading more of your poems, and works if you have any.
@EagleFly out to Seek and Kill
Thanks for the review! What exactly is it about the line you quoted that you find boring, or wearying? Looking back, I can see that it is definitely the most ordinary line in the poem, do you think it should start with something more magical, and why do you think that? And what makes the past tense ("blew") better than the present tense ("blows") here? It's hard to tell because of the formatting and the commanding statements, but the rest of the poem is in present tense. Do you think a past tense there would make it seem as if the "you" of the poem may already have left the house, making the advice unheeded and more ominous? Sorry for all the questions after you've already reviewed, you don't have to answer them if you don't want to, I'm just curious what your thoughts are on this. I've found that one's reactions to a poem and the thought process you go through when coming up with advice can be almost more helpful than the advice itself, because the thought process can be applied to other works and help you grow as a writer, while the advice is specific to the one work. Thanks again!
I really like the concepts and the language of this poem. I like the sort of mystical aspects of it, like the music being enchanting and "ensnaring". What I wonder about is the formatting. It's... well... it's different. I'm not really sure what your intention was with putting parentheses in odd places such as the line "in winter the night grows with the ice. so do our dreams". Was there a reason for the parentheses? Also that symbol "<" at the end line - not sure what that is supposed to represent or why it is there. Are you trying to signify a hyphen "-"?
Another formatting thing I question is the italics in the line "Listen to the howling, but do not /listen to the words/". Not sure what your intention was with the italics. The hyphens that surround the line "when the border between years grows thin, so do all borders", what is the reason for those hyphens?
Now this review might've seemed harsh, but I am only questioning the formatting, not the words themselves. The words themselves are amazing and I love them. If you have specific reasons in mind for why you did some unique things with the formatting, then don't change them, but I was a bit puzzled by your choice of punctuation...
This is a very cool poem... no pun intended.
Hey, thanks for the review! My intention with the odd formatting, apart from just playing around to see how odd I could make it and still have it make sense, was to create a sense of unease to go with the words. So in the last line of the first stanza, that end-parenthesis has dropped from sight in the way the "you" of the poem might disappear if they go out into the dark. In the second stanza it was more to sort of expand the theme of borders, in the way the first line isn't actually within parentheses, yet it still looks caged in, and the hyphens around the line about borders are sort of to represent the thinning borders, they don't hold the words in in the same way that parentheses do. In the last stanza, the italics are sort of to be the wind whispering over the poem's advice, still tempting "you" to listen and go outside. And the < in the last line is the thing I was least sure of, it's sort of just a repetition of the idea of the word "back", and was an attempt to maybe make people read "cannot find your way back" a second time, like an echo. I don't think that worked.
Thanks again for the review, I can intend all I want but that doesn't matter if it isn't clear in the poem itself, so if I decide to edit this, I'll definitely make it make more sense!