Eulogy for a Dragonfly

Hello~

You're getting better every time you post one of these.

I really like this one. You're exploring alliteration and multisylabic words that might not have much connotation behind them, but they're still discernible which makes them clear. I really like that about this piece. You're not relying on a limited vocabulary and you're stretching your wings to find the quickest way down, which makes the flow very good as well.

I honestly don't have much to pick at with this poem so I'll start with lines and see if I can find anything in the meaning behind it from there.

With your lines, you need to be careful to include meaning in all of them, not just most of them. I think you're focused pretty closely on your sounds and have let your structure slip a little bit.

I can find no

As a line, this doesn't hold much meaning to the normal person because finding requires something to find, or a direct object. We cannot just end the sentence at "find" so ending the thought there at the end of the line sort of pauses us before we get to these really long words that are nothing like the single syllabic words of the first line.

While you might add syllabication words to the first line to ease the situation I think it would be better to let the line run on a little longer. The reason being because you have a similar problem with "poignant poeticism in" that sort of leaves the poem short. Yes, they're big words, yes, they hold a lot of meaning like sour, sadness, thickness, poetic, poem-like-vibe, and so forth, and they can stand on their own as a phrase like "sad enough language" that isn't much of a thought on it's own either.

Instead, if you combined the two lines and made "I can find no poignant poeticism" as a single line we get the affect of "I can't find my words" which is really what message you're trying to say there.

The reason I left out "In" is because In is a preposition and I feel like it fits better with the noun phrase that comes after it: "the conquered corpse." Prepositional phrases should be with noun phrases. It is part of their construction. You can't just say "I set it on" you have to say what you set it on. If you say something like "I went in" the reason we know what In is referring to is because usually it's the noun phrase that's already been established as a location and it makes complex sentences.

That being said I feel like the better first stanza for this poem would be something like this:

I can find no poignant poeticism
in the conquered corpse,
the dragonfly that lies
with no more life.

This sort of brings me to another topic. "the dragonfly that lies/with no more life" is a pretty rough phrase. We know it's a corpse because you say it is. While I understand you're being poetic with the repetition, you just said that you couldn't find sad poetic phrases from/in the dead dragon fly, but you seem to be doing fine with it. If you want to stick with the idea that you cannot glorify this, then you might want to stick in a word like "dead" instead of "lies/with no more life." because that could be a lot more impaction.

"in the conquered corpse,/the dragonfly that died." <- This sort of thing.

Of course, looking at this sentence, it feels like you've crammed a lot into a small spot. After corpse, you could easily drop a period, but you wouldn't have a preposition, which could be "died" or "dead" or "is dead" even. If you just dropped a period with how you have it now, you could take out "That" and have the sentence "The dragonfly lies/with no more life" which actually is pretty perfect. Lies is an interesting word... Actually I'm going to link you to this Lay and Lie because I'm not sure you need the s on it. You might just need "the dragonfly lie with no more life" bu that sounds awkward.

Moving on!

If you did just drop a period for the comma, you'd still have the issue of being poetic right after you said you couldn't be poetic about it, but I think that's pretty easy to over-look. It's up to you if you want to do so or not, of course.

I really like the second stanza. It really shows you it's a dragonfly without the first stanza. You could cut the first stanza out completely and I'd still know it was a dragonfly.

I'm not really sure about the last stanza. In some ways I like it because of the way you use whittling, but at the same time I don't really like the way you use "away at hope." Hope isn't a physical thing. It's not something we can see. We can see the bejeweled body, we can see the whittling away of decomposition, but we cannot see hope, or inklings, or halidom. Because these words are so crucial to the message of this last stanza, and not some form of image that we can see and assess for ourselves, I'm inclined to dislike it, but it sounds pretty. Because of this, I'm going to suggest that you rewrite the last stanza to include more images of decomposition and less of the mental trauma from the person looking at a dead dragonfly and realizing that everything dies.

Anyway, I hope this helps ^^