Man's woman

Hello sagnik,

I'm Aley and I'm here to review your poem. I will start by saying that I think you have a good subject matter. The way you described the subject you were approaching, and what you chose to include about he story of Adam and Eve shows that you have a solid understanding of what you wish to talk about and where your interest lie with the subject itself. I think this is a very good thing to have. The hazard of being too many places at once is not something you're going to struggle with in your poetry because you're very focused when you write.

The places where I see you needing improvement mostly are in your word choices, your punctuation, and your flow of the poem. These things are holding the poem back from reaching to its full potential. I know that many people on here really like religious poetry. It gets put into the literary spotlight a lot. If you clean up these things, I'm sure yours will end up there too.

The first thing I'd like to point out is word choice. Part of this comes with grammar and punctuation, so I'm going to try to explain it the best I can and hope that when your second reviewer shows up, they will be able to fill any gaps I missed in my explanation. I'll start with the more obvious and work to the less obvious. Right now you're using "to" in a way that I've not heard it used before. This could be because you've got a different dialect of English than I do, or because you haven't developed a clear understanding of what exactly people are saying when spit out phrases, or it could simply be because you were tired and didn't realize what you were typing. Either way, I'll point it out for you.

Eve shared her food to Adam.

Usually I would expect "with" in the place of "to" because that's how I'm used to hearing it. I'm telling you this because I know that I read and hear it said this way more often than your way, which means my way is potentially closer to standard english. There is another word like this where you do the same thing and that is "as" which makes me think it's a dialect thing.

"As" might be a typo though because you have a comma, right in front of it. Anyway I would expect "Woman was born out of man" instead of what you have on your second line.

Aside from those two, there were no real obvious oddities with the language, but there were some things I'd like to say about the unobvious. I feel like when you wrote this you weren't intending it to be a piece for people to read as a conversational voice. It sounds too old for that. You use words and phrasing that I think is supposed to harken back to the language in the bible such as "Until cursed Lord God" but it misses the effect you're looking for because this is a poem, and we are expecting something more conversational. If you choose to maintain this language, you might want to read the bible you're using for the language a couple more times and pick up on exactly how they say things because the line I quoted in this paragraph, sounds to me like God was cursed due to the verb being directly before God as the direct object, thus resulting in God being cursed. Little things like that are going to make it easier to read and understand without pausing to wonder exactly what you meant.

Onto the next thing you can improve, and this one will be a bit shorter: grammar and punctuation.

First off, I want to say that I really like that you're not putting punctuation at the end of every line. You have three lines that doesn't have punctuation at the end, and to me that shows you're planning and thinking about what you want to do with your lines and punctuation. Too many times people just put complete sentences on lines and don't explore the beauty of enjambment. Right now, I think your biggest problem is that you're capitalizing the beginning of every line. This makes it feel off-balanced for me and even though it goes with the harkening back to older language, you don't have the rhyming that would be necessary for it to be considered an "old style" poem. I'll talk more about that when we get to flow. Right now, I feel like you're on the edge of looking at punctuation in a new light. That's why I'm going to keep this one paragraph and just provide you with a couple links that might be able to help you explore all of your options as a modern day poet writing in an old language.

Poetry and Punctuation
Capitalization in Poetry
ABC's of Punctuation in Poetry

The only other thing I'd like to say about your punctuation is that usually the comma will go after the word, not before the next word. Basically "Disunity, constancy, treachery?" rather than what you have. You do it right when your commas are at the end of a line, so I think it might just be quick typing.

Onto flow.

If you look at things like The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and those sorts of books, they have a strict meter and stanza style that goes along with their cantos. Here, you don't have stanzas, and you don't have a meter.

Part of fixing this is just going to be rewriting it again and again until you find something that works right. There's little you can do about a poem that's lost it's flow after edits, or a poem that's poor with flow to begin with. Rewriting can actually be a blessing though because you get to explore new avenues, use your own unique language choices, create new and interesting ideas, and most of all, develop a better bond with the poem. When you're writing poetry, the best thing to help with flow is to read it out loud. The more you read your poems aloud, the better feel you'll have for the cadence of your words, where to put the punctuation, how you want your enjambment to work, and what you want to use as your basic beat.

If you're having trouble understanding what I mean by flow, I would strongly suggest that you read more poetry out loud. Listen to spoken word poetry, listen to poets reading their poetry, and read along with them, then try to read your own too. This will help you develop a firmer understanding just like writing and reading your own work.

The reason I think you're having trouble with flow is because you have lines that work, like your last line, but they're muddled together with lines that sound nothing like it. Perhaps you just weren't thinking about flow, but it is a big deal especially in a preachy poem like this one where you're using the preachy nature of it to develop a speech to God. The more you develop your flow and rhythm in the poem, the better it is going to sound. Someone who is great at getting a really good flow with words that don't really mean what you think they mean by the end of it is Edgar Allen Poe. He focused almost purely on the response and emotional responses his readers felt. Because of this, sometimes he has sentences that really don't mean much, but they sound amazing, and he's a very popular poet because of it.

In summary, I think you have a really good subject matter. You're working towards something that's going to be a very powerful piece, and I'm sure that you'll make it shine. There are some things you need to work on, but we all work on a lot of stuff at once. I'm hoping that with this honey-do list you can pick and choose what you want to work on, ask around and see what other people think, and then begin towards perfecting your craft one by one. The more you read, the more you'll see. I hope you keep it up and continue to explore the many wonderful articles and features we have on YWS for working on improving your poetry.

Aley.