Princess Of The Sand Castle

Just because it is a poem doesn't mean it doesn't have to have punctuation! Ellipses area all fine and dandy, but commas and periods are lovely. Oh and I liked the title, and the rest of the poem was good too. I apologize for my rant about punctuation. Keep Writing!

Hello!

I really enjoyed the streamlined narrative of this. I'm the kind of person who likes to read poems with the mentality that they're no different from a prose story, so the systematic logic of the thought process and the breakdown throughout this appealed to me.

I was thinking of increasing hopelessness as I read, with the castle as childhood or innocence or something that the outside world shatters the pretty illusion of.

As far as changes and improvements go, I agree with your reviewer who advised to take out or at least limit the ellipses. I don't believe that you're using them incorrectly; my problem is that there were so many of them. Any repeated method of punctuation becomes formulaic, and the side-effect of that is that the mark loses its intended effect because the reader becomes too accustomed to seeing it.

You've also got a typo:

"i wonder why she always smiles while seeing them react"

Good attempt but I don't like the ellipses, it would be better just to break them up into individual lines unless there is another way around the problem. The imagery isn't particularly deep but then not every poem has to have shedloads of imagery to make it work. Personally i'm not a fan of the rhyming scheme but then I prefer more irregular and abstract rhyming anyway so this is purely a personal preferance and you don't need to change that because it works nicely in this context. Overall I thought it was pleasant to read and I think that you have a lot of potential.

Hello there! You don't seem to have many reviews which is a shame because this is quite nice so let's see if I can correct this First off, a few specific comments:

the castle's breaking..she's just watching.. [You may want to start with a capital letter as most people like to see good grammar used in poetry! Also, drop the ellipses. They're more a prose thing and really don't help you out here. If you want to indicate a pause, use a dash. They're sharper and more powerful and all the cool poets like Emily Dickinson use them!]
she's trembling.. she couldn't do anything.. [Oh you've changed tense here, try to avoid that! You started in present so stick to it, couldn't should be can't.]
her dream had has suddenly disappeared..
and now she's troubled and feared.. [Nice use of rhyme, that was actually quite subtle which is always good and the flow is working rather well for you. I would like to see some stronger imagery or any at all really. You don't give the reader much to visualise or at least this is too vague for us to really know what the castle should look like. Similes or metaphors are good or even just some more adjectives. It's a case of telling rather than showing which is something you'll probably hear a lot here but basically, instead of saying she's trembling, you could write something like: Her skeleton rattles like an old radiator.]

she's waiting while watching the stars glow..
thinking someone out there will lead the flow.. [A little too obvious with those rhymes this time. Maybe go for a half rhyme or an internal rhyme, they're often more effective and sneaky!]
i wonder why she always smiles while seeing them react..
though mockers pointing to her back.. [Again, maybe try for a better rhyme or lose it altogether. Poetry doesn't have to rhyme and it's not doing you much good here as there's no rhythm to back it up and no attempt to integrate it into the flow of the poem.]

Alright so overall it isn't a bad attempt but you need to have more images and make this more interesting for your reader. It's cute and I like your title, though 'Sand-Castle Princess' would be more concise. But you do need to read some more poetry and experiment a bit more. A fun task to try which might help you with your imagery, is to choose an object or a scene and stand there for fifteen minutes, looking at it and write down absolutely everything that comes to mind. Then once you're done, you cross out all the obvious ideas, like if you chose the sun and came up with fire, and you take the interesting ones and make a poem out of them. Maybe for just a moment you looked at the sun and you thought of a mother's protective gaze? It's maybe not an amazing image but it's certainly better than fire!

Well good luck and I hope you find some of this useful,

Heather xxx

Thanks so much. I need more of your comments to solidify my work.
I did some changes and I plan to formalize it soon... I still need your help...

Thanks for the comment dancingmangos.. Very good analysis.

This is really beautiful. It seemed to me like the girl was frozen in a state of cracking walls in her head. As in, she has constructed a fragile, but sturdy existence in her mind, and now it's breaking down and she has no idea what to do. This actually makes me think this is an abuse victim; whether by society or someone closer, I don't know. Almost like Stargirl; have you ever heard of it?
If you could use some different wording and punctuation, this could make an even bigger impact. Maybe no extra periods, to solidify the seriousness of it. When you use the extra periods, it makes it seem like it's a dream, as if she's drifting in and out of a coma or something.
Overall though, I liked it :]