Hi silver,
thought I'd stop by to leave a quick review -
so first off congrats on your first poem! If this is really your first piece, that's incredible! My first poem was not nearly this good. A few things I always look for in a poem (that I think are pretty much constants in poems that are engaging to read) are 1) Does the poem offer some sort of narrative or conflict 2) Is the poem specific in a way that connects to human experience and 3) Does the poem use unique poetic devices. And I think you cover each of these in some way, so you've got a good basis here.
Let's take a look at a few of those
Narrative/Conflict
The overall conflict is pretty clear that the speaker is really struggling with sadness and even some self-hatred, there's a whole range of negative emotions that are coming from all directions and really pressing the speaker into a dark place.
An issue, is I think you almost offer to many facets of the emotion, that it's hard to get one clear story here. Is the issue that they don't experience empathy, that they're afraid, that they're sad, that they don't know who they are, that they don't like themselves... for some reason it doesn't feel like the poem connects those different threads so it doesn't end up feeling cohesive and I don't really get a full sense of this speaker's conflict. I'd narrow the focus a bit.
As far as narrative development - I don't feel like the poem moves very much, I think if it was set up for the speaker to have some self-discovery by the end, or come to some sort of conclusion the poem would resonate more.
Specificity
You use quite a bit of specificity in the piece which helps us to understand what's going on, rather than just saying "I'm sad" you dive in more and offer metaphors and deeper insights into the speaker's emotional state.
I also appreciated the specificity in the images you used - like the water imagery at the beginning, which I think would have been neat to pull back into the ending.
Poetic Devices
You utilize some rhyme in the poem, that I didn't notice too much, but it did add some nice rhythm and flow to the piece.
You really utilize metaphor well too, with the idea of the "monster" that you bring through the poem.
Other comments
A big area of potential growth is that there are some lines in this poem that just don't make sense grammatically/logically. I recommend that you read the piece out loud and try to identify where the different thoughts are broken up - adding some more punctuation may help in some places, but really I think it's the structure of some of the sentences that were difficult to follow.
Take the opening sentence for instance,
Diving in the waves of summer
Who could ever, who could wonder
About the follies dwelling so very under
That says, "Diving in water who could ever who could wonder about follies dwelling so very under" --> "who could ever" just doesn't make sense in there since you already have "who could" and ending it in "so very under" is an awkward way to phrase that. There were other issues in here too with phrasing being a bit unnatural, I think reading through outloud will help you out though. You may even want to try re-writing without a rhyme scheme as an experiment to see if it frees you to make the phrasing smoother and add clarity to the narrative. It could be worth a try, even if just for an experiment.
Good luck in editing!
alliyah
Points: 144525
Reviews: 1227
Donate