Strength:
Choice of words and presence of rhymes elevate their meaning, making the reader feel the positivity the poem seeks to evoke.
Weakness:
There is a form followed, but not fully followed, which sabotages its flow and how effective it is in helping readers feel and enunciate.
Suggestions:
1. Either follow the form consistently (whether it be in terms of syllables or lines per stanza) or embrace free-verse.
(If latter, I recommend placing the line cut after "into a sensation of physical warmth". Only use enjambment*-type line cuts when making readers ask questions, e.g. "physical what?" or else it reads awkwardly. Most poems that follow a form with rhyme schemes place line cuts after rhyming words, but even without the line cuts, rhymes are easily noticed by our ears.)
2. Consider the use of commas to indicate pauses or rhymes not at the end of the lines.
3. Be consistent with the punctuations! In terms of punctuation marks, choose if: Periods only, commas and periods only, or no punctuations. In terms of usage: For separating ideas only, for indicating how it is to be read out loud, or compliant to grammatical usage.
Technical term:
*Enjambment- A line cut that doesn't come after a comma or period (when using punctuations) or where a comma or period should be (when using punctuations partially or not at all).
You know good words fit for inspirational writing. Keep improving.
From the get go and sustained til the end, this poem's tone resounds active resilience. Heroic romanticism is used, as well as free-verse line cuts and reduced punctuation.
I found the line cuts helpful in regulating the tone. The capitalization likewise aided in that respect, complementary to minimal punctuation. Even without conventional punctuation, clauses make sense.
Area for improvement:
My only reservation is the difference in sentence structures towards the end of the poem. Sentence length per se doesn't concern me. However, the poem begins with tighter, more concise and consequentially poetic phrasing.
Comparisons and close reading-
"Soul-mates, inmates, primates blown off in a whirlwind" is without a predicate but reads as a full sentence. "Are" could be added between soul-mates, etc. (subject) and blown off, etc. (predicate) to make a full sentence, but at the poem's current wording, omitting certain words strengthen the tone.
This also works in a larger scale, where the second stanza functions implicitly as the predicate to the whirlwind or storm. The over-clarification by grammatical conventions is not only unnecessary, but will undermine the stanza's current phrasing.
Suggested action:
Meanwhile in the latter part of the poem, there seems to be an authorial attempt to explain the poem causally. We see phrases such as "to stop" and "so that" whereas the latter could be shortened to "so" and the former stripped of the purposive word "that" and converted into "Nations galvanized... stop the bleeding of the downtrodden!" It is tighter, less prosaic, and the words after the ellipsis can be read as a battle cry.
Personal note:
Hello to a fellow Filipino writer! Welcome to WDC.
Received the impression that this was an essay, though I felt its rhetorical impact using repetition, irony, and twists. Very well written with an important message. Acknowledges multiple sides, raises questions, and in spite of its concerns, refuses to be paralyzed, instead reassures the readers who have taken their time to read.
(This is genre-bending, but I hope that's fine.)
Once upon a time there was a clock. Everyday, it went tick-tock. One day, it suddenly stopped. Because of that, time didn't stop. Until finally, someone replaced the battery.
I like the shift from "But I cannot sleep, I have duties to keep" to "I feel weariness creep, I have duties to keep". The last lines of both stanzas remain the same, but something has changed. And I like the change because, while in the first what I only get a sense of from the person is duty, in the reiteration I feel the weariness and the stress between that and duty. The first stanza introduces a condition of humans, the second stanza presents a human condition. I like it. :)
A story told concisely yet dramatically, simply yet climactically. The turn so built-up throughout the entirety of the poem is emphasized and literally re-introduced at the end of the poem, craftfully in the form of a letter: It began with "Dear Best..." and concluded with "love, your Ex".
On another note, I hope all is well with the writer. You write fine poetry. :)
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