My Morning - Second Edit

[jdeirmend]

Hi Beaufort,

Welcome! Just gave your poem a couple of passes. First, what I like about it. There are a lot of sensuous particulars, a lot of good description of the world from the narrator's perspective. I enjoyed inhabting that world for a brief moment. To accompany the narrator through the simple, admirably understated, melancholy paces listed was not without its charm.

Where I find the poem most lacking, however, is in the absence of imagery. As you may be aware, the language trope that defines poetry is the image, whether metaphor (typically the combination of a subject and a predicate that usually aren't paired in a simple assertion, i.e., "that fish is a monster!") or simile (generally using the words 'like' or 'as' to combine a subject with a "foreign" predicate, i.e., "the tree shook like a weak-kneed convalescent").

For the most part, images are the business in poetry, because they allow a certain economy of expression. You can say so much with just a few images, particularly when they are stringed together well. Beyond that, they invoke a certain type of aesthetic experience that is characteristically poetic, i.e., wherein we become bewildered by the strange, resonant, ambiguous shapes that meaning/consciousness can take in language.

Anyhow, I'll end the lecture there and refer you to further reading. Let's get to a line-by-line critique for your poem.

My Morning

I sit. I watch. I listen. Unconventional start, but promising.
Night gathers itself, this is an image I tend to enjoy, even if a somewhat cliched one.
Then disappears.
Dawn glows behind
The faded drapes. I would like to see imagery here. How are they faded? Like a newspaper left out in the sun?

The coffee beckons. How does it beckon?
Street noises begin. What do you hear?
The dog barks, unhappy For the rest of the stanza, try and show it in an image, instead of just reporting it.
That he is still in,
And not out.

The bird whistles like a ...
And finds a red berry
High on the bramble bush.
A croaking raven soars into
The cloudless sky of wanting. This is a good image. Notice that wanting is something we don't normally associate with the sky.

I rise. I turn. I pray I like how this echoes the first line in structure and subject matter.
To a god I
Don’t believe in
And hum a hymn
Whose words I can’t remember. I like the befuddled atheism in these lines; it gives us the sense of God not just being non-existent, but rather absent or lost. This is very good IMO.

Carefully I pour
The black and waiting coffee,
Emptying its hotness
Into my grateful mouth.
The cup of salvation, indeed. Another religious reference here. What I'm liking is that salvation is found in something simple and ordinary. 'indeed' feels a little weak, but at the same time, it intimates something I like.

Who mourns the death of one woman? I'm lost here. This seems like a dramatic shift in subject matter. It is disorienting.
The waves turn their backs, This is cool, a good image, but are we at the beach? If so, you may want to establish that earlier on.
Then change their minds. That they are indecisive is good; it echoes the earlier befuddling of the narrator's mind. As with his inner world, so it is without.
The horse’s mane rises up,
The drowsy angels sleep. These two lines seem both potentially good to me but also poorly placed.

This is not my story to tell. I am very befuddled by this closing line. I don't know what this could possibly refer to, if not the story that was just told. But maybe the speaker is getting at something else: as if the world around the speaker is telling the story through the speaker. I don't know, but I suppose it's yours to play with.

I hope that is useful to you, and that the suggestions provoke you to dig into the heart of the poem some more and offer us a compelling revision. Thanks for the read, it was a pleasure.