11-26-2014, 11:56 PM
(11-26-2014, 07:29 PM)makeshift Wrote: A silver bell hovers
above the skylight— -- These 2 lines can be trimmed and streamlined a little more. Maybe 'Silver bell / above skylight' and some edit to the following lines?
louder in the earth
than my ears. -- These 2 lines don't do much for me. To be honest I'm confused. The first 2 lines suggest a lack of movement, but these 2 lines jump into an action right away. I believe this is a problem with wording, and a change in the word choice would make this stanza stronger.
It sinks, -- 'Sinking' gives the image a more dynamic feel to it rather than the static 'It sinks'.
slowly through the ceiling -- 'Slowly' is redundant here, since the image of a dime descending is already slow. The tone set in the first stanza also helps make the descend slow already.
like a dime descending
to the ocean floor -- Beautiful image.
then engulfs the colour -- Unfortunately, the grammar pretty much kills the poignant image. Run-on sentences can be used to great effect, especially when you want to evoke a sense of breathlessness or an endlessness of some sort. In this case, I think short sentences work better. This applies to the poem as a whole.
off the off-white walls
washed in my lamp’s vanilla cast -- Once again, the image is beautiful, but I believe editing the grammar and cleaning up the sentence syntax will make it so much stronger.
and piece by piece -- 'and' is redundant.
pulls the whole house -- This may be just my interpretation, but I think the sense of time passing is extremely important to your poem. As such, attaching an -ing suffix to your verbs can help convey that. So instead of 'pulls', 'engulfs', and 'sinks', try 'pulling', 'engulfing', and 'sinking'. Just a thought.
between it's lips.
Only me and it remain—
a sunless earth
stalked by the moon. -- Cliche! Also, so far the whole poem has been zooming in. From the sky, into a small portion of the ocean, and into your house. There is no need to zoom out into space! There is still one more stanza to go! This breaks the consistency that you've built up so nicely.
I feel it's concaves -- its. Also, concaves is not a word. Using non-words is fine, but the usage has to make sense. In this case, I don't think it's justified. 'Rough curves' maybe? Or 'Round edges'?
colliding with mine.
like two tectonic plates
uncompleting each other, -- 'Uncompleting' is not a word. Once again, I don't think the usage of a non-word is justified.
a hole inside a hole. -- This last stanza is when you get to zoom out. Well, it's a good poem, and I do think editing it will make it way better. Of course, my interpretation may be all wrong, but I hope it helps either way!
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