A poem for Twelfth Night

[MAE27]

MAE27,

I was kind of hoping this had something to do with Shakespeare's 12th Night, but... 

Even as accentual verse only the first two stanzas work very well, the rest kind of devolves into a puddle of mush. Generally a sign of someone with little or no training in meter and trying to muscle it through by ear. Well, we've all been there. The first idea is to make each succeeding stanza mimic the first stanzas in form, at least in this sort of poem. So look at the first stanza, it starts off fairly well:

"Your sparkly baubles dangle,
Sad droopy tree,
Your star is staring down,
On a needle sea."

The only thing keeping this from being in iambic is the extra syllable in the form of the "a" in line four, which is not even needed. We'll make no mention of the half foot in L1 as it doesn't really bother much. However if you could correct that along with the extra "a". Then we would have three feet of iambs followed by two feet (an iamb is a two syllable foot consisting of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable). da-dum

Sooo if we do a bit of an edit we have a pattern for the rest of the poem.

"Your sparkly baubles hang
sad droopy tree,
Your star is staring down,
On needle sea."

However, I like the "a"

So you could add an "and" after sad to balance it out.

"Your sparkly baubles hang,
sad and droopy tree.
Your star is staring down,
on a needle sea."

Now if you built the rest of your poem on one of these you would have a nice sort of advanced nursery rhyme in terms of form.

Here is a nice Wiki article on Common Meter that's good to start with and it's free. Some of the patterns are not dissimilar to your first stanza.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_metre

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As I've already gone to long for this forum, on content I will just observe that most of what follows S1 and S2, seems a bit ad hoc and at points nonsensical, as thought the writer were reaching blindly for words to finish the poem, having started with an idea, but running out of steam after the initial burst. Been there also.

Welcome to the site,

Best,

dale

Thanks for your comments Dale. I wasn't attempting to produce a poem under the normals rules of meter (which I understand somewhat). In a sense this is 'modern poetry' and for me the short lines at the end are meant to structure the poem in a way that the reader feels they are being dragged down the stairs along with the Xmas tree. More Carol Ann Duffy than Shakeapeare I guess.

It is so helpful to get all the diverse comments which are helping me to think again about my poems. Dale, you are correct, I am a play it by ear writer who likes to bash these things out. I would like to revisit and review my poems to take them too the next level.