No, you're not in the wrong place as you're amenable to suggestion and this isn't fatally flawed. It is really hard going and because of the style, the language and the excess verbiage it does not invite close reading. I know this sounds awful, but I found that I just didn't want to know what the poem was about. Narrative poetry is something of a passion of mine and I like to read stories in verse, but that comes with a caveat: they must be well-told, engaging and pleasing to the ear, particularly if you intend it as a fireside tale. No bard would have sung, or recited, without meter (that doesn't mean it has to be iambic, and it actually doesn't even mean that it needs to be regular meter, just with emphasis that falls in the correct places.
Let's take your example.
That moment reigned still
On it's kingdom until,
Those thrice babes of a fox turned and fled. -- this line, regardless of the number of syllables, is stressed wrongly. If you take out "those", it works better.
Not for fear of the hunt,
when returned was the runt,
bearing summons to go where they led. -- now this line, even though it has the same number of syllables as your corresponding one in the previous stanza, also has its stresses in the right place.
English is not a language with regular stresses and therefore you can't use it as you would French or Italian, which are languages that can handle isosyllabic lines (syllable counting only). Similarly, the bardic forms in Irish and Welsh count syllables because their language works that way. We can't do that in English because it ends up sounding wrong, unless you force a mispronunciation of words and that's just awful, especially in spoken forms. You are correct in that it would be better spread out into stanzas of shorter lines, but you're going to end up with a very long poem that still isn't holding the reader's attention unless you really seriously consider what it is you want to say and how you want to say it. It's no good having a clever idea that you don't communicate.
Just so you know, if I thought it was a complete write-off I wouldn't have wasted a couple of hours reading this and critiquing at all. And we would never kick someone off the site because we don't like their poems, just because we don't like their attitude -- which is mostly people telling us that they're right and we're wrong instead of remembering that you write for an audience and if your audience is not receiving your message then you're not sending it properly.
Let's take your example.
That moment reigned still
On it's kingdom until,
Those thrice babes of a fox turned and fled. -- this line, regardless of the number of syllables, is stressed wrongly. If you take out "those", it works better.
Not for fear of the hunt,
when returned was the runt,
bearing summons to go where they led. -- now this line, even though it has the same number of syllables as your corresponding one in the previous stanza, also has its stresses in the right place.
English is not a language with regular stresses and therefore you can't use it as you would French or Italian, which are languages that can handle isosyllabic lines (syllable counting only). Similarly, the bardic forms in Irish and Welsh count syllables because their language works that way. We can't do that in English because it ends up sounding wrong, unless you force a mispronunciation of words and that's just awful, especially in spoken forms. You are correct in that it would be better spread out into stanzas of shorter lines, but you're going to end up with a very long poem that still isn't holding the reader's attention unless you really seriously consider what it is you want to say and how you want to say it. It's no good having a clever idea that you don't communicate.
Just so you know, if I thought it was a complete write-off I wouldn't have wasted a couple of hours reading this and critiquing at all. And we would never kick someone off the site because we don't like their poems, just because we don't like their attitude -- which is mostly people telling us that they're right and we're wrong instead of remembering that you write for an audience and if your audience is not receiving your message then you're not sending it properly.
It could be worse