04-29-2016, 12:40 PM
Hi James. The lines are quite nice, but the poem as a whole is unintelligible. You need to throw in some hints for the reader, otherwise it's a nice, impenetrable poem.
1. Storing away Stephanie's old habits with demons may mean something to you, but not to the reader. If you throw in a line like that and never come back to it, it's frustrating.
2. Until the end I don't know whether Stephanie is a madwoman, a ghost, a cat, a bird, an AIDS victim, ot the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. Or a combination of these. It's not the sort of ambiguity that is enjoyable, it just feels like the writer forgot that there was a reader.
3. The simile at the end is nice in isolation, but in the context of the rest of the poem, leaves me no wiser.
4. The high watermark of vagueness is reached in L12
1. Storing away Stephanie's old habits with demons may mean something to you, but not to the reader. If you throw in a line like that and never come back to it, it's frustrating.
2. Until the end I don't know whether Stephanie is a madwoman, a ghost, a cat, a bird, an AIDS victim, ot the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. Or a combination of these. It's not the sort of ambiguity that is enjoyable, it just feels like the writer forgot that there was a reader.
3. The simile at the end is nice in isolation, but in the context of the rest of the poem, leaves me no wiser.
4. The high watermark of vagueness is reached in L12
~ I think I just quoted myself - Achebe