Edit 7: Reflections in St. Augustine

[alonso ramoran]

Thank you to both Knot and RiverNotch for such helpful critiques. I'd like to respond to some of your comments River.

critical notes:

Romanticism, Abandoned 
 
Time bends, deceiving promises  
made when we were headlong and young,  "headlong" feels synonymous to "young" at this point, and thus redundant, especially since both words exist in the context of broken oaths. The oaths were broken as they entered adulthood, not as kids. Would it be redundant then to use "headlong"? Maybe I should rephrase the first line.
as elusive light pools to lost and thin men. this line reads less like the interesting kind of heady, and more like the meaningless kind of heady. I would like to fix this. Possibly by eliminating "elusive" since, upon rereading, seems sorta redundant? Or is the metaphor itself heady
What major will teach me how to siphon  also, to question the pursuit of a major -- the only "major" that, for me, means something here is a college major -- right after railing about how the speaker was once young guts the poem of meaning for me. i am right now a college kid, and, like my vision of this piece's speaker, i do keep referring to the simpler joys of five years ago, i do keep trying to leave romanticism behind, i do keep reciting to myself Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech; but at the end of the day, especially when i'm trying to compose a poem bigger than myself, all of those struggles quickly fall apart: things might not be as simple as before, but ultimately i still jam with Khalid's "American Teen" or Lorde's "Melodrama" as a peer, not as an observer.
water from light? but to provide a simple, unpoetical answer to the question: no major will. i think even english or creative writing majors would tell you that: majors are meant to give you the tools you need to write for much quicker than for us internet-bred autodidacts (my major is far from anything creative), but the impetus for greatness still lies with the creator. This is true. "Major" in the previous line was wrongly used.  

Within its rippling reflections, I recall concerning the metaphor that ties light and water together, as far as i can tell you use water very little all throughout. the reference to rivers is effectively dropped by the poem's conclusion, with the next stanza's "tears" having its connections to care, rather than its identity as a liquid, emphasized. the metaphor, overall, is a little weak, and even if the speaker meant to make it look like his or her old age was dry, since time is clearly what is referred to as water, and time can't help but be universal to both the romantic's and the realist's point of view, the subtlety fails. 
your face, glowing alongside another's; 
you had found someone else. I wander and then the introduction of a "you", particularly a "you" lost to "someone else". possibly good as insight on the cause of the speaker's angst, but with the last stanza's question it reads more like you were trying to hit the high-school-poet's jackpot. 
in the timeless shadow of the Notre-Dame, cast 
by nameless ghosts, a wayfarer far from home. it is a little unfortunate that the very real image of the speaker walking around in the streets of Paris isn't further developed. i suppose it's kinda well-worn, but it's still a level higher than abstraction. It is a bit well-worn, esp. in a poem about being lost in the world, which is why I decided to only dip my toes in such imagery.
 
Now I am almost as old as my parents 
when they surrendered moonlit flings 
to the garret's cobwebs and dust, to wipe 
our tears and dress our scrapes. i was going to comment on how i should perhaps retool my readings around this, as this perhaps makes the speaker to be older than i first thought him or her to be, but then i realized two things: first, that by most accounts this should be at around the age of my sister, which by my reckoning is still too young (as far as i know, it's thirty years old and above when one really starts to age); and second, that at any rate "almost" is so nebulous a term that it could mean sixteen or seventeen, which could root this even further into the triteness i've talked about throughout. in short -- well, see below.
 
It's time the painter has learned  
practicality when there's no grey 
of truth daubed on his palette. again, the angst here feels particularly cliche, especially when given a lot more thought. i'm not exactly in a good way right now, but even i can note that truth isn't all "grey" at all: modern or enlightened railings against romanticism not seeing the "truth" of things miss the point entirely -- or rather, truth is only "grey" when one is totally colorblind. i'm all for the painter learning practicality, sure, but romance is far from sustainability's antithesis, and the greats rarely had to sacrifice creativity for the sake of, say, raising kids. (time and health, perhaps, but they wouldn't have been great without "moonlit flings") The N reflects on his parent's life choices more than the choices of the greats since his parents hold more influence over him. In result, he ironically sees things in black and white: either be practical and financially successful or follow dreams on minimum wage. He concludes on the first option because of things addressed in the first stanza.

I'll admit this is one of the tougher poems I've tasked myself with writing bc the subject matter is angsty, so I'm trying to tackle it with as much taste as I can. With that being said, I really enjoyed your critical notes River. Made some changes.

Best, Alex