12-06-2024, 05:38 PM
(11-12-2024, 08:15 PM)Meus Wrote: First two stanzas metrically unusual. Five trochees, four iambs, five trochees, four iambs.
As we come to life and hear the songbird,
The world looks bright beneath the trees.
It has come to pass, the bout of sorrow
That kept us trembling at the knees.
Big slip-up, metrically, on line 7. No one says " UN-heard". Not only does the line end up kinda awkward, it also breaks the rhyme -- fortunately, I don't think rhyme is necessary here, since the scheme of the first stanza is ABCB.
It is lighter now beside the songbird,
The weight is swaying with the leaves.
And the plight of doubt is silent, unheard,
The voices whisper in the breeze:
Suddenly no regular meter, or at least nothing apparent. The sentiment is also too dull to support this sudden shift, but I'll elaborate on this more later.
We come together
So naturally,
Procreation
Binds us endlessly.
Third metrical shift (or, I should say, "beat change"). Here it's better placed, since there is at least some kind of strong image here: last stanzas were under the trees, now it's through the clouds.
I see you through the clouds,
You're even higher now.
You fill the misty nights,
You keep my dreams alive.
I look above in awe,
I watch my angel soar.
You set my soul alight,
You weave the midnight sky.
If time were ours to bend,
If it would never end,
If I could stay with you,
Forever's far too few.
We'll meet again someday,
When looming ravens take
Our feathered souls away,
And lay our flesh in graves.
I like it when folks try out meter and really stick to it. A lot of pop poets, when they try to make their work sound more-or-less pre-20th century, aren't nearly as exacting. But here, bar the second and third stanzas, you properly keep a couple of schemes. That's great!
I also like that you're not afraid to do slant rhymes. The rhymes you picked, while dull, at least are never tortured, so that the one instance of enjambment -- "When looming ravens take / Our feathered souls away" -- sounds natural.
But notice that I've repeated that adjective, "dull". Comparing love to a songbird....comparing a beloved to an angel....having love end with "ravens"...."It has come to pass, the bout of sorrow", "misty nights, / You keep my dreams alive", "If it would never end", "We'll meet again someday": we've all heard this before, we all continue hearing this if we listen enough to the radio, and yet there's absolutely nothing here to hook the reader/listener, not even a particular context known enough by the reader ("We'll Meet Again" is literally the title of a Vera Lynn song) or at least neat sound effects to make the banal instead seem effortless (Madonna's "Angel" doesn't read great, not at all, but hey).
I hope this doesn't discourage you, because the fact that you kept to the meter means you have an ear for this sort of thing -- as another commentator said, you have a "potential Genius of sound" -- means you have a big, and all-too-often neglected, aspect of poetry down, but this particular piece only really works as an exercise, as a test of your abilities to work with prosody. As an actual poem, I can only recommend discarding it, unless you manage to think up something truly particular for your speaker to say. As an example, you can elaborate on the kind of bird, on certain details of its song:
Listen to the "hoo-haw-haw"
of the oriole on the branch:
black-and-yellow "Love-me-now".

