A Lifted Life of Leisure

[YaMarVa]

My analogy is attempting to explain that you need a good mix of everything to make a good cake - a mix of simple sentences and more longer, complex clauses to add variety.

I understand the meaning of those words, that isn't the problem. It is that it is a drudge to get through your poem while you have to think about it. I'm not of the background where toiling and stoic is a common everyday word, and so I had to pause and think about the context of what is going on. Any flow you have built up then stops.

I should build up these meanings by describing the hard work and pain of this low-class laborer with more plain language?

Exactly - not necessarily plain, but descriptive. So your stoic workers are there stoically working, but you could describe their faces as being 'unmoved by joy or grief'. You can say so much more when you don't say it.

Thanks for the feedback...in the spirit of poetic development on my day-off from work.

If I used "common everyday words", which I believe my poem uses a simple vocabulary of words that any native English speaker with a high school education should comprehend without drudge, then the enjoyment I find in writing poetry (taking advantage of the vast amounts of words found in the English dictionary) would be diminished for my person.

I am not against your evaluation, but it seems nit-picky to think that the use of the words "stoic" and "toiling" place a drudge in the reading of this poem. But everyone's opinion is still, just an opinion.

Then in T.S. Elliot you'd find plenty of drudges. But I enjoy him because he uses words that get strait to the ultimate meaning he is intending, without being at length; thus writing poetry and not prose.


"So your stoic workers are there stoically working, but you could describe their faces as being 'unmoved by joy or grief'. You can say so much more when you don't say it." I agree I could display these qualities through the subject’s actions and let the reader come to the conclusion they are stoic.

I take your comments with construction, and a bit of thoughtful defiance.