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One of my first poems. Feedback is appreciated.
The irresistible incentive to love another
Is one Truly unmatched
The True bliss of her soft lips
Is a True, divine gift
Her zephyr-like gaze, entrenched with the deepest sapphire
Has pierced the depths of my unreachable soul
A stroke undisputedly delighting caresses my skin
She must be an angel, undoubtedly akin
The tranquil air melts, the hourglass drips
I tell myself "Loves not Times fool"
Her lips become vapid and wearisome
The sapphire shade fades into apparition
His bending sickle's compass came
Only to reveal the nightmare Life-in-Death
The irresistible incentive to love another
Is one without True Intentions
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For a first poem, it's not a bad start.
To take it to the next level, you'll have to drop the cliches and abstractions.
Some specific comments below:
Too many metaphors, and too many of them misplaced.
A wind-like gaze is hard to comprehend.
A wind entrenched with sapphire, that too. I know you're referring to the blue of her eyes, but I'm still thinking zephyr.
I can't imagine air melting....solids melt. Gases can at best turn into plasma.
What's a sapphire shade now? Is it her eye shadow? Or is she the shade? Can a shade fade into an apparition? Isn't 'shade' a synonym for 'spirit' anyway?
I get the Shakespeare and Coleridge allusions, but in the Rime, Life in death did not pop out of Death's bending sickle. He was a separate figure on the skeletal ship. So I don't see the allusions working at all.
~ I think I just quoted myself - Achebe
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(01-02-2016, 04:43 AM)Xctv Wrote: One of my first poems. Feedback is appreciated.
The irresistible incentive to love another
Is one Truly unmatched
The True bliss of her soft lips
Is a True, divine gift
Her zephyr-like gaze, entrenched with the deepest sapphire
Has pierced the depths of my unreachable soul
A stroke undisputedly delighting caresses my skin
She must be an angel, undoubtedly akin
The tranquil air melts, the hourglass drips
I tell myself "Loves not Times fool"
Her lips become vapid and wearisome
The sapphire shade fades into apparition
His bending sickle's compass came
Only to reveal the nightmare Life-in-Death
The irresistible incentive to love another
Is one without True Intentions
Rosanik has some good feedback for you about cliches and abstractions. I will add to also consider word variation. You use the word true or a derivative three times in your first stanza. For me this started to get interesting with the hourglass. It seems like you didn't quite end this...I have the impression that this loved person with the sapphire gaze was only a dream or an illusion...I do not quite get your ending. I think you are saying that one tends to love the wrong person who cannot love back properly?
This is a terrific first attempt though...remember to describe using concrete details rather than intellectual (abstract ones) and to use fresh language rather than overused (cliche). Love is a tough one not to use cliche, so you have to reach. I find the hourglass stanza interesting.
"Write while the heat is in you...The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with." --Henry David Thoreau
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(01-02-2016, 10:08 AM)Casey Renee Wrote: (01-02-2016, 04:43 AM)Xctv Wrote: One of my first poems. Feedback is appreciated.
The irresistible incentive to love another
Is one Truly unmatched
The True bliss of her soft lips
Is a True, divine gift
Her zephyr-like gaze, entrenched with the deepest sapphire
Has pierced the depths of my unreachable soul
A stroke undisputedly delighting caresses my skin
She must be an angel, undoubtedly akin
The tranquil air melts, the hourglass drips
I tell myself "Loves not Times fool"
Her lips become vapid and wearisome
The sapphire shade fades into apparition
His bending sickle's compass came
Only to reveal the nightmare Life-in-Death
The irresistible incentive to love another
Is one without True Intentions
Rosanik has some good feedback for you about cliches and abstractions. I will add to also consider word variation. You use the word true or a derivative three times in your first stanza. For me this started to get interesting with the hourglass. It seems like you didn't quite end this...I have the impression that this loved person with the sapphire gaze was only a dream or an illusion...I do not quite get your ending. I think you are saying that one tends to love the wrong person who cannot love back properly?
This is a terrific first attempt though...remember to describe using concrete details rather than intellectual (abstract ones) and to use fresh language rather than overused (cliche). Love is a tough one not to use cliche, so you have to reach. I find the hourglass stanza interesting.
In that stanza im trying to convey the inevitable end of love with time. I have an original version where the second stanza is very different without the abstract metaphors but i decided to keep them to add emphasise of this womans beauty. Thanks for the feedback though i will work on it.
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I'll try not to repeat what the previous critiques have identified. Love is difficult to write about because it is so much a part of the human experience. Finding new approaches can be difficult without slipping into cliché or repeating the work of others. I would concur that this is a good first effort. I would ask what the "incentive" is that is irresistible to love another person? Is it the lure of another's love drawing the person who is speaking? Why are Truly, True and True capitalized in the first verse? What do you want these words to convey? Finally, the reference to a "sickle's compass" confuses me. Does this refer to what guides the sickle? Keep at it, revision is the key word.
The irresistible incentive to love another
Is one Truly unmatched
The True bliss of her soft lips
Is a True, divine gift
Her zephyr-like gaze, entrenched with the deepest sapphire
Has pierced the depths of my unreachable soul
A stroke undisputedly delighting caresses my skin
She must be an angel, undoubtedly akin
The tranquil air melts, the hourglass drips
I tell myself "Loves not Times fool"
Her lips become vapid and wearisome
The sapphire shade fades into apparition
His bending sickle's compass came
Only to reveal the nightmare Life-in-Death
The irresistible incentive to love another
Is one without True Intentions
I really like that the first line repeats and so offers a sense of closure.
I might be just caught up too much in my own concerns about rhythm lately, but some lines feel clunky to me and I catch myself rewriting as I read.
Line 1 stanza 2 I desperately want to change to:
“Her zephyr gaze, entrenched with deepest sapphire” But that might just be a predictable lunge towards blank verse on my part.
The next two lines just throw me: the first (Has pierced the depths of my unreachable soul) because it feels overly obvious, a tad melodramatically teenaged, sorry.
And the next (A stroke undisputedly delighting caresses my skin) because I can’t find a way to read it aloud that doesn’t leave me in a tongue twisted mess.
The closing line though I love (She must be an angel, undoubtedly akin) there is a strangeness there that stems from “akin” hanging on its own, when we are so used to seeing it followed by the preposition “to”. I like that a lot.
The shift in stanza 3 feels a little abrupt to me too, I wonder if there is not another verse that could jump in there and soften the blow.
Is it just me, or would “death in life” match the idea of love’s loss better? Maybe that’s just the way it felt when my heart last got shattered though.
Finally, I’d be drawn to make “intentions” into “intention”, it just feels broader, maybe a little deeper.
I critique and feel like a fault finder, which is a shame as there is so much there that I genuinely like, above all that opening line
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A hell of a lot better than my first poems. My biggest complaint is the changing imagery. It moves much too rapidly for me. I don't have the time process one image before jumping directly to a new one. I'm not worried that the metaphors aren't easy to understand, because the depth usually indicates a that it holds a lot of information in a few words - a high compression ratio. I also agree with Will regarding line 7. It's a bit hard to say, but I can't tell if that is by design or not.
