8/6/2017 7:54:02 AM
Sean Kibble
Posts: 1
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APOCALYPSE
When from afar I watch a balloon rise,
Across the coloured spectrum of our life,
Reminds of music scales, some lows,some highs,
Just like a tune played on a fairy fife.
The breeze uplifts our wishes intospace,
For each of us with our own hopes isborn,
Some fall astray but most achieve gladgrace,
as noble vigour our life path adorn
Yet, blooms decay and autumns fade away,
until new memoirs are etched once again.
For man borrows this earth tilljudgement day
but leaves his knowledge here behind. Tillthen,
the mystic stands alone atop the hill,
to make new findings for tomorrow’sthrill.
edited by Ouroboros on 8/6/2017
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9/6/2017 2:05:37 AM
Jack Webster
Posts: 255
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Hey Sean. Thanks for allowing me to critique your poem. i hope something i say may be useful somehow. my response will be long, but i hope your patience and good faith will meet mine and yours will be well rewarded. If my comments are of no use, i thank you for the opportunity just the same.
If you wish to do major revisions (if not skip to the next section):
I feel you either need to change the title or rewrite the work completely. The reason i say this is technical in nature, and not a dislike of the poem. I do not feel the work captures the feeling of an apocalypse.
The octet is very light and cheerful, almost romantic, idyllic, spiritual, or whimsical. While this is good to set up the volta and contrast with the sestet, it is not apocalyptic.
The volta is clear. However, the sestet likewise fails to capture the feeling on an apocalypse. The closest we come to a description of an apocalypse is the line "Yet, blooms decay and autumns fade away..." Blooms decaying is an everyday occurrence; Autumns fading away is a yearly occurance. Neither communicate the sense that the world has ended with some sort of finality or has been destroyed.
In an apocalypse do blooms fade away, or... are the only flowers left peonies of burning ash? Do the autumns fade away, or are there no more Autumns left to come, and instead only endless nuclear winter? Let the apocalypse be real. Even despair and destruction can be melancholy-beautiful. Don't be afraid of it.
I think, if you rewrite, the volta must be flipped. The octet must fiercely capture the destruction, the desolation, the annihilation. The volta must introduce your theme of hope and the power of the mystic to make new life from hope itself. The more powerful your description of the devastation, the more wondrous it will be when the impossibility of new life comes true.
Another thing to consider if you rewrite is, your meter is extremely dense. your lines frequently use spondees, and you only have two lines (the couplet) that only have 5 stresses per line each. This isn't a problem necessarily, but it is something simply to consider. Many of your spondees are back to back and the lines simply swell up with loaded syllables. The ear instinctively imposes an iambic pattern where it can, but this is the work of the ear and not the art of the author. Regular meter can be very dull, so its good to turn the verse to make it lively or expressive, but it almost feels like there was a battle with the meter and a desire to impose the will of the author upon the meter. some of it is unavoidable.
Your best used spondee is the end of stanza 3 "Till then,..." this is very excellent, especially will your smart choice to finish the previous phrase short instead of using the whole line. The phrase break plus the duh-duh of the spondee in "Till then..." very audibly and artfully announces you are finishing the main thought and moving into the conclusion of the poem. very well done.
if you wish only light revisions:
if you wish to simply polish the poem as is, my suggestions are mainly grammatical in nature.
the first stanza is essentially one sentence, BUT there is no subject. "...balloon rise..." is part of adverbial phrase beginning with "When..." When means means that the balloon rising is occuring simultaneously to the action occurring in the predicate. The true verb of the sentence is "reminds", however the subject is not stated nor is the person who is being reminded.
(also, the balloon image is thematically inconsistent with mystics, fairies and nature. My suggestion is to think of something from nature capabale of going hih, low, across the world, and that posseses many colors, and has some connection to music - perhaps a bird?)
in the second stanza you use the term "glad grace"
. I'm not familiar with this term. it feels a bit unnatural (another spondee!). If you're going to stick with it, my suggest to invoke the kenning structure of old english and use a hyphen to make it one conceptual unit: glad-grace. It won't make it clearer perhaps, but it will give it a literary nail to hang its hat on at least.
my final comment is about your use of inverted syntax, or rather "inversions." This seems to happen when there is a struggle with the meter or forcing a rhyme scheme to work.
Inversion make things more difficult to read, and can even rob a line of its power.
for instance: "for each of us with our own hopes is born"
is really saying - for each of us is born with our own hopes. The latter phrasing is much more simply understood, however then the rhyme scheme changes.
also: "as noble vigour our life path adorn."
is much more simply understood as - as noble vigour adorns* our life path. but, again the rhyme scheme changes.
rhyme schemea can be very demanding. it is my opinion that natural phrasing shpuld not be abandoned to force a rhyme to work. my suggestion is to first write a natural phrase, then make a word bank of rhymes for the end word, then think creatively about what you can say naturally that ends with the rhyme. sometimes this means abandoning your original phrase. sometimes you discover a new thought that was even better!
For example, your couplet. The first line of the couplet isn't technically inverted, however i think the line misses the two most poetic words to place at the beginning and end of the line:
"Till then,// the mystic stands alone atop the hill..."
i think "alone" and "stands" are your two most powerful words in the line, but they are hidden in the middle! what about:
Till then,// alone atop the hill, the mystic stands...
it places the emotional content "alone" at the front, and its counterpoint "stands" at the end. He's alone, but you can feel how strong he is still standing inspite of the fact. Beginning with "the mystic" and ending with "the hill" just kind of leaves him standing there as the blossoms fade - you don't get a sense of his power, just sort of watching it happen. The pause at the end of the line after "stands" nails his feet to the ground; he's not going anywhere, apocalypse or no.
this does change the rhyme scheme, and the second line would have to change. my suggestion is to rhyme "stands" witg "hands". your couplet is about the power to make tomorrow happen. tomorrow is in the mystic's hands. that is the poetic thought of your couplet - to MAKE.
...Till then,
atop the hill, the mystic stands
to make tomorrow.....hands
conclusion
thank you for your patience and good faith. i hope I've said something useful, and nothing offensive. Again, thank you for sharing your poem.
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