Poetry / Burn, Candle, Burn

Its a candle on a shelf…spelled It’s
when its only yourself?...it’s
that its burned quite low…it’s
sot that no one can see; ...typo “so”

I like how a couple of the stanzas lead into the next with the phrasing…

I like how the poem begins with the whole world turning to see it, but then no one notices when it goes out.  This could be a metaphor for so many things, a poem without boundaries.

The quatrain form works reasonably well. Gives it a form to shape your poem. The meter is all over the place, which is not necessarily a problem. In a more free form poem you can sprinkle the meter around, so long as you drive imagery, alliteration and allusion strongly, to compensate.

Of course the running metaphor is “life”, being burned at both ends. The problem is the image is too abstract, without concrete, specific context, and when it’s too abstract it starts to fall into cliche. When you tighten the image into a concrete, specific one, the poem takes on it’s own unique personality. Who is “you”?

The other concern I have is other than the extended metaphor there’s nothing else here—no alliteration, no allusions, no internal rhyme, no sibilence, etc. In other words, there’s no interesting use of language or image.