teaddub reviewed Version 1 -
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Nicely done! I get a specific meaning, but mine comes from a failed relationship that you could know nothing about. Maybe you are writing about your failed relationship, and mine just fits? Or maybe I don’t get it at all. I do know a little about poetry, and while I can’t pretend to write like this, I do get the privilege of reading poetry like this once in a while, so let me try, in my humble way, to give you a critique.
Your meter is a tetrameter, with the last foot USUALY losing the last syllable, and you switch between iambic and trochaic. I am not certain whether this is deliberate, or just word choice; I choose the former, believing you would know about these things and choose your words accordingly. SO I need to understand more about the piece to know why you would switch back and forth like that.
After your first stanza you leave a larger space, here in urbis that is easy to do accidentally; again, I think it was deliberate and has a purpose. If you have set that first stanza apart from the rest I believe it signals a change from the narrator remembering to the memory itself, attendant with all the joy of that first meeting, and the pain of the continuing relationship. There are no more double spaced stanzas so the feelings of those memories stand apparent to those of us who have been through it, watching our partner’s selfishness and insensitivity destroy what is left of our part in them.
We ourselves do not die, we live after the destruction of what we thought our lives were supposed to be, supposed to mean. Our very identities as a part of us is ripped from our hearts, leaving us to bury what was and seek new life in the ruins of the old, with the experience to nurture our own growth as the ideas we once believed in are left in the exposed flesh of our past disastrous relationships.
While this is a horrible scene in the first reading, one finds hope in the new life after a study bof the mechanics of your message. Again, well done.
Now improvement? Please don’t think I can presume to give you advice, but understand that won’t stop me from trying. In my arrogance I would suggest that if your switching of meter is not deliberate, please make it so or fix it, one of the two. If the dropped syllable in the last foot of most of these lines is not deliberate, please go to school and take some poetry classes. It should be! And with that knowledge you would be unstoppable as a poet (assuming you don’t already have that knowledge). As far as the deeper meaning, I feel sorry for your “John” that just got “dear”ed. He probably won’t get it, but I hope no one ever has that oppinion of me.
So, maybe let me know how far off I am, and how much of the mechanics was deliberate? I do think the meter being the same would improve the cadence and “readability” of this piece, but I do know how nice it is to use those choices to accentuate certain sections of it.
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