02-10-2013, 11:07 PM
An intriguing and even suspenseful fantasy poem. I read it like I would a prose story: with an eagerness to know what happens next. The opening verse presents a powerful, almost horrific image. There's something chilling about the spider's tap dance, as if he's attempting to communicate with Morse (needs a capital letter, I've discovered by running this comment through a spell checker) some necessary message, or maybe a spell which transports the narrator to the other place. The image of a spider dancing in the narrator's head could have been unintentionally funny, as if you were saying that he's so empty-headed insects have nested, so to make it chilling and thought-provoking is an achievement.
The use of "somewhen" in verse two was clever and effective; I don't often see that word. In verse three could a colon go after "name", to indicate that everything else in that verse is a metaphor for what the narrator's name has become? Also, instead of the semi-colon after "dark", you could stay in tense by replacing it with a comma and "dangles" with "dangling", just to bolster consistency within the verse. I'm not sure the following couplet ("sticky remnants ... endless fear") is needed. It's really just an extension of verse three, and as such is slightly overkill.
Verse five is an excellent close. I especially enjoyed these lines: "The word of God interrupts/spiders and pillows and men". It paints an elegant picture of holiness disturbing banal daily life which reminds of certain passages in Flannery O'Connor's stories. Critique is JMHO, thank you for the read
The use of "somewhen" in verse two was clever and effective; I don't often see that word. In verse three could a colon go after "name", to indicate that everything else in that verse is a metaphor for what the narrator's name has become? Also, instead of the semi-colon after "dark", you could stay in tense by replacing it with a comma and "dangles" with "dangling", just to bolster consistency within the verse. I'm not sure the following couplet ("sticky remnants ... endless fear") is needed. It's really just an extension of verse three, and as such is slightly overkill.
Verse five is an excellent close. I especially enjoyed these lines: "The word of God interrupts/spiders and pillows and men". It paints an elegant picture of holiness disturbing banal daily life which reminds of certain passages in Flannery O'Connor's stories. Critique is JMHO, thank you for the read
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - Gene Wolfe