05-17-2014, 09:44 AM
Review of 1st edit:
I found this poem somewhat hard to read because of its unique grammar. That may be more my problem than yours, though I will say you need a "the" or an "a" before "breath of life" in your last line, unless you make "breath" plural. Let me show you what I mean by the grammar. Take your opening lines:
"Crossing seas from dawn of time,
elicits words for sailor's rhyme."
Firstly, what is crossing the sea and elicits words? I know it's the breath of life, but these lines are, or should be, a self-sufficient sentence. Instead, they feel like the latter clauses of a sentence. They might work if you replace "elicits" with "eliciting", because then both lines are of the same tense and can therefore earn a poetic licence.
The other problems are that "dawn" should have "the" and "sailor's" "a" before them. I'm sure you're trying for a meter, but in this case the meter doesn't quite justify the grammar, for me. There's a lot of promise here, though. The last two lines of verse three are really charming and powerful, as is your natural imagery. Keep working at your meter (I tear my hair out when I try to use it, so you're doing better than me), and thank you for the read
I found this poem somewhat hard to read because of its unique grammar. That may be more my problem than yours, though I will say you need a "the" or an "a" before "breath of life" in your last line, unless you make "breath" plural. Let me show you what I mean by the grammar. Take your opening lines:
"Crossing seas from dawn of time,
elicits words for sailor's rhyme."
Firstly, what is crossing the sea and elicits words? I know it's the breath of life, but these lines are, or should be, a self-sufficient sentence. Instead, they feel like the latter clauses of a sentence. They might work if you replace "elicits" with "eliciting", because then both lines are of the same tense and can therefore earn a poetic licence.
The other problems are that "dawn" should have "the" and "sailor's" "a" before them. I'm sure you're trying for a meter, but in this case the meter doesn't quite justify the grammar, for me. There's a lot of promise here, though. The last two lines of verse three are really charming and powerful, as is your natural imagery. Keep working at your meter (I tear my hair out when I try to use it, so you're doing better than me), and 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