In the Abandoned Garden

[milo]

Very new to poetry, but extremely open to criticism!

In the Abandoned Garden

Nameless, | shapeless, | faceless, 6
so-ci|et-y's blood| red chest|nut blight.  9
Darkness | envelopes | and coddles, 8
even | moonlight | ignores | his plight. 8

Earthy mulch smudged tatters, 6
neglected gazettes, rested head. 8  
Blanket wriggles and scuttles, 7
inky plume-lined feather bed. 7

Vacant corpse, decaying tree, 7
a meager voiceless hermit. 7
A withering rose of consciousness, 8
once sown amongst the vermin. 7

Hi BlowMyWadsworth, welcome to the struggle. Here's a couple of things you should consider.

1. Rigid end rhyme sans poetic meter seems disjointed to the reader, and usually does not accomplish what you set out to accomplish. Meter, like the standard Iambic pentameter of Shakespeare (and many many others), involves patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, and takes a lot of work to master. Here are the basics. First, lines should have the same number of syllables (pentameter has 10 syllables per line). You might think "well penta-meter sounds like it should have five syllables." That's because these lines are broken into metric "feet" which are usually either two or three syllables long. Thus, penta has 10 syllables per line, but 5 feet per line, hence the prefix. In the first stanza of your poem I broke it into (what i thought are the) poetic feet and bolded the stressed syllables. I also put a syllable count at the end of each line throughout the whole thing to get you started. For end rhyme to really function properly you want the same pattern of stressed and unstressed in each foot, and the same amount of feet per line.

2. Avoid abstraction. Abstraction is using large sweeping statements about the world in general. The reader cannot visualize them as well, and therefore has trouble interpreting them as images. It follows the same vein of "show, don't tell." When you abstract, you are telling the reader something, as opposed to showing it. An example of where you used abstraction is "society's blood red chestnut blight". I don't know what that means, I can't visualize it, I don't know/cant see how the preceding line augments it, and overall it confuses me.

3. Avoid cliche. Darkness always swallows or envelopes, corpses are always vacant, roses always wither or wilt, so saying those things are happening are almost like repeating yourself. They're just not very aesthetically pleasing.  There's no list of cliches and I'm sure if there was it would be too long to read, but they're not hard to point out. You know them when you see them.

All the best, and don't give up! Literally everyone here either is in the same place you're at, or started where you're at! I know I did.

-Em

All good stuff here and a good critique.  Just a mild correction - Abstraction is not large sweeping statements, that is generalization.  In poetry, abstractions are things that only exist conceptually (not in the physical world) like hope, beauty, love, truth, etc - and you are right to advise avoiding them.