06-09-2016, 12:42 PM
(06-09-2016, 06:41 AM)mitsuch Wrote: TrueWelcome, @mitsuch! Your poem has some good qualities on which you could capitalize with further work.
- We stand in this delectable land
- A casing, enveloping truth
- We live in a world sheathed,
- Our faint ideas of the world
- A false belief is delivered
- A love that leaves us bland
- A complex matrix of man
- cloak over genuine meaning
- An embrace that fixates
- An untrue fleeting grace
- We lay at the mercy of us
- As we let ourselves into the embrace
First off, and as you've noticed reading critiques here, many will disapprove capitalizing the first word of each line. I 'm in the minority, holding out for every-line-capitalization sometimes - it's traditional, particularly for rhymed/formal verse - but in the present case you might consider capitalizing only the first words in sentences.
Which is another suggestion you might consider. The poem's punctuation is limited to one comma, but there are certainly thoughts and sub-thoughts - phrases - that could benefit from marking them with commas, periods, semicolons, or dashes. This is novice critique, not line-by-line, but examples would be L2, which might profitably end with a period [full stop], and L3 where an additional comma after "would" could avoid an amibiguity (is the world sheathed?) With punctuation in place, you may find the poem naturally falls into a less regular form than two-line groups.
There are also some grammatic technicalities, as in L11 where changing "lay" to "lie" would put L11 into present tense, matching the action of L12.
Such matters aside, the poem is evocative and atmospheric. Some word choices are surprising ("bland," for example). Surprise is good when it advances your project. Think, for example, of a more surprising way to say "genuine meaning."
Think about editing this one, or write another and come back to it later. You have a style; see what happens when you apply it to a more concret subject, for example.
Non-practicing atheist