11-07-2025, 06:35 AM
An curious poem. Four haikus and a closing couplet. The haikus all work, the final couplet a little puzzling. As I read it, the poem is both a set of portraits of the seasons, and an allegory for ageing and death? So the festivities in the closing couplet seem odd, I suppose you might mean something like a wake, and ofc it works with the reading as a nature poem, the festivities being Christmas (presumably), but ti does not work as a funeral, even a raucous one.
The imagery is clear, the classical reference in the first stanza is odd because it is the only one in the poem, I would suggest either cutting it or adding something to mirror it in one or all of the other haikus. I might also suggest that the "naked spindly shreds" line sounds more wintery than autumnal, I get what you are going for, the wind stripping the dead leaves from the tree, but "bare branches" is much more of a signifier of winter, I think.
In all an interesting poem with an interesting structure that is slightly muddled by its ending.
The imagery is clear, the classical reference in the first stanza is odd because it is the only one in the poem, I would suggest either cutting it or adding something to mirror it in one or all of the other haikus. I might also suggest that the "naked spindly shreds" line sounds more wintery than autumnal, I get what you are going for, the wind stripping the dead leaves from the tree, but "bare branches" is much more of a signifier of winter, I think.
In all an interesting poem with an interesting structure that is slightly muddled by its ending.