Hi Polar bear, Welcome to the site.
It is great to see you have dived right in and had a go at a fixed form, and you have chosen a good soild subject with lots of images to pull out and enrich your poem, but my adivice here will not look at the form or the story and images chosen, because for me the thing that dominates and spoils my read is the construction / syntax of your lines.
I would suggest that you set each line down in turn and ask yourself does it make sense, is this how i normally contstruct my sentances or express myself?
I will highlight a few examples to show you what i mean:-
(11-19-2013, 02:28 PM)Polar Bear Wrote: We sat amidst the night to wait til dawn This was my first immediate problem. This is just the wrong word here in my opinion. Think on the subject here and how you normally talk of being out at night...perhaps surrounded by darkness, cloaked in the night or dark, or even we sat out the night to wait for dawn. The subject of the night is not a solid or multiple thing that can then be sat in the midst of, so whilst you can be at or in the middle of the night and you can be surrounded by one of the features of night - say darkness
With hope for light to come at last within
All doors be open'd just to see it gone Sounds like a command from the middle ages. Also there has not been enough ground work to use "it" as a personification referance to the night. We open the doors to usher out the night.
Oh there among the dust our crimes of whim Ok you launch off here into a stream of words that sound well and good but don't apear to be grounded in any images you have fed the reader or even to make any real sense. Where is there? out in the night...in the somewhere inside that is the place where the doors were placed. I am so confused by this point that I cannot work out if I was sat outside but now i have come inside or if I have always been sat inside but the night was allowed to invade the inside (which is what I am leaning towards thinking but I have had to work too hard to conjecture to make this an enjoyable read.
Command for strength of men and beasts abound I am completly at a loss to know what image or idea you want to convey here. Sorry! (Perhaps orders are being issued in some medievial castle image in your mind but again you have not built the picture well enough for this reader to work it out.
In horror of truth selfmade a fire abides Same again. No idea what this means
No wind of words will quiet a shameful sound
But rather it stoke a fire of hell inside
We sat to find relief from pain and loss
In guilt it comes again to memory
To trust betrayed no pay can match the cost
Instead a blade kept sharp eternally
No ache so great than fate to take our love
And gone aflight was set a gentle dove
My impression is that you have tried too hard to make this sound poetic and old style and in doing so have lost control of the poem.
I would suggest taking each line and just write a sentence around the idea or image you wanted to convey and then go back to your poetic form and re-work from here.
Please do not be overly discouraged with what might appear to be harsh words. They are never personal and always just the opinion of the crit.
This is your poem. I think that there will be lots to like in this poem once you have taken control back and allowed yourself to be you. Be encouraged and keep writing and have fun.
...and remember to leave crit for others on the site.
All the best AJ.
