Her eyes, blue and gray and green and gold
A personal rainbow admidst the gloomy night
Shining bright against the silvered sliver of lunar superiority
"Why does someone so small, so strange, so stupid
Deserve to stumble on the vast tundra of life?"
She questions her blue and gray and green and gold
Life that was granted to her by the eloquent myth
A gift she inquisitively wishes to revoke under the griseous mist
"If God existed, even in the Christian perception
He would then indeed be man's image of idiocy in extremity"
The darkened path of blue and gray and green and gold
All fade to a hell like black that reflects her caliginous mind
The shroud of evil is too heavily attached to her for exuviation
"Mansuetude describes this night all too well
For it is, indeed, a mass of gentleness within chaotic madness"
Silent blue and gray and green and gold
The caducity of life is agrestic at best for Mommy's little princess
The darkness of this night was a blessing compared to the light's malison
"And hence end the story of a being that never really lived
A sad soul that no one ever really believed in"
Never more did the blue and gray and green and gold
Wonder of the human race grace and please the insignificant mortals surrounding her
But rightly sat inamongst the deities whom she embodied
The catastrophe that her creation caused was now null and void
She has found a home in heaven, pure ecstasy of pain
And sitting in the superiority of the moon she has left the mortals behind
In The Manseutude of Caliginous Moonlight
Author notes
Not very good, but specially written for the person who made the contest.
Enjoy, Jaded.
A contest entry
- .:. Take My Breath Away .:. by DecorusApparatus.
1400 points, ended April 14, 42 entries
Gold trophy winner
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest
Do you get the difficult words in there?
Comments
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congrats
Well, congrats on your cup. I like to write critiques, so here's a freebie. My intention here is to learn more about writing and help you write better by analyzing your work and telling you what I come up with. If you don't want the input, please feel free to ignore it, but prithee don't construe this as insult or grandstanding, because it's neither. OK, disclaimer is out of the way. On to business....
I like your tone and abstract references to color. The feel of this is sort of a "philosophy through image" sort of feel, which sounds cool, so I hope you draw that out even more in future edits. With that said, though you'll never, ever hear me saying highly intellectual poetry is distateful, if this were my poem I'd be editing it with a mind to effecting greater accessibility. I am not a vocabulary-challenged individual - have, in fact, not infrequently received criticism somewhat along the lines of the idea I'm about to elaborate - and I count 7 words I'd need to look up, 2 of which appear in your title. First let's talk about what that does to your title. I think a title does its job best when it sort of sets the hook - gives the reader a morsel to nibble on. I want to say to myself, "Ooh, that sounds interesting/provocative; I wonder what it's about." I've spent 10 years at universities, though, and I'm pretty sure I'm not in the minority as a reader who's never heard the words "mansuetude" and "caliginous" in his life. You might be able to get away with one word nobody knows in a title, but aside from your two question mark words you've got a preposition, the definite article, and "moonlight," which is therefore the only word you're effectively giving most readers from the outset here. Just like that, you have a poem titled simply "Moonlight," and you risk either a] running afoul of negative associations (witness all the artless vampire/werewolf tripe that runs rampant on this website), or, not much better, b] shouting, "I'm extremely vanilla, but look at my fancy words." Speaking only for one reader, my level of initial interest suffers a bit for the lack of accessible context.
I'm definitely not saying a poem can't work well with a bunch of $4 words, and there are no hard rules in poetry or art in general, but I think you're best served if your readers know you're using those SAT words for some other reason than to contrive enigma via gratuitous obscurity. When SAT words I don't know render whole lines inert in the absence of helpful background words, as in the cases of the lines ending in "exuviation" and "malison," the reader has to choose between pausing in the middle of your poem to punch up dictionary.com (your best-case scenario) and just skipping that line entirely in the hope that (s)he'll be able to pick up the broken thread unaided later. I'm pretty sure when you wrote this you were hoping your reader would appreciate your words, not skip them.
Anyway, overall impression of this poem is that you have a really interesting use of tone and interplay of soft imagery and subtle meaning, but I think this would work better if you relied a bit less on vocabulary for wow-factor. Last thing I will say is that I very seldom write reviews of poems I see as no good unless I'm asked to by someone I know well. If I thought this was lousy, you wouldn't be reading this right now. I only know what I know because of free advice other writers gave me. This is my attempt at paying that good turn forward, so no flame mail, please.
Be well,
Morgan
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Thank you for the exquisite comment! I do appreciate my work being so thoroughly examined, and seeing as I am only a novice and you appear to be in throes of mastery, this is a wonderful thing.
The words that needed looking up were intentional, to confuse the reader. This poem wasn't written for every single person to read, you understand, just the person who held the contest whom I know quite well. But, still, I understand where you're coming from.
This is the only poem I used unused and odd words, just so you know, and I don't normally have them in there.
However, I am immensely thrilled in finding your review, just...thank you!
What an honour indeed.
Thank you again, and live safely! -
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Well, I don't know about "throes of mastery," but I certainly appreciate the blessing. I have been fortunate to make friends with some really good AP poets with great advice to give, and besides wikipedia that's where I learned everything I know. If my $.02 looks like a dollar to some at this point, that's very gratifying, but I'll be the first to admit I'm just redistributing ideas I've cherrypicked from insightful critiques I've received. I'm sure those folks didn't come up with that stuff on their own, either, and as far as I'm concerned that's the whole point of this place. Use and abuse AP in the right way, and I'll bet there are more than a couple of ways it's a better tool for poets than an MFA program.
Nice attitude, by the way. I don't understand the writers on here who let their pride prevent them from learning to write future poems they'd feel better about. Sounds like maybe you aren't one of those.
I used to run a group called Lead Pipe Cruelty. Invitation only, the only thread topics allowed were requests for honest criticism of poems posted as thread topics and subsequent no-holds-barred critiques, and all manifestations of the ego were expressly banned under penalty of excommunication in the group rules. So if you'd like the names of a few excellent AP poets who know how to give a kick-ass, bull$hit-free critique in fewer words than I can, I know dozens, and I'm not greedy with my pot of gold.
Anyway, thrilled if my thoughts were helpful to you, and I have a number of poems I didn't write for the masses, too, so I know how that goes.
Best,
Morgan
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Just...
♥♥
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And she's entirely stunned.
I suppose that's a good thing.
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