Locked Away (feedback appreciated)

[Damana]

Locked away in dark so deep praying for my soul to keep.
From prying eyes and sickening lies. Fromhappiness and butterflies.
Locked away in dark so deep praying for my soul to keep
From you from all the world. In on myself this lonely girl.
This lonely girl locked away in dark still keep praying for my soul to keep.
When all I want is to be free to make merry, love, and be.
To be myself what is myself? A simple shadow on the wall?
Or to be something greater?
These walls are broken I am bare standing here with not a care nor a friend my life within this world begins.
Begins in anew begins in fear begins in hope that love is near.
That love will find me someday soon and rid me of this darken tomb.
Praying for my soul to keep that love my find and set me free.

 

[Tzara]

Locked away in dark so deep praying for my soul to keep.
From prying eyes and sickening lies. Fromhappiness and butterflies.
Locked away in dark so deep praying for my soul to keep
From you from all the world. In on myself this lonely girl.
This lonely girl locked away in dark still keep praying for my soul to keep.
When all I want is to be free to make merry, love, and be.
To be myself what is myself? A simple shadow on the wall?
Or to be something greater?
These walls are broken I am bare standing here with not a care nor a friend my life within this world begins.
Begins in anew begins in fear begins in hope that love is near.
That love will find me someday soon and rid me of this darken tomb.
Praying for my soul to keep that love my find and set me free.

What kind of feedback are you looking for? There are multiple kinds or levels, and different people welcome some and are upset by others. For example:

• Do you want complete honesty? This can be quite brutal and unpleasant for some poets.
• Do you want "sort of" honesty, where people try to tell you what they don't like about your poem without outright saying "your poem sucks?" (Not that yours does--I haven't really read it yet, as I want your response before commenting on it.)
• Do you want "not so much" honesty, where the reader tries to be neutral or mildly positive about your poem?
• Or do you want "hugs," where people basically tell you positive things about your poem?

There is nothing wrong with your asking for any of these levels of response, but what you want does make a difference in what you will get as comments.

Welcome to the Poetry Forum, by the way.

 

[Damana]

Tzara I'm willing to take whatever opinions are offered be they good, bad, or strange.

Though I would prefer a more constructive approach if someone doesn't care of my poem for some reason.. "You suck" is just childish.

 

[bronzeage]

Locked away in dark so deep praying for my soul to keep.
From prying eyes and sickening lies. Fromhappiness and butterflies.
Locked away in dark so deep praying for my soul to keep
From you from all the world. In on myself this lonely girl.
This lonely girl locked away in dark still keep praying for my soul to keep.
When all I want is to be free to make merry, love, and be.
To be myself what is myself? A simple shadow on the wall?
Or to be something greater?
These walls are broken I am bare standing here with not a care nor a friend my life within this world begins.
Begins in anew begins in fear begins in hope that love is near.
That love will find me someday soon and rid me of this darken tomb.
Praying for my soul to keep that love my find and set me free.

The erratic line lengths make this a difficult read. The sing-song rhythm of the first two lines actually works well, but breaks up in line four. The second sentence in line 4 (In on myself this lonely girl) does not make grammatical sense. Removing the capital letters at the start of each line which is not the start of a new sentence and proper punctuation would help a lot.

A rhyme scheme should be consistent, or at least not be forced into consistency. It's usually a good thing to seek shelter "from prying eyes and sickening lies", but why "happiness and butterflies"?

It reads as if you are trying to capture the voice of Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Christina Rossetti. This is good when done right, but each of those poets wrote in their natural voice. That's the way they talked. When one wants to express personal anguish, loneliness, and all the other dark emotions, assuming a different personality is tempting, but seldom works as well as wanted. One's natural voice is the best way to vent strong emotion.

This piece takes it's form from a very old child's bedtime prayer.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I shall die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

This piece has been reused, misused and abused for over two centuries, so it is fair game, but it remains a prayer, not a meditation. A prayer is a plea to someone or something. If I were asked for suggested improvements, I would say start with identifying who is being addressed. Is it God, the vague cosmos, or the as yet unseen lover in the last line? Examine each line and decide what you want to tell this person. Look at it as a sales pitch, instead of a distress call.

 

[Tzara]

Tzara I'm willing to take whatever opinions are offered be they good, bad, or strange.

Though I would prefer a more constructive approach if someone doesn't care of my poem for some reason.. "You suck" is just childish.

Fair enough, but there is a difference which is very hard for some poets to see between "your poem sucks" and "you suck." While it might be rudely phrased, "your poem sucks" (or the somewhat more polite equivalent, "your poem is bad") is a valid comment about a particular poem. (Though without specifying anything about what is bad it isn't often very helpful.)

The problem that often occurs when trying to give feedback is that poets often read the former statement but hear the latter, take this as a personal affront and get angry or defensive, as if they have personally been insulted.

OK. Enough soap box. About your poem:

I would start by saying pretty much the same kind of thing as bronze about the structure of the poem. The first four lines sound pretty well, particularly the rhythm that you establish, but then you seem to just drop both the rhyme and metric regularity. That may be intentional on your part, but it ends up making the composition look haphazard, as if you lost interest in maintaining the structure.

Some of the rhymes look forced--"butterflies," for example, or the "be" ending L6, which I assume you mean "to exist" but which seems clumsy, especially since you use "be free" shortly before it in the line.

Thematically the poem seems a little confused, though generic, starting as kind of an existential meditation and resolving into a somewhat maudlin love poem. Both of these are pretty universal themes and a lot of poems have been written on either topic but I don't read anything here that is distinctive about either theme. That's very hard to do, of course, simply because so many people have written on these topics, but for someone else to be interested in your poem, you need to either say something new about the topic or at least say something usual in an interesting way. It needs to be more that simply a statement of how you feel--it needs to be something that evokes feeling in me (or whoever is reading the poem).

Finally, there is very little imagery in the poem. Rather than evoke images or pictures (though not simply visual pictures), you mostly just tell us things like you're lonely or that you want to be happy and in love. The imagery you do use (e.g., being in the dark, being a shadow on the wall, broken walls) is mostly clichéd. Clichés are difficult to avoid, because they are so ingrained in our thought processes, but that is what is so insidious about them--they substitute a ready made phrase for a fresh phrase that would make the reader actually appreciate the thing or action being described.

All of this probably sounds as though I hated your poem, but I didn't. There are a couple elements I rather liked (the rhythm early in the poem, the repetition of the one line) and it certainly doesn't suck. Assuming you are fairly new to writing poetry (you don't mention your experience in reading or writing poems), it is, I would think, fairly typical.

So. Stick around, try some of the challenges (like Neo's 5 Senses challenge) and read a lot of poems. Not just those here, but classic and contemporary poems. Reading and thinking about poems you like helps you get better, as does, of course, practice in writing them.

 

[Tzara]

I forgot to suggest one other thing. You have, so far, made nine posts. You've requested feedback.

Shouldn't you perhaps make some comments on other's poems, either on the forum or on the New Poems?

Most forums (fora?) have rules about this, either two comments made to one received or something like that. Thinking about and commenting on other people's poems helps you improve as a writer. Makes you think, if nothing else.

It's why, actually, I am commenting on yours. You've made me think.

 

[champagne1982]

Hi Damana, I see by your posting history you were or are involved in a RP about Hades and Persephone. Does this poem intend to represent the emotions and confusions felt by the lovely Spring maiden as she spends her first winter with her dark groom? You may want to explore that aspect of the story and concentrate on who you're directing your plea/prayer to.

Try to focus on one poetic element as you learn to write verse, think either a simple iambic form or a little bit of free verse where syllable count dictates line length; even take it to a point where nothing but the end word in a line determines a break. Remove all punctuation and try to make your poem make sense through using simple phrases to break on. There are so many ways to write a poem that shows a consistency of thought rather than having your style scrambled and haphazard between different rhythm and forced rhymes.

I enjoyed your poem, I would enjoy it much more if you had retained consistency throughout.

Take Care.

 

[Damana]

I apologize for such a late reply. Thank you all for the thoughts and comments.
@ champagne: It's just something silly I wrote off the top of my head bored at work. I'm thinking of using it for a Detective/Junkie murder mystery rp I'm working on.