I Do, Do I?
This was written a long time ago, when I was waiting for an incredibly boring class on Human Resource Management to hurry up and finish happening.... I don't expect you to make any nice comments, but feel free to say what you like.... Just try to maintain some level of pertinence to the post ya? :oP
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So sorrowful and not just bleeding awry,
(awry? What does bleeding awry? It doesn’t mean anything. Just a nice sounding word put at the end.)
I soak the sand, deep red!
(nice attempt at alliteration. But ‘deep red’ is the laziest use of the phrase. There is so much more you should be doing with the notion of the colour red. Try for an ‘s’ sound and attempt something more dramatic. Deep Red sounds like something out of a six year old’s crayon box.)
In anger I've known not before, cry I,
(This is what happens when one uses a rhyming scheme…the meaning and the sounds are lost in the frantic attempt at trying to rhyme. Inversions such as “cry I” are not only cringe worthy, they are also the weak links of poetry because in reading it, the reader loses all sense of direction and rhythm.)
Into the soil, my essence has bled.
(The golden rule of poetry is to show and not tell. The ‘essence’ means nothing. It is an empty word. Also the entire line seems to be a repetition of the second line in the stanza. It has no value and makes me wonder why the poet had to talk of the sand getting red - in such mundane ways anyway - twice in the same stanza.)
Such value in intermittent charm, I say,
(Intermittent is a word that not even the greatest poet could have used without shuddering. Imagine a word with four syllables put there in the name of poetry. Try to use words which might be less ‘grand’ but easier to sound. Poetry is about the economy of sounds and such long words, unless they are used for irony, are particularly useless. The addition of “I say” makes my heart go the reverse of leaping…a certain kind of reverse explosion I think.)
The world makes my heart 'ere thunder,
( ‘ere’?????? Why, pray why? It is not like you are sticking to meters anyway…why would you want to use a 16th century ellipsis in a line here? “the heart thunders” is a horrific imagery. Not horrible, horrific.)
In my chest, my heart seeps silently away,
(We are still stuck with the heart are we? Imagine repeating the noun of the stanza in two subsequent verses! Laziness and a complete disregard for the sensitive reader’s sensitivities)
What have I done to invoke such wonder?
(Polemics and rhetorics are good for political speeches. In a poem, an interrogation is for effect not for deliberation. Unless you are going to answer the question, don’t ask it. If you are not going to answer the question, make sure that the question is an answer in itself. Right now it is just primary school wonderment simulated at great unease)
In careless whispers of un-toyed emotion,
(What is this? A tribute to George Michael? You are never going to dance again and careless whispers? Why would you want to resort to using phrases out of pop music? Surely you have better things to do than talk in careless whispers?)
I shudder in strange, unwilling anticipation.
(Oh the horror! The horror! “unwilling anticipation” sounds like it is put there for a revenge against the minimalist poets. Long, clumsy, meaningless and redundant. Give me an image, a strong sense of the visual or the sensual rather than a description of your feelings. Descriptions come in empty epithets. You have to overcome the temptation to use them.)
I know I've suffered inscrutable demotion,
(“Inscrutable demotion”. Want to deconstruct it? Really, try to explain “inscrutable demotion” in ten lines and see if you can make it to mean anything.)
I lie low for a time, in this languid segregation.
(“languid segregation”. This is it. I think I am now going to weep. Weep. WEEP.)
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