very deep

What an ending, compliments

Beautiful…

The Good: — Your piece has a lot of potential.

– You have a good grasp on your theme and you maintain that grasp throughout your piece.

– You set the reader up with a mood that gives away certain expectations, but like Robert Frost once said, “poetry should begin in delight and end in wisdom,” and you follow that through to its “learned” end.

The Bad: — You have some potentially poignant lines, but you forget to highlight them. You crowded them in by splicing your rhythm together all into one tightly woven necktie, when it should have been much looser like a scarf to coincide with the worn-down theme. Choose the thoughts that go well together and separate them by skipping lines. Any lines that you want to stand out, tab them, or put them at the end of these strophes, or separate them altogether. Your last few lines, because they are a sort of culminating contrast with the bulk of your content, should be separated by a skipped line into an anti-strophe. The form or shape your free verse takes is meant to represent the rhythms associated with your content. For ideas about what I mean, look up Marianne Moore, or T. S. Eliot, experts at free verse in my opinion. Or, for a very vivid idea about how to use free verse in a stylistic way, there’s a free verse called Running Through The Fog, by Adam Henry Sears here on triond, absolutely my favourite free verse.

– Too cliche. Your lines, one after another, are cliches. Try to avoid using more than a staple few.

– Rhyming at the end, but not throughout; the rhymes at the end kind of distracted me from fully experiencing the antistrophe as it should have been. Free verse does often incorporate rhyme, but in yours here the triple rhyme should at least be hinted at througout the rest of your work, or, since the triple rhyme is within your antistrophe perhaps all you need is a few couplet rhymes in your other strophes. Placed strategically, they might give quite an effect indeed!!

– Lack of grammatical or syntactical correctness.
“There are but things we regret…”
Better sense: “there are things we…”, “There are naught but regrets…”, “There are but a few things we…”, “There are nothing but regrets…”. Also, the capitals really should go. You look like you’re trying to write like the 19th century poets.

Perhaps your antistrophe’s impact should be reworked. When a wound eventually leaves us with a bit of wisdom, it no longer is represented by a scar is it? A scar is an unsightly reminder of something that happened because it never healed over properly, but a wound that leads to a life lesson is one that completely heals and even makes the skin stronger. Anyway, you think about it and at some later time when you go to rewrite it, maybe you could consider the suggestion.

Thanks for sharing, and have a good day.

Lovely poem.