Poetry Heart of Grief

[Ina]

They say that all who die shall dead remain


But how I should forget the sweetest name?


I prayed to god, yet only demons came


To torment me until I had them slain.


Even now my eyes do shed a salty rain


The grief I bear is one I fail to tame


And yet I cannot hope to do the same


as poets do and thus I must refrain.


And thus must I, a mortal man


Tear out the heart, turn into one


Of which the soul is now torn down.


Lest hope breaks vainly what I can


Still do to make it so that none


Shall have to fall and like me drown.
​

I hope to get some feedback on this, I'm not especially happy with it but I cannot put down my finger on what is wrong with it. So I bring this to thee, so you can tell me what I can do to improve my poetic attempts.

 

[Grey]

Alllright. Got a lot to say here, and some of it is purely holistic.


First, structure. At first blush it looks like a sonnet, but it's all couplets of nearly identical rhyme. That's offputting to me; it feels droning and simplistic. One of the first suggestions I make, therefore, is to experiment with Shakespearean or Petrarchian sonnet forms - if my understanding is correct, either may be a fitting approach.


Second, word selection and some syntactical oddities.


"But how I should forget the sweetest name?" stands out especially. Is this intentional? Some lines do feel vaguely archaic (your use of 'do', for example)


"Tear out the heart, turn into one


Of which the soul is now torn down."


It's difficult to articulate the issue with lines like this. 'Of which' feels contextually inappropriate and the repetition of the vital tearing imagery lacks impact, thus it feels unimaginative at best, lazy at worst.


On the upside, I like the first line - it's not spectacular, but it's a damn fine opening line. If I'm reading it correctly, you're linking loss and thwarted ambition; good angle, might need to be explored more, the link strengthened or one theme dropped to better serve the other. I really think you're limiting yourself by using the couplets. You're forced to make choices that enforce the metre and rhyme, but don't serve the entire poem well enough.


I hope this makes sense, and helps you - and if you have questions, ask.