An essay on domestic quarrel

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poddarku
Senior Member

since 2008-01-15

Posts 589
india

0 posted 2008-01-18 05:36 AM

See the burning air outside the window,
The reverse swing of a pendulum,
The undulating bows those bear burning birds
See the reflection of your perverse pleasure
At the culling of pregnant clouds
That pleasure is bright on your grate
Where balmy flickers of jungle fire
Is quivering like your soul.
See, what happens when a girl like you
Wraths on a man like me, alone, and defaulter.

Brad
Member Ascendant

since 1999-08-20

Posts 5705
Jejudo, South Korea

1 posted 2008-01-20 05:47 PM

quote:
See the burning air outside the window,

I liked the opening image.

quote:
The reverse swing of a pendulum,

Okay, but I see a wrecking ball here.

quote:
The undulating bows those bear burning birds

Are you sure it shouldn't be boughs? I think that might fit better (and you can still keep the pun):

"The undulating boughs which bear burning birds"

quote:
See the reflection of your perverse pleasure
At the culling of pregnant clouds

I see the point of breaking the linebreak/syntax here, but it still feels like you've lost something in the process. Not sure going back to 'See' is the right move, nor am I happy with the sudden switch to pregnant clouds (this may be integral to your subject, I don't know, I can only tell you what I feel).

quote:
That pleasure is bright on your grate

I keep seeing gate instead of 'grate'. In many ways I think that would be stronger anyway.

quote:
Where balmy flickers of jungle fire
Is quivering like your soul.

balmy? No, I think you've lost focus here. You want to explain instead of show. Jungle fire returns us to outside the window. I see no reason to take up outside again.

quote:
See, what happens when a girl like you
Wraths on a man like me, alone, and defaulter.

There's something intriguing by 'wraths' here, but 'alone, and defaulter' don't seem to add much to the rest of the poem. It sounds like your switching the syntax and returning to some kind of imperative but those adjectives also look like they're describing the man.

I don't know.

Overall: Strong beginning but you lose focus by the end.

Bob K
Member Elite

since 2007-11-03

Posts 4208

2 posted 2008-02-18 09:55 AM

Dear Poddarku,

          I agree with most of what Brad said but have a slightly different take on it overall, which I hope may prove helpful.

     You are imaging a confrontation between a man and a woman.  In this draft, you have reached the point where you have a fairly good grasp of the ending you are looking for.  You seem to have a great feel for endings overall.
But you've only begun to imagine the emotional storm at the beginning.

     To stand in for the actual concrete images of real external things that you're going to need to bring your readers along with you, you've substituted (for now) less formed pictures of your internal feeling states.  These make the first lines more difficult to access for readers, as in fact they've been difficult for you.

     All the cliched and abstract detailing in the beginning needs to come out, and you have to look at what the pictures and objects are that you've been protecting your readers from by using those clouds and burning airs.

Did you mean,

"The undulating boughs bear burning birds?"

     That would be more concrete.  It reminds me of a line in an old poem of mine, so perhaps it simply my memory playing tricks.

"See the reflection of your perverse pleasure"

has some nice language play to it.  That's one of the great things you're doing here.  Unfortunately the line is built around "perverse pleasure," which is cliched  and has no visual image to it.  You're protecting your reader here, do you see?, against the impact of what you haven't yet been able to tolerate imagining yourself.  You have to imagine your way in there to find the right details or find another tack to get to the ending you want.  And it's a great ending.

     You have the same issues with " the culling of pregnant clouds," (What does that look like?); and "that pleasure is bright on your grate," (Where are you now? and what does burning pleasure look like?); "balmy flickers of jungle fire," (Last time I grabbed a handful of fire, it wasn't balmy, it burned me,) and "quivering like your soul" (The visual here is unfortunate; your soul should not look like a pyrex bowl of green Jello.  Certainly poets have souls, but you won't find any good magazines that publish poems with the word in them.  Perhaps you can come up with an exception, but it will be a rare one.  Also there's that problem with what a soul looks like that gets in the way,  It isn't visual enough.

     The last two words, "and defaulter," are probably meant to be the cap of the poem, but they simply are too obscure and don't work.  The notion that "a girl like you" would produce the rather substantial effects is not workable given the way the poem's set up.  You've invested a lot of time and energy making sure that she's got a grate for a hearthfire, and a pendulum (perhaps a clock, perhaps some piece of wacky scientific apparatus), and she can control weather with the power of her feeling.
Surely she deserves to be a woman.

     I love the use of wrath as a verb.

     In your next few drafts, why not consider a more concretely imagined initial section with more specific images.  I'm happy to see such ambitious work.

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