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Critical Analysis #2
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Liquid Demons
| Critical Analysis #2 |
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Liquid Demons |
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Musel Junior Member
since 2008-07-17
Posts 34 |
This is completely different to Raven and I am not sure what rules it should be followed in a write of this sort, but it is an issue close to home and so I wrote it with no specific rules in mind besides the rhyming scheme. I look forward to your critiques!! Liquid Demons Sitting, sighing, smoking, drinking, She thinks I can’t hear the bottle clinking, Light stays on til early hours, A spell she’s under, in its power. Every night it is the same, Til morning comes and she feels the pain, Head is cloudy, groggy, sore, And she tells herself, "This, no more". But evening comes and she is sober, The scene plays out once more, once over, Waiting, watching, door stays shut, Locked in there, stuck in this rut. Hide it, hoard it, keep it near, Keep it safe, Reduce the fear! Suspicious eyes, they’ll only say, How she drinks her life away. Alone with thoughts she gulps some more, And wonders what she does this for, But as sun sets each night the same, Alone she drinks, it numbs the pain. Married to this demon drink, The more consumed, the more she sinks, The more it gnaws at her insides, The more it forces her to hide. Away from lectures, angry voices, In this bottle are her choices, Help her now as in she stumbles, Slurring words, incoherent mumbles. We all have one within our life, Who battles with this lonely strife, We all know someone it its grasp, Trapped in a heavy iron clasp. If only they knew how we cared, The one we knew now so impaired, If only they would just relent, These liquid demons that sap her strength. |
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| © Copyright 2008 Musel - All Rights Reserved | |||
moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
Musel Have you read Hiawatha? It's written in trochaic tetrameter. Your first line, and many other lines are trochaic tetrameter. SITT ing/SIGH ing/SMOK ing/DRINK ing I suspect your natural ear for meter has carried you through to some extent here, but there are rough patches. If you insist on rhyming you MUST go and learn about meter. There are resources all over the net. People here have already given you some advice. But having said all that, you are clearly writing about a powerful emotional subject here, yet it loses force imo because you are trying so hard to rhyme. Also you have so many phrases here that are well used - they have no power because of that. Moreover phrases like "she feels the pain" SHOW us nothing. What pain does she feel? What does she look like? Scents, sights, noises, the touch of her skin. You've painted a bland picture here that obviously means a huge amount to you because you may have experienced some of it first hand (going off your written note here), but it doesn't show me, the reader, very much other than: here is a gal with a drink problem. You have natural talent already, now you need to learn to channel it into something more than bland rhyming poetry. Get stuck into Kowit, before you get stuck in a rut!! (a cliche btw!) Also while you're waiting for Kowit, doing a few critiques here in CA might help you with looking at the detail of your own poetry. Workshops (CA) thrive on giving and receiving yanno! M |
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hunnie_girl
since 2006-06-18
Posts 2567Canada |
jeeeeze!!! I started reading and I was so caught up in it.. such a good poem with strong words I agree with moonbeam you have talent. I wanted to critique aqs much as i could today, a new trend for me, but I really dont know what I could say that would make this poem better.... hmmm... the only thing I can think of was the ending. it seemed a little more forced like you were just trying to think of an ending to the poem(i'm bad with ending poems) It was still good nevertheless but it seemed to lose its power towards the end.. maybe cos its one of those poem you hope never ends... Great write and I dont think I have welcomed you yet to the blue pages of CA Welcome to Critical Analysis  hope to read more from youKrysti |
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BROTHER JOHN Member
since 2006-04-06
Posts 386 |
Dear Muse, Remember, there are many enslaving habits and I see this in your writings. |
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moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
Good job with your critique Krysti. It's good that you are adopting a questioning approach to your reading of poetry it will help you with your own writing, especially if you now try and look deeper and try and identify more precisely what aspects of a poem work for you and why others don't. You wondered how the poem could be made better? Perhaps a good place to start would be to stand back and look at what this poem actually said. Let's look at it. What does it tell us: A woman is sitting in a locked room each evening getting drunk. She hides her drink from people. She wonders herself why she does it. There isn't much there in the way of detail is there? Nothing about the woman herself, how she looks, who she is, how she got to where she is? Not much about the room either. I, for one, can't visualise it at all. She gets drunk? Sure, this is lamentable and sad, but I find it hard to sympathise because I know nothing about the circumstances of that drunkenness. For all I know she may have committed some horrible crime, and is now drinking to cover her guilt and remorse. So the crucial question is, WHY did you, Krysti, find this to be "powerful". I venture to suggest that you were not responding so much to the POEM itself, or even necessarily to the woman's plight - perhaps your reaction was more based upon a sympathy for the writer, Musel, or just a general compassionate response to all people in this situation. Clearly there is nothing wrong with that reaction, it shows that you are a kind person, but what we are concerned with here is the POEM as a work of art - a piece of writing which will stand up for itself over time and other readings. Musel might well have generated a similar feeling in you had he/she written a piece of prose describing the death of a favourite dog. In short, while Musel has further demonstrated in this poem a skill with using words to a poetic effect, there is nothing here which is going to distinguish the piece from thousands of others like it, where the writer tells us in a fairly unoriginal way about a common human condition. TS Eliot suggested that the best way to write about your personal feelings was actually to get them out of the way! He said: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." I don't necessarily subscribe totally to Eliot's views (and he was imo slightly mixed up himself!), but there is a lot to be said for beginners in poetry trying to avoid a scenario where they are so wrapped up in the personal feelings and sentiment that they treat poetry as simply an outlet or vent and forget that they need to learn HOW to express that sentiment in a way that will create a lasting and worthwhile echo in other readers. Krysti, your point about the ending was a good one! As you pointed out, this is weak. Do you see how the focus switches from the woman drinking to what the speaker is thinking? I think you noticed that change instinctively, and also noticed that it weakens the poem. At least while the spotlight was on the drunk woman, the poem ha some interest in that we could imagine a person in dire straits and sympathise with her. As soon as the speaker takes the floor and starts to make vague or obvious pronouncements about alcoholism any power that the poem had is severely diminished. As it happens I for one don't know anyone personally who is an alcoholic, so the statements in the penultimate stanza are little more than an erroneous speculation. And the "If only" lines are quite bland, in the sense that it's fairly obvious that a compassionate response is to care about a friend in those circumstances, the writing says nothing about the particular circumstances and nothing new. Writing about subjects like this. A universal problem - the weakness of humanity for a panacea to dull pain - is hard, hard in the sense that it's been done so many times before, you are likely to simply repeat and repeat and repeat. A different approach to this poem might have been for the poet to let us see behind the scenes. Take a peek at who the lady is, and how she got where she is, and specifically why the speaker cares. These are way of making the poem more personal and more poignant and more memorable, while still, with skilful writing, leaving the door open to making the more general point about the waste of alcoholism. Musel, I hope you are ok with me rambling on like this  . Hope your book arrives soon! Best. M |
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chopsticks Senior Member
since 2007-10-02
Posts 888The US, |
Dear , Musel , you did a good job of showing the hopelessness in loving an alcoholic. If I had not known one, I would not have known that. It is a subject matter that made the USA amend it constitution two times . No other matter has ever done that. I don’t know how many rules you broke, I’m in the process of learning the rules myself , but I don’t think you could have picked a better subject to break them on. You did miss the rhyme a couple times, but a rhyming dictionary will solve that. Here’s is the link to the one I use, http://www.rhymer.com/ Btw, the serenity prayer is gold : God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. |
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