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Katherine Baker replied to the topic Help a beginning poet out? in the forum Poetry Discussions 7 years, 5 months ago
I feel like I’m arriving late to the party. 🙂
First off, wow! Your poem was so good! Sweet and innocent, but still filled with deeper meaning. I love it! I know you’ve been saying you’re Dutch, so is English a second language? If it is, that makes your poem all the more impressive.
I won’t try to duplicate efforts with @evelyn too much, but I noticed a few little things that you could think about changing:
Stanza 1:Â He did not need the water fear
It took me a while to figure this line out. We don’t normally end on a verb (though I know it’s very common in other languages), so it’s odd enough to throw me off). Maybe change it to something like: “He need not fear the waves below” or “The water did not scare the bird” or some variation of that. (This line doesn’t need to rhyme, so it’s relatively easy to fix)Stanza 4: As slow the floating house approached
This one didn’t throw me off as badly as the first, but the vowel end still did mess with me a bit. Again, it doesn’t need to rhyme, so changing it to “The floating house approached him slow” or something like that would do.Stanza 7:‘Maybe seas are just like skies
This is more of a meter suggestion than a grammar one. I would do “Maybe the seas” to change the meter (and syllables) to put emphasis on the word “seas” instead of the word “Maybe”. I won’t go into why that makes a difference, but when I read it out loud it does. 🙂Stanza 8: You don’t need when your wings are fins / and have humps on your back.’
This is a trickier one to fix grammatically because the easy fix messes with the meter. The last line of this stanza, “and have humps on your back”, needs to have the clarifier “and you have humps”, or else I can’t tell if the wings or the creature have the humps (logically, it’s obvious it’s the creature, but grammatically not so much). I would play around with that one a bit. Maybe even change the meaning slightly to fix the grammar (i.e. “and waves roll off your back”).That’s all I got! Lovely work, Lin. It’s so sweet; I keep coming back and reading it again for the sheer joy of it. Keep writing great poetry!












