A Cromwell. / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page A Cromwell..

Avelon21 15 Jun 2020 04:10

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An entry from your friendly poet Avelon! Thanks to UncertaintyCrossing for feedback, and to SMLT for giving the Library the Cromwell bot :D

Admittedly, I wrote this in the span of two hours, and I guess I might have issues with cohesion here…Even then, I hadn't posted anything here in a while, so when I was challenged to a quickwrite…Well you know how it goes ^^

As always, all feedback is welcome!!!

Image Art is CC and made by UncertaintyCrossing

Last edited on 15 Jun 2020 04:13 by Avelon21 Show more

MaliceAforethought 22 Jun 2020 21:58

Meter in the first poem seems a little off, but as we've established, that's very… dialect-conditional. Lines that stood out to me were

But 'twas the scaled bird that bore the best fruit—¹
No fowl of kind could hope to defeat,²
Of a swarm of cromwells that wants to go that Way.³

…which all (to me) have ambiguous stress-patterns that I can't really get my head around when reading, and

And even to now, to the electricity days

…where "to the electricity" seems to have far too many syllables to fit.

Other than that, great work :)

footnotes

Footnotes

1. Scaled here could be one or two syllables. If one, it requires an awkward beat in the middle of the line, and if two, the stress is on the end, which feels all kinds of wrong.

2. Even if you stress the first word of the line, that same awkward beat is there.

3. The syllable count lines up, just about, but it results in a really unnatural, stilted feeling to the whole thing. The natural breaks/emphases in the sentence don't seem to line up with the meter at all.

Avelon21 22 Jun 2020 22:48

All valud points! I don't want to seem rude, but I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean with the first two lines you mentioned. But I'm sure you do have a point, I think I just can't hear it myself. The third line's weird feeling is probably because of the plural-noun-verb agreement thing, because "cromwells" makes you want to say "want", but it's "a swarm", so it's "wants". I'll probably have to figure out a different way to fix that.

I definitely see what you mean by "electricity"; I guess I still like the flow of it, but that's more of me liking the effect of saying it than wanting to carelessly break meter rules though. Thank you for reading!

+1

Whitehills 09 Aug 2020 18:28

Oh, I'm now in love w these guys! I'm a complete sucker for worldbuilding lol. The poems are great, good job to everyone.

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-Wanderheil

Re: +1

Avelon21 09 Aug 2020 20:11

good job to everyone.

I'm the only one that wrote the poems, if that's what you mean? Anyway, glad you enjoyed!

blazerboy69420 04 Feb 2022 16:52

Small Rap for the Big Help Bird shall forever be considered a hood classic