Nice. Poetry is good, always want more of it.
Now crit on a technical level:
- Second line of that haiku might be better with a comma (slaughtered, and spared).
- Sonnets are generally a little tricky. I'll sing you a song about that, but firstly I'd say that you shouldn't feel like you need to use a very tight form like that in a prologue poem. Generally, for a poetry collection that tells a lot of story, you're going to want to look at epic poetry and ballads. Basically, just using any form of same length verses with consistently iambs or trochees is going to serve you well enough and be more flexible. 10 or 11 syllables usually works well, i.e. 4 feet, four iambs or trochees stacked together, possibly with an extra syllable at the end. Having any structure at all for these is going to get you pretty far, you don't have to go all the way to a sonnet.
- - So, about sonnets specifically: They function because of a relatively specific structure which the meaning has to cleanly fitted into. The english sonnet tends to go three times four verses plus one couplet, the former crossrhymed, the latter with a paired rhyme. This is because the classical french and italian formate two time four verses, with embracing rhymes trough both, then two times three verses, with two to three pairs of rhymes in various shapes through both, is sort of hard to achieve in english, because english doesn't rhyme as much as those languages. In any case, it's always 14 verses in total, sometimes visually distinguished by those groups of verses, but always rhymed by that order, and always expressing its meaning in that structure. As an example, Shakespeare:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Only the last couplet is seperated visually, but the rhymes follow the structure, and so does the meaning. First four verses, set up the comparison. Second four verses, specify the shortcomming of summer days. Third four verses, come to speak about your particular tendency to probably die. Couplet: Resolves this by saying how you are immortal because a poet has now written of you.
Specifically, the last group of four verses has a tendency to go against the grain, and the couplet has a tendency to resolve.
- - Secondly about sonnets, they tend to sort of go bad if you don't keep your meter, because they rely heavily on their rhymes for their effect. Rhymes work best when the meter of the two lines that rhyme are the same.
The two relevant points here is that, you haven't done that yet. Which I get, it's really hard actually, especially when getting started, but that's going to come to haunt you on a sonnet. Earht-hearth os also, not actually a rhyme. The english language is mean with those, because rhymes depend exclusively on sound, and sound doesn't actually correspond to spelling that much in english.
- Anyway, good on you for making a start. Might want to soften the theme a bit too, too much evil, and blood, and pain can sort of overplay the whole thing. Don't give up though. Poetry takes a while. Read some Robert Frost and stuff, feel the sound that happens when you keep your meter. You're going to get it.
