Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24487239-20150127224138/@comment-24101790-20150127225609

As I deleted the story, I feel I should comment. Here are some of the larger issues I found.

First and most important is the words you used to rhyme are problematic. You start in ABAB, but seemingly abandon that pattern and pick it up at random intervals. Home/throne, afraid/decay, me/stop, them/stems. A few of those are stretches and it really impacts the lyrical flow of the poem.

The rhythm is also skewed. Try reading this poem aloud and see how it flows. For me, it hit a number of stumbling blocks on the 1st, 3rd, and 5th stanzas.

The storyline is also fairly vague and doesn't really touch on key plot points or explain itself well. I understand the protagonist was kidnapped and tortured, but what exactly happens in the fifth stanza. How were they broken? How did they see where the darkness stems.

A final note, poetry is not easy. It looks easy, but a lot of users who try their hands at it quickly find that this site has more stringent rules on poetry due to many users' difficulty with meter, lyrical flow, and prose. For more suggestions/advice, a former admin actually wrote an insightful segment of poetry that might help in this situation.