Because the line ends half way through a simile, a great deal of expectation is aroused. The expectation is dramatically gratified by the word "Crushed"- easily the strongest word Hopkins has yet used in the poem. As a result of the expectation being suddenly fulfilled, the run-on line is far more emphatic than the two end-stopped ones."
Nawal I have another example of how run-on lines (or we call them also 'enjambed lines') should be used. Yeats says in his poem "The Wild Swans at Coole":
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the primming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans. Look Nawal, the third and fifth lines are enjambed only because the meaning is not complete; the third line ends with a subject, so it should not be end-stopped because this line still needs a verb and object. The same applies to all poems!
The conclusion of all this is that all your lines are enjambed, and this is absolutely NOT correct. From now on you should give more attention to punctuation because it is as important as the other words in the poem.
Now I come to the form of your poem. Your poem consists of four quatrains, a quintet (a stanza with five lines) and a couplet. I think you were fortunate in composing your poem in this way; I will give the reason when I come to analyzing the quintet, but let me start with the first stanza.
It is very important to notice that you started your poem with a verb, and not any very, 'be', the most important of all verbs. This is important because such starting foreshadows what is coming in the poem. When we read on we discover that a lot of lines start with verbs, especially in the quintet. Structure is very important in analyzing poetry. The intensive use of 'imperatives' connotes an important message to the reader. In addition, the type of the verbs used in these imperatives tells the reader that the speaker is suffering a lot: burn, shut, kill …. Etc. However, you started your second line with "and". I think that placing "and" here is not appropriate. For when you use 'and' between two phrases or sentences the two sides before and after "and" should be equal, your first and second lines are not equal in terms of their grammatical components. i.e., the subject in the first line is 'you', while in the second line is 'I', and yet you used 'and' to connect them together!
However, what is good about this stanza is that you made the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme together. In fact, different factors make a poem differ from other types of writing; one of the most important of them is making lines rhyme together. In fact, I think that poetry without rhymes is not 'real poetry' (this is my own view). Some poets compose poetry without rhymes, but I think that what encourages readers to read poetry is the rhyming lines. "Rhymes tend to make a poem more musical and poetic. But not all rhymes are equal. A rhyme created by rhyming words that are separated by only one or two lines is much more audibly perceptible than a rhyme created by rhyming words that are farther apart. Perfect rhymes are more perceptible than off-rhymes (slant rhymes). The more perceptible a poem's rhymes are, the more musical it will seem ( Professor David Holdeman). Thus, your words (more – restore) contributed to the musicality of the stanza overall. We call them perfect rhymes because they share more than one sound ( o and r). NOT only rhyming your stanza made it beautiful, but also the use of other sound effects played a major part in making it seem poetic, like the consonantal abutment ( a term coined by professor Holdeman: when harsh consonants butt up against each other) in the fourth line:
lefT To.
Moving now to the second stanza:To tell you the truth, I couldn't comprehend this stanza very well. I
FEEL that there is something wrong in the quatrain. You started it saying "once you're a child" so the reader expects that you are going to tell something about the childhood of the addressee, but when we read on we do not find anything about that childhood. What you did is telling things to 'describe' something of the past but you did not tell what happened when the addressee was a child. You should tell what happened because you started the quatrain with 'once'. Or you can avoid this style. In addition, some grammatical errors occur in this stanza. For example, "A pre-chosen roads, a predestined dreams": you used the article "a" with plural nouns and this is definitely wrong. Nevertheless, the mentioning of these terms is very clever of you. The importance of such usage lies in the connotations they carry with them. When I read the line for the first time I immediately remembered the tragedies of the past,
Oedipus the King, for example. Such terms are usually connected with tragedies where the hero has nothing to do with his life, so he/she suffers not because of them but because of the fate. So these terms connote the meanings of sorrow, pain, suffering . . etc,. Here I find them appropriate for the subject of your poem. They help the poem a lot to create an atmosphere of desperation and hopelessness. The speaker blames fate, and this is very tragic indeed.
The third stanza has a problem in using the rhyme. Since you are composing the poem in the form of quatrains, and since you intend to rhyme it, then you should stick to the rules of rhyming quatrains. A rhymed quatrain should be in one of the following forms: ABCB, ABBA, ABAB, AABB, ABCA, AABA. If you notice, all forms say that the last line MUST rhyme with a previous line, whether the first, second or third line. What you did is that you made the first and third lines rhyme together and ignored the fourth. You may ignore rhyming the first and third lines but you cannot do that with the fourth line. Such rule does not come from nothing indeed.
"When we hear one word rhyme with another, we usually experience pleasure in finding harmony between the two. Harmony creates a feeling of COMPLETENESS, the sense that something has been resolved or finished. This is particularly true when we expect a rhyme; our ears wait for the rhyming word and, when it comes, we enjoy feeling that something- a meaning, a line, a stanza- has been completed." Nawal you did it right in the two previous quatrains (unconsciously), making the last line rhyme with a previous one, but here in the third stanza you ignored this rule. Read it again and you will FEEL that more words should be said to complete the meaning. Even when you rhymed the first and third lines you used the same word, 'comes'. This is called "identical rhyme", it is NOT wrong but we cannot use identical rhymes anywhere. When poets employ identical rhymes they do so on purpose.
I do not find any problem in the next quatrain; it is one of the best stanzas in the poem as a whole. It conveys a great deal of sadness through the usage of certain words, like "dirge" – which is associated with death and funerals-and "Nothing more" which also conveys a pessimistic mode. Overall, I find this stanza perfect and appropriate to the subject matter.
Now I come to the most important stanza in the poem, the quintet. I do NOT know why you shifted from quatrains in the previous stanzas to a quintet here, but when I was reading the poem and reached to this stanza I was shocked because I expected to read a quatrain. When you wrote this stanza in the form of a quintet you "disrupted the expectations of evenness, the comforts of balance that the quatrain gives." Such shifting forces the 'reader' to question what is the reason behind this shifting. Of course the answer lies in the denotations and connotations of the words in the quintet. What is shocking in the stanza is that the speaker seeks relief in destruction. The speaker thinks that burning/shutting/killing are the sole solution to the sadness she is experiencing. In addition, two of the most important things in human life are mentioned in this quintet: the heart and the mind. The using of these two words in the stanza reveals the conflict the speaker is suffering from. Nawal, you made the first and last lines rhyme together, using the same word, "heart"; so the stanza begins and ends with "this heart", as if everything is happening inside the speaker's 'heart'.
I find this stanza the most important because rhythm is clear in it. Rhythm is different from rhyme. Now the question is "why does rhythm matter? The answer is that it conveys the emotional weight of what is being said. For instance, "
If you are sad, you experience sadness in two ways- you KNOW you are sad, and you FEEL you are sad. Now, consider how you could convey this to somebody else. If you say "I am sad", you will convey the knowledge of your sadness, but those words alone won't bring over the feeling. But the rhythms of poetry can. They can convey the fact of an emotion and the feeling of that emotion." Now if we apply these words to your poem, I think that in this quintet you succeeded in conveying both the knowledge and the feeling of sadness and suffering. You conveyed the knowledge through wishing that the addressee unlocks the memories of the speaker (that's because the speaker suffers from those memories). Yet the most important thing here is the way you conveyed the feeling of sadness and sufferance. You did so through different methods. First, from the unusual wishes: the speaker asks the addressee to burn her (let me suppose, for analytical purposes, that the speaker is a female and the addressee is a male), to shut and to kill her; she does so because she cannot stand pain anymore. Because she is very desperate she seeks salvation through her death.
Second, the structure of the sentences is very simple; a lot of imperatives are used. This tells the reader that the speaker cannot create long and complicated sentences because she cannot concentrate. The speaker is telling what is going inside her heart directly and that's why the sentences are simple. Finally, read the stanza again and count how many 'm's are used:
Burn
me, shut
me, kill
my heart
Unlock those
me
mories
Free the
m of this
mind
Turn
me into a
mecha
A flesh and
mind of no feelings or heart
The letter '
m' here is very important. It takes its importance from the fact that the sentences of the quintet are said spontaneously: directly from the heart. Now what does this letter connote? If you make a long pronunciation of 'm' you would pronounce it as '
mmmmm'; this sound, you know, refers to moaning. When someone is suffering from some kind of pain we can hear this sound getting out of their mouth. Moreover, even the word 'moan' starts with 'm', the word 'mourning' starts with 'm' as well. So this letter represents suffering, moaning, mourning, sadness, etc. Great job Nawal ! You may say all that was NOT in my intention when I composed the poem; I know that. But here I am analyzing what the poem says and not what you meant when you wrote the poem. I believe in "The Death of the Author" theory so you and I are equal in analyzing the poem. The fact that YOU composed the poem does NOT give you the right to say that 'this understanding' is right or wrong! **
At last, the Couplet:Couplets are usually used by poets to conclude poems. By placing a couplet at the end, a firmness and strength is added to the whole poem. After all, and after the conflicts the speaker undertakes throughout the whole poem, she finds ( the speaker) that the solution is being with the addressee because only that would make her safe. However, some grammatical mistakes are strongly present in this couplet. After "keep me" there shouldn't be a verb; so 'safe' should replace 'save' in the first line of the couplet. In addition, what is the subject of the verb "is" in the last line? And why you used 'save' after 'only' instead of a noun? I advise you to rewrite the couplet again so that it becomes grammatically more acceptable!
ConclusionI want to say that the poem in general touches the soul, especially the quintet; because it reminds me with some lines written by Hardy in his poem "The Voice":
Wo
man
much
missed, how you call to
me, call to
me,
Saying that now you were not as you were
When you had changed fro
m the one who was all to
me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
The same letter '
m' is used apparently here, and it has the same effect as in your poem. In terms of diction, you employed 'middle diction' throughout the poem; this made your poem earthier and closer to the hearts of the readers. You were very clever in choosing your words. I liked the words 'prechosen' and 'predestined' too much because I think they conveyed a great deal of sadness with them. The poem as a whole is well-composed, but still needs some refinements! You ARE talented Nawal. You are a great poetess.
For your benefit, and the benefit of all members of ART-EN, I have attached with this post two nice books about writing and analyzing poetry. You can download them from here:
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Best RegardsAli (Ala') Al-Ibrahim