Let someone be your delusion of greatness,
Calling you out of darkness,
Pushing your fears away.
Let someone be your uncried tears,
Breaking you in the right places,
And then putting you back.
Let someone be your foolish happiness,
Reminding you of hope,
In the bleakest moments.
Let someone be your high,
To take you from your low,
Keeping you sane.
Let someone be.
Let someone in.
Posted Sep 13, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC · edited
Not sure about "Reminding you the hope," - do you mean "Reminding you of hope"?
From a rhythm perspective, I'd suggest "To take you from your low" rather than "To take you out of your low".
"Keeping you sane." was a disappointment - I'd have preferred something like "To let you fly free."
Allan thanks,
This is interesting. It reads almost like on of the best diary entries I've ever read. Very special, it seems like the writer holds something very special in their heart for someone they are writing about. I also found it very nuanced in the way you blended a serious topic with a diary like rapid fire of opposite sayings.
Okay, so this is didactic poetry. Which means it's trying to teach us, or persuade us about something.
##three types
There are three main varieties of poetry, very roughly speaking. Dramatic, lyric, and narrative. Dramatic poetry focuses on the life-story of a particular person, usually historical. Narrative poetry focuses on elements commonly found in fiction: character, plot, conflict and resolution. Lyric poetry though is the most common. Lyric poems focus on the emotive content of the text.
Didactic poetry is almost always lyric poetry. In other words, it attempts to teach us something about human nature, by focusing on the delivery of emotive content.
##effectiveness
When trying to deliver an emotive punch, the most effective way to do it is to create a scene, and allow the scene to unfold naturally, trusting in the strength of that imagery to get your point across. This is the most effective means, because it is immersive. Your reader will experience the emotions that you want them to experience, directly and personally.
The second most effective way, is to tell the audience about feelings that one of your characters experiences. In this way, the hope is that the reader will sympathise/empathize with your character and be able to understand the emotive content intellectually.
The worst possible way to deliver emotive content is to tell your reader directly what to feel. If I read "you should feel sad now", there's an almost perverse knee jerk reaction that happens where I stubbornly refuse to feel sad, even if there are good intellectual reasons I should.
##your Text
Guess which one of the three you've chosen. Yeah... Not the "good" ones.
When you say:
The first thing I think isn't
It's more like:
##paradox
Another large flaw here is the misuse of paradox. A paradox is a seeming contradiction, that when viewed in a certain way, makes sense. Your Text makes heavy use of paradox, and oxymoron (the more compact version of paradox). The problem is that there's no payoff. The function of paradox is to make us see the world from a unique perspective, to challenge our ways of approaching our thought processes, to reveal a truth that was previously hidden. But there has to be a point where the paradox is unraveled. Otherwise, it just evaporates into meaningless, absurd, nonsense verse.
##summary
This has some major flaws. Didactic lyric poetry needs to be shown not told in order to be effective. Paradox needs a payoff, otherwise it's meaningless.