Relationship

Boy, those first two stanzas are strong. And I was on board with the change in direction of the third stanza. But that fourth discredits the effort and attention the first three establish. They have interesting ideas: What does it mean to be at peace when finding concurrence? And with that in mind, why is it so biting to have missed that kinship when it's right next to you? The fourth stanza answers these questions with apathy (very millennial), all I'm saying is there's space to dig in.

This strikes a chord with me as someone struggling to come to terms with significance. This piece feels like slip from optimism at the beginning to existential crisis by the end. Is that what you're going for?

These people aren't wrong in saying that the final stanza is a cop-out. It sort of is. It feels like the author's attempt to bring a resonating so-what factor into a piece that aches for one, so he scrapes the bottom of the thematic barrel and finds existential nihilism. It's not like the nihilism comes out of nowhere (I think it's prefigured earlier in the poem by the author expounding on how insignificant he and other humans are) but I think a talented poet such as yourself could have come up with something better. Since you are the slayer of Gummyfail, after all. By the way, you should submit in my latest contest. Go to u/walpen's latest Brief History post to find it.

This poem is a bit lacking in metaphor. The reader spends the first stanza pondering an "infinity" of sand (a bit weak of a descriptor, in my personal opinion) and how one sole grain belongs to him. The language is well-implemented ("particularly mine" is very descriptive, for instance) but it feels a tad vanilla. I'm not saying this is awful, nor that it's even fixable for this poem. It just feels less poetic, per se, than other poems that rely on more powerful imagery and metaphor. The rest of the stanzas have this same problem, especially stanza 2, which does a lot more telling than showing. As Lana said in one of her magnificent critical posts, the most powerful way to elicit emotion in the reader is to have a scene unfold before them so they experience all the emotions in the piece for themselves. The second most powerful way is to depict a character feeling those emotions. You've chosen to use the latter way, which is inherently weaker than the former.

tl;dr It's a better idea to use strong metaphors and imagery instead of describing the emotions of a character in the poem. Also there are better endings you can choose than existential nihilism.

This one is much more legible. The piece is playing with the idea of soul mates (the idea that there is some particular person who is exactly suited to be your romantic partner), the argument being that even if there is a particular person ("grain of sand") who is your "soul mate", you could, even should you manage to find them, not tell that they're you're soul mate. The final line emphasizes this sort of pessimism by saying that the living the length of the search would be an impressive life span, but a life span poorly spent.

Probably the best bit of literature playing with these ideas is Aristophanes' Speech in Plato's Symposium. The catchiest (if not most accurate) retelling of this myth is "The Origin of Love" so just check that one out. But I think the important difference that makes Plato's Aristophanes' such a powerful story and hampers this one is that for P-Aristophanes there is a clear, memorable and funny account for what makes a soul-mate particularly yours. Here there is no such story. There is no imagistic or narrative context to distinguish the "particular" grain. This is probably the point (the idea of a soul-mate is thereby revealed pointless by the interchangeability of persons), but it makes redundant the rest of the poem (we know in the first stanza when the thought experiment is posed that it is ill-conceived, the thousand years business just seems like fluff).

Related to that there's a blaseness to the narrator's musings that makes the stakes so low. This is so clearly an idle thought, the task is so clearly poorly defined and pointless and the narrator so clearly knows this that one can't put any seriousness by the piece. I can't take this as a serious argument the idea of soul-mates and searching them out partly because the narrator and the poem seem to think that no such argument could be needed--the narrator has such an ironic attitude to the content.

So if we can't take this as a serious bit of didactic poetry, we should treat it either as 1. a character study or 2. a bit of wit. But it does not really work as either for me. The narrative ends the moment this musing ends, so I don't know anything about the narrator other than maybe that they're prone to idle musings and they don't take soul-mate talk seriously, so it does not work as a character study. And I just don't find it particularly witty. The only real sparkle of amusement I got was in the last stanza

which would still be an achievement
however pointless.

I got a kick out of that, but it's basically the only quip in here beyond the basic idea of spending an absurdly long time performing this task. Now, I happen to really like absurdist humor, but to me the funny part of such a setup is that it is actually painful (in the context of the narrative). Because this task is merely hypothetical, the meaningless pain it would cause cannot be cast as a cruel, cosmic joke.

So overall this did not really work for me either. The writing is very clear and relatively low on fat, but there is not a huge amount of meat here and the ironic rendering to me dulls whatever impact it could have.

this poem was seriuosly deep in the end. i liked how you finished the poem in particular, it really wrapped it up well. great share!

I like it. Free verse can be hard, but you did a good job.

I'd maybe play around with the last verse. Swapping and modifying the last two lines could help. "Which, however pointless,/Would still be an achievement." Though changing the bluntness of the current ending may diminish the bleakness of the end, which is perhaps not what you're looking for.

The second to last stanza is a little vague. A little reworking could change that, though. "On the other hand" is a little weak, and "it could be that one there" isn't pointed enough. Maybe "Though it could be that I've seen/My grain already, unheeding/And somehow not noticed its significance".

I'm always unsure how much feedback is too much. Sorry if I'm being presumptuous.

There are two ways I see this poem: stanza by stanza, and the overall message. I like the message, it seems kind of like how a reader lives a thousand lives, you live longer because you've search for something and that in itself has been a fulfilling life. And it's almost romantic given the title how it could be about finding that special someone and seeing the experience leading up as all worth it. I think it's endearing and kind of motivational, but when broken up piece for piece, it's hard to feel the flow. It seems more like prose put into stanzas but cause instead of describing one idea or thing in many ways, they are ultimately one description for one thing. I would like to have seen either a longer version or something more condensed. That's not to say you should change it, every piece is a learning experience and you shouldn't break an arm trying to reform something old when you can make something new from a more mature perspective. All in all it's great and I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing!

I enjoy the apathetic ending of this poem. It kind of caught me off guard and was almost funny--in a good way--kind of out of left field nihilistic positivity amongst apathy, if that makes any sense.

The only thing I don't really care for is the title. I mean it is certainly necessary to acknowledge that the metaphor is referencing a relationship/relationships, but in my opinion "Relationship" seems a bit lazy.

Overall I really enjoyed this!