Alone She Stood

[Nossa]

Alone she stood,
With wails and tears,
Her screams, never to be heard,
Her shouts, into the spheres.

Did they forsake her?
Maybe they forgot,
But she’s standing right there,
Waiting for her lot.

Her fate to be determined,
By the Powerful and Mighty,
And days to days will lead,
To a forlorn future,
Of prosperity.

She’ll be happy once,
Said the fortune-teller,
Yet under the sun,
When life seems better,
Her tears will never dry,
And inside she’ll still wither.

One might think her beautiful,
Indeed, verse was written about her,
But by and by the eye would see,
How far she’s gone,
How far she’ll still slither.

And yet once more,
She will be forlorn,
In the lifeless heaven,
Of some lavish dream,
And again, and again,
She’ll never learn to stray,
When life throws its ticks,
Along her way.

And now she fell,
For the same old trap,
She then stood alone,
With wails and tears,
But she’s forlorn,
To the end of time,
Her powers have faded,
Her voice is chocked,
As she stood there,
Waiting for her lot.

PS: Don't be so harsh..this is probably only my second peotry-writing attempt :blush:

[ShadowID]

I really like the poem. I'm surprised that it's only your 2nd attempt.

Since I'm new here, it's really hard for me to give great insightful comments.

Is the fourth line suppose to be "here" or "her"?

I noticed that you capitalize every line even though the prevoius line ended with a comma. I've been concentrating on "structure" as I find my way through this thing the world calls "poetry" so I noticed that quite readily. Was it intentional?

Again, I really like the poem. I like poems that have an added bit if mystery and doesn't explicitly say what it wants to say. The bit about the fortune teller really adds to the mystique. And the general feeling of the poem makes me feel that I'm in some mystical arabian adventure.

Words like spheres, fortune-tellers, "Powerful and Mighty", sun, slither, ticks, and trap seem to work together to make me feel like I'm in a desert as opposed to a "magical forests" with too many elves (Yuck, elves).

Only after finishing the poem and glancing at your name do I see that you are from Egypt.

:thumbs_up :D

[Nossa]

Thank you SO much :D:D I'm glad you liked it.
About the fifth line, it's 'her' not 'here indeed, it was a typo.
And concerning the sturucture..I always thought that in poetry capitalizing the beginning of the sentences is needed even if the previous line was ended in a comma..maybe you can enlighten me if I'm wrong, cuz I don't exactly have a reference to that.
And yup, I'm from Egypt :D Is that surprising?! lol

[jon1jt]

Hi Nossa. I would be interested in reading more about the girl in the poem and less about how she feels. I can see she's hopeless, you've told us that. But you haven't told us much else. Why is her fate to be determined? What powerful and mighty??

Great job for a second poem-writing attempt! :)

[Nossa]

I've always been told that I put too much description into anything I write...I'm trying to work on that but everytime I write something, it just comes out like this..I promise I'll work on it.
Thank you for the comment :D and I'm glad you liked it (didn't you? lol)

[ShadowID]

Thank you SO much :D:D I'm glad you liked it.
About the fifth line, it's 'her' not 'here indeed, it was a typo.
And concerning the sturucture..I always thought that in poetry capitalizing the beginning of the sentences is needed even if the previous line was ended in a comma..maybe you can enlighten me if I'm wrong, cuz I don't exactly have a reference to that.
And yup, I'm from Egypt :D Is that surprising?! lol

You could be right about the capitalization. I just read a bunch of Emily Dickinson poems and the beginning of all her lines are capitalized. The same goes for T.S. Elliot.

However, look at this segement of a Robert Frost Poem:
http://www.ketzle.com/frost/in2myown.htm

I should not be withheld but that some day
into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

The rest of the poem is also capitalized in the beginning of the line.

I personally didn't know the answer but I always thought that poetry is just prose but broken up in a non-paragraph form that emphasizes the rythm, the rhyme, and other goodies that prose cannot. Take the previous paragraph as an example:

I personally didn't know
the answer
but
I always thought
poetry is just prose
broken up
in non-paragraph form;
emphasizes
rythm,
rhyme,
and other goodies
prose cannot.

Take the previous paragraph
as an example:

As you can see, I broke up the paragraph into a "poetic" form, removed some words (an ellipse) and had my fun emphasizing elements of my idea. For example, "rythm, rhyme, and other goodies" are all on their own separate lines as if they are important enough to stand on their own. Every line can be read by itself but when combined with the previous and the later lines, it states something much deeper. Well, "deeper" for most poems. This one was just a rehash of a paragraph. lol.

If we look at Oregon State:

http://oregonstate.edu/dept/eli/buswrite/capitalization.html

They say capitalize every first line of a poem, even a sentence fragment but....

"*Some poets do not capitalize the first letter of every line of poetry. Copy a poem exactly as the poet wrote it."

Personally, I guess if I "see" poetry as a "broken prose" then I would not like to capitalize every line because it would imply a lack of continuity. However, form is form so it's either right or wrong. I'm also new to this poetry thing so my word doesn't hold much weight.

Thanks for teaching me a thing or two. Whatever you did to write this poem, try doing the same thing again.

Do me a personal favor and forget about the rest of the world and what they may think. I learned here that poetry is a personal thing so if the poem is good to you, that's all that matters.

For fun :D :
Do Me a Personal Favor

Do me
a personal favor,
forget the rest of the world,
forget what they may think.
Poetry is a personal*.
If, to you, the poetry is a good,
the world can melt away.

*omission of the word "thing" is intentional.

[ShadowID]

Ooo, something else I found on capitalization:
http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/resourcebank/capitalizing/

"A CAPITAL IDEA: SHOULD FIRST WORDS IN LINES OF POEMS BE CAPITALIZED?


–Capitalizing the first letter of each beginning word in a line of poetry is traditional, if not contemporary and common. Historically, this is how poetry has been distinguished from other art forms when rendered on the page, and writing it this way is still often taught in elementary and secondary schools. In scholarship, of course, it is de rigueur that one be careful to note this capitalization, and to reproduce it faithfully when quoting.

In professional contemporary letters, however, the waters have been muddied. As a reaction to tradition, with plenty of examples even within the tradition, American poets often stopped capitalizing their lines beginning loosely with the second half of the 20th Century, a period generally associated with free verse. The abandonment of this particular custom has become the ready practice, so much so that contemporary readers now encountering capitalized first words in lines may find them startling.

Why poets even did this has essentially been lost to us, beyond the historicity of being able to say that poets just always did this. The original truth of its why may be as simple as housekeeping--poetry like this, prose like that. Or it may reside in some nobler ambition, such as attempting to reflect a studied anticipation at the great orator's next line. If the line was delivered in appropriately dramatic fashion, the capital letter in this circumstance became a cue to the reader that a deep breath was taken at this place.

The idea of a breath being taken, or a dramatic point being made, may also be a useful consideration in trying to understand line breaks. It is reasonable to thing that the two worked in concert: The line break was made clear and certain for the reader by the capitalizing of the first word of the next line, this visual cue serving as assurance to the careful reader that, indeed, a line break was intended even if there was no other punctuation at the end of the line to so indicate.

The convention of capitalizing, however, was likely such a pro forma convention that it was never deemed necessary to write its usage into the rules of formal verse writing. The sonnet may have 14 lines and a variety of other defining aspects, but nowhere do the rules say that the first word of each line in a sonnet particularly must be capitalized. This is probably not because it was unimportant to the form, but rather that it was so strong an unspoken convention in poetry generally that nobody thought to include mention of this practice in any specific rules. And since it was not written into the rules, the contemporary writer has taken this to mean that capitalizing of this sort is not, therefore, one of the rules.

Regardless of how we might feel about the historical aspects of this now, the fact is that--in the same way that capitalizing became the standard originally--not capitalizing now has the majority of practitioners. One would hope, however, that these poets are acting out of choice, rather than habit or lack of knowledge. Capitalizing the first word in a line is one of the traditional tools of poetry writing, and using or not using it is a decision that a poet should make after some consideration. But whatever the decision, the practice today is clearly personal.

In my own writing, I do capitalize the first word in lines of poems. This is my own decision about my own work, and not anything more. Fashionable or not, I myself have found meaning in doing so, and meaning is something to value wherever we find it. For my own part, I capitalize letters at the beginning of each line:

· to remind myself that I am writing a poem;
· to underscore to myself the integrity of the line, which is after all what distinguishes poetry from all other literary genres;
· to connect myself to history for a very brief moment before I go on to say what I myself have to say now;
· to give each line--however subtle--its own authority;
· to suggest that, although I may be telling a story, it is not a regular story, and certainly not prose;
· to make my enjambment have to work honestly, and to give my end-stopped lines greater Moment;
· to build up thoughtful pacing in a poem, suggesting or invoking a little more strongly all the reasons we break lines to begin with--breath, heartbeat, dramatic intention;
· to recognize this use of the shift key as a self-conscious act, which raises the stakes for everyone and everything--the poem, the poet, and the reader;
· to do more work in this small moment, knowing that work makes more things happen;
· to rhyme--that is, to use this recurring, predictable device of capitalization in the ways that poems have often used many devices, such as rhyme, to give structure and sensibility to the poem; knowing that I'm going to capitalize the first word in each line gives all my poems at least some rudimentary structure;
· to understand that a poem cannot be contained--rather, it launches outward and away from what we know; that is, capitalizing the first letter of a line can be predicted and controlled ahead of time, but that's all that can be controlled, so that the poem, each line of the way, is launched, and this launching, this kicking away from the shore of the left margin is always an act of power, imagination, and adventure.

Every one of these ambitions for a poem can be accomplished in some other fashion, often as described in the reasoning itself--a poet might use traditional rhyme, for example, instead of capitalization to accomplish just the same result. And understand that these are all simply ambitions for poems--not rules. Absolutely none of this has to be done, at all. A poet has many tools in the toolbox, including rejection of what anyone else has done or is doing. But rejection, of course, supposes that the poet has something better to offer. Take care in understanding that caveat.

I don't want someone to tell me what to do in my own writing, not when the choice is mine--I am, after all, a child of my time. Please understand, then, that I don't personally advocate one practice or the other for poets. And I don't feel one thing or another when I read capitals at the beginnings of lines. This is because the practice is not for others, and I don't expect others to be doing it for me. If they are, then the dramatic or didactic effect is likely more bothersome than effective, and should be avoided. If they are doing it for me, then they may also quite possibly be saying that I, too, should do it, and I react strongly--and negatively--to these overtures.

The truth for me in all of this is that I do it for myself. These capitals are me talking to me--they are not, particularly, me talking to the reader, though the reader may hear something of my conversation. I certainly don't need to add more rules for writers--there are plenty of those to go around. But, with this discussion, I do want to add to the universal treasury of options well-thought, and grounded in a reason for being."

[Pendragon]

Being a musician, I started humming at the start of your poem and by the time I got to the longer stanzas I was working out chords in my head! Beautiful poem. If that's only a second attempt wow, we have a prodigy!

Pen

[amanda_isabel]

that was great for a second writing attempt. i remeber my first attempts.. cheesy.

as far as the capitalization, we poets have perks: we don't need to follow rules of grammar, and i think that the capitalization is an option.

[Lote-Tree]

Alone she stood,
With wails and tears,
Her screams, never to be heard,
Her shouts, into the spheres.

Did they forsake her?
Maybe they forgot,
But she’s standing right there,
Waiting for her lot.

Her fate to be determined,
By the Powerful and Mighty,
And days to days will lead,
To a forlorn future,
Of prosperity.

She’ll be happy once,
Said the fortune-teller,
Yet under the sun,
When life seems better,
Her tears will never dry,
And inside she’ll still wither.

One might think her beautiful,
Indeed, verse was written about her,
But by and by the eye would see,
How far she’s gone,
How far she’ll still slither.

And yet once more,
She will be forlorn,
In the lifeless heaven,
Of some lavish dream,
And again, and again,
She’ll never learn to stray,
When life throws its ticks,
Along her way.

And now she fell,
For the same old trap,
She then stood alone,
With wails and tears,
But she’s forlorn,
To the end of time,
Her powers have faded,
Her voice is chocked,
As she stood there,
Waiting for her lot.

PS: Don't be so harsh..this is probably only my second peotry-writing attempt :blush:

I liked it Nossa. It is good :D

[Nossa]

Thank you guys SO much. I'm so glad you all liked it :D

@Shadow: Thankies for Capitalizing references :D
Oh and also for this :


Do me
a personal favor,
forget the rest of the world,
forget what they may think.
Poetry is a personal*.
If, to you, the poetry is a good,
the world can melt away.

:D

[mukta581]

The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness

[Schizo-Manic]

This was a good piece, I like how you reiterated everything in the last stanza, then closed it. It seemed like the woman's time had passed her by and she faded away with time.

[dibyendra]

I liked your effort and it's amazing how your second attempt crafted such a aroma in your poem. And yes, I agree with jon1jt regarding why and whats...
But, this is certainly your good effort that counts. Good luck!

[Nossa]

Thank you so much everyone :D I'm so glad you liked it. Thank you for all the praise and criticism, it helped me a lot :D