Rip Van Winkle

[SilentMute]

This is a poem of mine that got published in an collection of works contributed to by many people:

Rip woke up from his nap one day
half his life he had slept away
"I did not mean to sleep so long
All those years--now forever gone."

He vowed to start the goals he wanted to do
right after he finished going to the loo
After eight years working for his degree,
he realized college was not where he wanted to be
He did not have a mate
He had never been on a date
It wasn't that he didn't like the dames
He just preferred to play video games
And because his family tree did not fork
he desired no bundles from the stork
Rip realized his goals had changed
This list was quite deranged

People spent half their lives attaining
and the other half was spent maintaining
They never just relax and sit
They have everything except time to enjoy it
And after paying this tremenous cost
Health, assets, and life are doomed to be lost
Think of all those who came before
Born, lived, loved, and now are no more
To be forgotten is the fate of most men
The illustrious few becoming a boring fact for children
A fact a small few care to know
Unless they are competing on a trivia game show

When it was all done and said
Rip decided he'd rather just go back to bed

[dizzydoll]

An excellent portrayal of procrastination, I see myself in these few words. And how true your poem describes societies shortcomings. Good job. :smile5:

[MorpheusSandman]

I love the content; the theme, the words, the use of Rip Van Winkle to depict it was really a stroke of brilliance as well. But too often the couplets combined with the irregular meter makes it really difficult to read. I probably dole out this criticism more than any other, but if you're going to use end-rhymes it's imperative to pay keen attention to the meter. The first stanza is almost perfect being composed in variable tetrameter:

Rip woke up from his nap one day
half his life he had slept away
"I did not mean to sleep so long
All those years--now forever gone."

///--/-/
/-/--/-/
-/-/-/-/
/-//-/-/

The only hiccup is the last line where the spondee disrupts the rhythm; it would be better if the "now" was removed. But elsewhere, things are much more problematic, just as an example:

He vowed to start the goals he wanted to do
right after he finished going to the loo

-/-/-/-/--/
//--/-/---/

The first line is iambic pentameter with a disruptive extra unstressed beat in the penultimate syllables. The spondee that starts the next line is awkward, as is the two unstressed syllables that followed. The second line feels more like tetrameter since "to" is, at best, a weak stress.

If you could fix these formal flaws I think the piece could truly be something special.

[SilentMute]

Thank you!

I suck at iambic pentameter. As I said, I don't consider myself a poet--and that is one reason why.

This poem was actually supposed to be humorous, which is pretty much the only type I write now. When I was a teenager, I was very intense and wrote more philosophical poems about death and how pointless life was. I'm rather glad my outlook has changed. I did manage to worry all my teachers.