Comeback

[cogs]

My mind cursed time, an enemy,
Its rigid flow I strove to dam.
Like night and day, from memory,
The time maintains its one-way ram

Whenever crises I recall,
My trout-mind vainly swims upstream
To patch the cracks in fortune's wall,
To clinch eventualities

Yet, destiny is time's to reach,
Aloof, against my seasick splash.
I shake my fin at decades each,
My failures held in frozen cache

The present, time can't wash away
The past, my anguished mind allows
Events are gone, of yesterday
It's true, or else they'd be here now

Now, I am what time has made me
My hope is this current striving
Instead, wisdom's waves escort me
As one, time and mind mark living

[MorpheusSandman]

There are some delicious metaphors and images here, like the "trout-mind" and the "patching cracks." I also like the play on dam (which makes one think of "damn" since you had "cursed" the line before!). But the rhythm, rhyme, syntax and sense goes really wonky in some places. "The time confines its one-way ram?" I'm trying to imagine time confining itself which is a ram, but I just can't see it. Something like the inversion of "Whenever crises I recall" and "decades each" seems like an archaism used solely to make the meter work. I am certainly not a poet who automatically condemns archaic words and tools like syntactic inversion, but if you're going to use them, they have to be making a point and not just there to make the meter work. Also, I'm curious why S5 is the only one written in the tetrameter/trimeter pattern of ballad meter as opposed to the tetrameter of the preceding stanzas...

[Hawkman]

This is a good effort cogs in that it is strong rhythmically. Superficially it reads well though under closer scrutiny it does show some weaknesses. For example:

"My mind cursed time, an enemy,
Its rigid flow I strove to dam.
Like night and day, from memory,
The time confines its one-way ram"

What are you actually saying here? Time is the enemy of the mind - so far, so good: "It's rigid flow I strove to dam," again, ok and self-explanatory, but the subsequent two lines don't seem to make sense. What are you saying here? I'm guessing that you mean that night inevitably follows day and the passage of time is unstopable. However, it is rather clumsily expressed and I had to read this several times to get the sense of it. Why mention "memory" and "confines". The problem is that it is possible to interpret this as "time flows one-way in memory" which I would dispute, as memory could be described as the only means we have to travel back in time.

My point would seem to be reinforced by the second stanza which basically says that you keep going over all the mistakes you've made in the past and try to come up with ways to correct them.

I did like the image of the mind swimming upstream like a trout. Very nice. The rhyme scheme falters a bit in this stanza though with upstream and eventualities not really matching and I don't like the repetition of to at the beginning of successive lines. the second one could easily have been an and.

The third stanza is strong, apart from a very noticable syntactical inversion, "Decades each." Now I know you could accuse me of doing this, and you'd be right, I do modify syntax occasionally, but I do so logically, so that it is still grammatical and doesn't jar the reader. I think that in context you might have been better to say: "I shake my fin at decade's beach," which (although not perfect) would have extended the watery metaphor.

The last verse has a problem metrically. L3 is a beat short which stalls the last one.The reason would appear to be the ventured assonance of me and carries. Not sure if this works. You can get away with this, providing you compensate for the missing beat in the subseqent line, so that it flows naturally from the last. Some things you might want to watch out for is the repetition of the themes of mind and time. It's good practice to try to avoid the repetition of words (except for rhetorical effect) as it helps to expand your vocabulary, which also helps with rhyme and meter.

With ballade forms there is no necessity to rhyme two pairs of lines in the quatrains. You might find it easier to just rhyme L2 with L4 which will give you a little more freedom in expression. Because of this, when you miss the rhyme on L1/L3 in two verses, it isn't actually that obvious, especially as there is a degree of assonance in your word choices. Missing beats, though, pull the reader up short and should be avoided.

Regardless, this poem shows how you're improving, and as I said, it is a valiant effort. Please don't think I'm just trying to pull your work apart for the sake of it, my motive is to try to help by objectively deconstructing poems.

Live and be well - H

[cogs]

thank you for the critiques. yes, they are the main way i improve, so i respect your intentions. 'like night and day, from memory' says that time is very different from the mind (also, a time reference), in that, time is a 'one-way ram', that forces its way through (also, a memory reference).
ms, you caught the cursing reference, good.
hm, thank you for recognizing the effort and improvement... all thanks belongs to critiques and imitation of better poets here.

[MorpheusSandman]

What I really admire about you, cogs, is your willingness to experiment and embrace new poetic ideas and forms, put those experiments out there for us to see, and then learn from our critiques. I consider myself a neophyte experimenter with poetry as well, and nary a poem goes by where I'm not imitating a favorite poem. Oftentimes, the inspiration precedes the content--like I'm still waiting to write a pantoum or an actual ballad or a sestina or whatever. I think every poets first 10 years or so should be spent doing nothing but imitating and practicing and ruthlessly critiquing their own work to get better, and you certainly seem to be doing that. So, cheers!

[cogs]

thank you MorpheusSandman! i added the last two stanzas, so it's somewhat complete.

[miyako73]

One way to make a poem coherent is to employ time or place markers. The best way to indicate time is through tenses. Your "mind cursed time", but then later "your anguished mind allows." Is your anguished mind no longer cursing? What comes first, cursing or anguish?

[cogs]

they cursed it at first since they didn't understand that time is not the culprit. the anguish is always with them, so it's current. the tense idea is good, thank you miyako, for reading.

[MorpheusSandman]

I want to write a more detailed critique because I feel that there's a lot of good work here that's just getting tripped up by the form, so feel free to take and discard any of my following suggestions (and I may ask some questions as well to clarify my understanding of the intended meaning):

My mind cursed time, an enemy,
Its rigid flow I strove to dam.
Like night and day, from memory,
The time maintains its one-way ram

In trying to parse exactly what’s wrong with the opening stanza, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that opening clause seems a bit incongruous with the everything ever. What I mean by that is that you make “time” the object of “My mind cursed,” thus putting time in a secondary position within both the line and the clause, yet, for the rest of the stanza, time’s power dominates. I feel one way you could strengthen the sense of the overwhelming power of time is to open with time, and perhaps put the “I” subject somewhere in the middle. A rewrite might go like:

Time maintains its one-way ram,
Like night and day, from memory,
Although I strove to make a dam
Against the flowing enemy.

Now, this is just a quick attempt, and I wouldn’t actually recommend you just copy that, but, rather, what I’d like to illustrate is that by opening with time as the subject subject, and closing with time as the object, it creates a greater sense of what a tough enemy the speaker is up against. In fact, by opening with a catalectic stressed syllable, you emphasize this even more as the power of time even overpowers the meter. I really do not like “the time maintains…” because it’s very obviously meter padding. When writing in meter, it’s just as important to look for spots where you can break the rules expressively as it is to maintain the rules when it’s otherwise. Plus, I do not like inversions like “Its rigid flow I strove to damn,” where the object comes before the subject unless there’s a poetic, expressive reason for it.

Whenever crises I recall,
My trout-mind vainly swims upstream
To patch the cracks in fortune's wall,
To clinch eventualities

I’m not entirely sure what “to clinch eventualities” means… it has a ring of fatalism to it, but the rest of this stanza works fairly well, I think.

Yet, destiny is time's to reach,
Aloof, against my seasick splash.
I shake my fin at decades each,
My failures held in frozen cache

I kinda like Hawk’s suggestion of changing “each” to “beach” here. I’m not quite sure about the pairing of the first and second lines; at least, I’m not quite sure what “destiny is time’s to reach” has to do with “aloofness” and “against” your seasick splash. I guess the implication is that time reaches destiny against our wills? Also, I’m not sure why this kind of destiny/time/striving against concept is paired with the railing against past failures, and why those failures are held in “frozen cache…” Maybe because like a fish can’t swim through ice, we can’t really access our past failures? If so, I might consider a rewrite like such:

Time will still reach its destiny,
Even against my seasick splash.
I shake my fins so angrily,
My failures froze inside a cache.

Although, frankly, I’m still unsure about this stanza. I don’t know, maybe I just need to know more about what you were going for here.

The present, time can't wash away
The past, my anguished mind allows
Events are gone, of yesterday
It's true, or else they'd be here now

I get the sense that this stanza is really your attempt to muddle the reader’s sense of time, perhaps suggesting a kind of temporal omnipresence of the past and the present? I think such avant-garde ideas can work in the right context, but the problem is that the rest of this piece is constructed grammatically, meaning that there are complete sentences and clauses and pauses correctly separating one thing from another, etc. Yet this stanza completely abandons that grammatical correctness. I’m not sure if it works in this context, though I appreciate what you’re trying to do. If there is an actual grammatically correct full sentence here, I can’t piece it out. It’s more entangled than the most complex verse of John Donne’s. I think the problem especially crops up in “my anguished mind allows / Events are gone” which reads like a sentence fragment juxtaposed against a complete clause. If you put a period after “allows” you could actually make two complete sentences out of this with two sub-clauses that split both complete sentence. I really see no downside to doing this actually, because you’d still provide the sense of the intrusion of the past into the present.

Now, I am what time has made me
My hope is this current striving
Instead, wisdom's waves escort me
As one, time and mind mark living

I think the only major problem with this stanza is the meter. It seems that this stanza is mostly in trochees rather than the iambs that marked the other stanzas, but it doesn’t read consistently as trochees either, such as in the second line. I’m compelled to ask what you intended in terms of the meter with this final stanza, as I can’t imagine that you didn’t notice the radical change. I’m also still scratching my head over the ending: “time and mind mark living”? Shouldn’t it be “mark life” or “mark the living”?