The Fall of Camelot (working title)

It's been over a year or more since I attempted my last poem. I'm afraid I am terribly rusty, so feel free to bash this poem into pieces. I've worked on it long enough, so I just need to throw it out here, into the fire, and see what part of it (if any) survives. Also, I'm not at all happy with the title, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.



The Fall of Camelot

The solemn white knight
with the smoke-smudged face
cradles the little limp princess.

Above them the battle continues;
Kevlar-clad warriors storm the castle
ablaze on the corner of 3rd Street and Elm.

Compatriots gather behind barricadees,
silently gawk along the grungy sidewalks;
fearful faces flickering in the firelight

as Parkside Palace,
their bastion of brick and stucco, burns
fiercely just before sunrise,

the fifth and most of the sixth floors aflame,
stemming from candles left burning on magazines
by the juvenile jester in Apartment 119.

The grizzled knight,
kneeling, gallantly strives to revive
the golden-haired damsel,

wiping black filth from her face,
then, pressing his lips to hers,
breathes life with a hero's kiss.

Her father the King, dishelveled, powerless,
and her mother, fragile in flannel pajamas,
prays for a fairy tail ending.

It seems to be describing the scene of an accident (a fire in a residential neighborhood)? But the elements of fantasy seem a bit strange when thrown into the mix-- strange in the sense that this reader isn't sure why you included them in the first place, or why this poem is called "The Fall of Camelot." It doesn't seem to be delivering any kind of sentiment, rather just describing the aforementioned scene and comparing some of the people there to royal figures. Again, not sure why this is done, nor if it pays off...

But let's look at the use of language.

Quote:

---

The solemn white knight
with the smoke-smudged face
cradles the little limp princess.

---

Read this sentence aloud. This is how it sounds in a reader's head. It's very inelegant. It communicates a lot of information, certainly, but that's all it does. It doesn't show care for phrasing, or rhythm, or language itself. What's worse is that the information in conveys is of dubious merit (as mentioned before about the 'why' of including the fantasy element).

Quote:

---

Her father the King, dishelveled, powerless,
and her mother, fragile in flannel pajamas,
prays for a fairy tail ending.

---

In the final line, the verb 'prays' has been conjugated to the third person singular. It needs the third person plural ('pray').

What you have here is poem that certainly must have a reason for being, but that reason isn't made clear yet. This is what we work with, though; this is the marble we carve from. This reader thinks this piece needs to be cooked a little longer, and that you should cook it by thinking about what you wanted to communicate in the first place, and then after spending time there, thinking about the best way to communicate it.







J



EDIT: Also, was the use of the homophone 'tail' intentional?

This could have been an original attempt to compare a firefighter with a knight of old -
but then you throw in a load of other fairy-tale characters and it just became a muddle.
It seems you were trying to combine contemporary settings, a war zone and Camelot into one piece - a little over-ambitious given that it ends up like a news report from 'our man outside Parkside Palace' .

Parts of it could just as easily be rewritten as prose since there's not much in the way of poetry on show:

'cradles the little limp princess' - is a line that's almost impossible to read out loud so that should tell you it needs a rewrite.

This verse is a mish-mash of styles:

Compatriots gather behind barricad(e)es, -100% prose
silently gawk(ing?) along the grungy sidewalks; - questionable word choices
fearful faces flickering in the firelight - then an overload of alliteration

Verses 6 is virtually a rewrite of verse 1, and this description

and her mother, fragile in flannel pajamas,

is presumably meant to be taken seriously...

A work in progress at best methinks. So far the title is the best bit.

H

Thanks for the critiques. There is tons of helpful info to be taken from them.