Is my poem any good?

Yes, it’s very sweet. Keep writing. :)

It’s very good, and actually, your style is reminscent of Oliver Wenell Holmes.

http://www.poetry-archive.com/h/the_two_streams.html

Beautiful job… Keep up the great work!

I like it, for the most part.

Not my cup of poetry.

It is important to use images that are believable in order to support your point. While there may occasionally be a fawn around in December, that seems to unlikely to me that I can’t really get past that to feel sympathetic about your message about love and loss.

I do however think that you would benefit from further writing. I encourage you to keep it up.

I’m with @wundayatta. The unreality of the images threw me completely.

Not too many flowers are blooming as the snow starts.

A flower on a cliff is one thing. A deer scampering to a flower on a cliff is another thing entirely. Some deer do okay on cliffs, but not with “a long pace”, and fawns are notoriously wobbly.

I don’t imagine a deer would have the same reaction to missing a flower that you would. Crying over a flower? No. Crying over “no food”, maybe.

Not much concept of “come back tomorrow” for a deer.

Other than that… I’d work on meter and pace instead of simple rhymes. Rhymes are nice enough, but don’t make them your aim.

And absolutely, definitely keep at it.

I am going to offer some constructive criticism.

The very last line seems too long, at 14 syllables. You could either try to shorten the line, or add another line appended to the end of the poem. You could try “But tomorrow has come and the flower’s not here / The baby deer sighs and waits for next year”.

I would suggest changing “The baby deer sits and watches the flower wither / As snowflakes fall here and hither” to “The baby deer watches the small flower wither / As snowflakes fall here and snowflakes fall hither” to make them of equal number of syllables.

I would change the first two lines from “As the flower blooms / With its sweet perfume” to “The flower blooms / With sweet perfume”. This really doesn’t make a difference.

Awesome! The above advice from everyone is what I was thinking but I think overall the poem is really goo (:

It’s decent, frankly I don’t give a shit whether it’s realistic or not as long as it gets a message across. But yes, certain lines are too long and disrupt the rhythm of it. But hey, keep writing and you should only get better and better!

Relax guys… Poetry is a process and I don’t know if you noticed it or not but she/he is 13 years old. What were you guys writing when you were 13. Save the “Honest” critiques for older writers who are still for all their trying at this plateau. If he/she keeps at it (hence encouragement) he/she will advance naturally with absolutely no help from anyone.

I tend to lean off a bit when kids are young under an assumption that they might be sensitive (if you don’t know a person from adam, age assumes that fairly enough realizing that may not be the case) and to me at least it’s not worth the chance to pick it apart and discourage them when pointing out the good here in this particualr instance is the better call in my opinion.

For a 13 year old writing this well it only goes to show how he/she will progress on his or her own. She/he is a natural.

Awww I thought it was very sweet. :D Good work! I love how you worded it so well.

It’s certainly not bad.
Keep working at it. :)

It’s very good. KEEP WRITING.

I can already sense a certain “style” that you have developed in your writing. Something which all great poets possess.

So yes like others have said, don’t concentrate on rhyming. Work on the quality of expression. I would suggest read a whole lot of poetry. You’ll see it doesn’t have to rhyme, or even be too literal to be beautiful. Keep it up :)

@GabrielsLamb I wish I could flag your answer as “AMAZING”

I have been brooding about this question for several days.

@leopardgecko123: You show real promise. Please keep on writing.

Several suggestions:

Six poems a day is too much. A poem, like a painting, needs time and thought, and revisiting. Every word, actually every syllable, and even each vowel and consonant, has weight and meaning, both the literal and the sounds, emphasis, stress, even placement in the line.

If you feel the need to use end rhymes, don’t write aabb, ccdd, eeff, gghh, iijj, etc.

abab is better and less forced; also think about repeating some of the original rhymes in the later verses.

You must check your facts; before you write about deer and fawns, make sure you understand when fawns are born, when they mature, when they leave their mother, how they handle survival in winter, and what kinds of sound they actually make.

I would not bother with these thoughts if I didn’t think that you should continue to write. Good luck.

Here’s a mini-masterpiece by Robert Frost. Ask yourself why it works. (Read it aloud, as all poetry is meant to be.)

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

And now for something completely different, but equallywell-thought-out and well-constructed, by Ogden Nash

THE TERMITE

Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good,
And that is why your cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.

As usual, @gailcalled has excellent advice.

You need to read a lot of good poetry if you want to write even passable poetry. Nothing but doggerel can be dashed off in a few minutes without much thought. (Even that is an art form to be mastered.)

Funny, but I was also going to suggest a Frost poem, one of my favorites:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near,
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake,
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

thanks for all the advice. I know it doesn’t make much sense but I’m just starting and sense wasn’t my main intention but I will work toward it more. And I have a poem that repeats a line at the end. I’m actually learning about poetry in English so it will probably help. And thank you for being honest, I appreciate it.

@leopardgecko123:

We are spending the time with you and your poem precisely because you show so much promise.

As an experiment, take one stanza and play with it.

For example:

But, alas, the nodding flower is nearly wilted
For winter is finally keening its song.
Drowsing, the fawn also sits and watches it wither
As snowflakes fall hither and yon.

Here, I used internal assonance with the letter “w.” It is a crude attempt but adds some interest. And I snuck in some metrical discipline. Not too much.

I find that I am enjoying this and could easily rework your poem until it becomes mine and uses up the next three days of my life. LIne three is really awkward because of the lack of better meter, but I simply can’t indulge myself. Why don’t you try? Read it out loud and see what sounds nice and what sounds clunky?

What would work better than “also sits“in terms of meter? “Al so sits” is DA Da dum. Aha.

What about;

Drowsing, the fawn weeps and watches it wither. Nah. Too many “w’s.”

But, but, but “winter keening” and the “fawn weeping” mirrors the melancholy of the metaphor of winter and the death of the flower.

Stop me, someone, please.

Anyway, you get my drift.

(I also changed the rhyme scheme to a b a b.)

Stop, @gailcalled! Stop!