The Serpent

[NickCall]

Thought I should probably put SOMETHING out there to show that I am a writer. I signed up, dropped a few comments, and have yet to finish my story I'm writing, so figured I'd just throw a poem out for you guys to enjoy:

The Serpent

 

She sits on your shoulder,

Hissing sweet words in your head

Playing your emotions--

Corruption manifested.

 

She hisses directions,

To you, her sweet pawn,

Changing your perception,

Of what is right and wrong.

 

She plays this sick game,

And with the peices she toys.

Each move calculated,

With frightening skill and poise.

 

Destroying the bonds,

Without sense of sorrow.

Ending these worlds

For her idea of tomorrow.

 

I'm sorry, dear pawn,

You've collected this fiend.

Now you're a sacrifice,

Instead of a queen.

 

I wish you well, in your planned life,

Though I imagine you'll have struggle and strife.

By The Serpent's dark tongue, this chaos create--

All for her gain, her attaining 'Checkmate'

[reverie]

nice rhyme scheme. Second stanza's a little inconsistent with the rest. Not sure if you're following a specific form here. It reminds me of a free verse version of a Ballad, but with something akin to an envoy from a ballade added in for fun.

 

The best advice I can give you is the oldest there is: Show don't tell.

 

Hmm, but you probably want more than that.

 

You're a fiction writing right? Here's trick a few have tried to teach me with varying success. Inhabit your narrative using the free-indirect discourse style pioneered by Gustave Flaubert. I.E. Write in the 3rd person like you would in first person. Construct all your 3rd person actions and thoughts through the filter of a single character mindset/point of view/world out look etc. An example of this is Thomas Mann's character Auschenbach from the book Death in Venice, where the narrator weighs the protagonist's vacation and eventual death through the mind of the protagonist: an aging 19-century scholar whose point of view is colored by his familiarity with the mythology of the Classic world. Read it and you'll see what I mean. I recommend the either the critical edition edited by Naomi Ritter or Clayton Koelb's translation. Koelb is neat because he has footnotes pointing out where Mann seamlessly wrote sections of his prose in German dactylic hexameter in tribute to the Virgil's Aenied.

 

How does this apply to your poem? Well, what are you really writing about? The Serpent or Eve. Or to take it step further the Serpent's reaction to Eve or Eve's reaction to the serpent. What you have now is kind of a loose mix.

 

She sits on your shoulder,

Hissing sweet words in your head

Playing your emotions--

Corruption manifested.

 

"Your" meaning Eve. Okay you have 3rd person subject pronouns mixed with 2nd person pronoun objects. Grammatically correct, but not very effective as a narrative style. You've adopted the voice so often found in personal love poems. Writing like this fine if the the object of your attention happens to be your reader. But if they're not, then it gets kind of silly because your narrator continues to speak as if they were. Which works for the person you intended the poem for because you are really only reaffirming in their mind what they expect you to say (or lampooning the opposite). They have a frame of reference already established by being aware of your narrator as a living human being, but everyone else that reads it isn't in on the joke. "We," the reader are not "Eve." I think it would work better if you switched to 3rd person entirely and then had an omnipotent narrator that could submerged itself wholly in either Eve, the Serpent and or both (if you want to make it longer), which you could then use to set up the dialogue or thoughts in the concluding stanzas. Or you could just write the whole thing in first person and or switch to 3rd halfway through or vice versa for dramatic effect.

 

 

Also, (and you probably already know this)but writing strictly in italics limits what you can do with thoughts, dialogue, colloquial expressions, trade marks, sign posts, terms of endearment, indirect quotes etc. in a poem. But Mira does well enough with it. You might want to have a look at some of his stuff.

 

 

rev...

Edited October 13, 2006 by reverie

[Wyvern]

Nice poem, Memento Mori. :-) I agree with reverie that the allusion to the Garden of Eden is apparent, though I didn't read the second person of the poem as necessarily being Eve, since serpent's influences in this piece suggest broader themes to me. I found your decision to make the serpent female very interesting, and really like how you juxtaposed "sacrifice" and "queen" in the second to last stanza.

 

You mentioned in a previous thread that you were unhappy with how some of your rhyme schemes turn out, and that you didn't care much for meter. Personally, I think the two are interconnected, and that the reason you may be unhappy with how some of the rhymes come out is because of the differing rhythms of words and syllable counts. For example, in the first stanza, there's a slanted rhyme between "head" and "manifested," but the rhythm of reading "Hissing sweet words in your head" is entirely different than that of "Corruption manifested." Unless you want to create a deliberate jarring effect on the reader, you may want to try parralleling the rhythms of lines more to enhance the rhyme schemes of the poem. Also, while I didn't have as much of a problem with the second person of the poem as reverie did, I did feel that the introduction of the first person in the last stanzas felt odd in the context of the rest of the piece. You might consider sticking to the second person in those stanzas as a possible means of improving upon this.

 

Anyway, nice stuff. :-) Thanks for sharing this here, and know that you don't need to prove yourself as a writer in our eyes. We don't place emphasis on writing experience or background, around these parts. :-)

[NickCall]

It's really an old work, and oddly enough bears no allusory element towards Eve at all

 

Though it is funny to step back and see that there now.

 

The original intent of the poem was actually to be a message, just a vent.

 

If I get bored one day, I'll re-work it, but inspiration long lost, it might not be suitable

 

I do appreciate the extensive critique, though.