Bittersweet Candy Bowl Forums

Okay, so around Christmas last school year we were assigned to write sonnets for English class. I was digging through files on my school laptop and found three, but one of them I used to many syllables on a few lines, and another revealed personal information. I'm posting the only one that's remotely good, but it's still so embarrasingly bad! I figured maybe I could get some good feeback to improve next time. I hereby present... an atrocity!


Never Been Kissed
In this here life that I have always lead
I was told lips on my lips would change all
A girl has yet to place such on my head
This somber fact is much to my appall
When at school, my personage is mockèd
Through my friends I have been called vastly kind
Yet, it is as though my heart is lockèd
Such a disheartening fact blows my mind
Tears stain my eyes when I wake up from sleep
I feel alone without a woman’s cheek
And though I am often tempted to peep
My depression constantly keeps me meek
Karina is my sweet desire’s name
Today, she shyly asked to be my dame

Sounds pretty good, and the grammar is flawless from what I can tell.

I note that some of your lines stray from the iambic pentameter which is typical of Shakespearean sonnets. If you could fix that, I think that would help the lines flow better. As an example:

Quote

The first line is in iambic pentameter, but the line following it is in trochaic pentameter. To fix the meter, you could change the second line to something like "For when at school, my personage is mock'd..."

I'm not going to bother with the "iambic pentameter" part because I hate actually structuring poems via their sounds--because it's such a chore. Besides, wacko already highlighted that.

I'm going to say that mostly it's good--you explore the facets of what it feels like to never be kissed. What's kind of obscure is that if the narrator feels alone from having not been kissed or not having a woman. Because the title is "Never Been Kissed" and you mention the lack of being kissed, but you also mention how you feel lonely not having a woman. Maybe it's that the title is slightly misleading--if I look at it without the title, it could be considered just the facets of being with a woman and how you wish you had one.

But what really bugs me is the last couplet, because the entire poem was like "I feel really sad having never been with a woman--BUT IT'S 'K NOW BECAUSE THIS CHICK ASKED ME OUT" It would have been okay if you spent, say, the last quatrain and last couplet to develop it (I'm pretty sure that's standard, actually--first eight lines to develop, last six for a change). But the problem is it feels almost as though the last two lines kind of just subvert all that you felt. You did pretty well with building up the depression and sadness of being alone, but the problem is it... doesn't even connect. There's not even a contraction, like "but." It just seems to abrupt. Two lines, for something like this, generally doesn't leave room for a twist that doesn't feel like a deus/diablous ex machina. If you want to improve this poem, I'd suggest rewriting it with using the last six lines as a twist, and also keep wacko's comment about iambic pentameter in mind.

EDIT: Also, as a silly little side note, when the line "And though I am often tempted to peep" popped up, I noticed your avatar looked like it could be squinting to see--er, something. xD;;

This post has been edited by Lux Aeterna: 30 March 2012 - 01:54 AM

I understand the use of a humorous turnaround joke at the end of poems. That being said, the tonality and seriousness of this poem taken into account, a "punchline poem" is not adequately represented in this style.