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The last one is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the only one that has (a) anything close to an action verb, and (b) any semblance of concrete imagery.
I've said it before, and will continue saying it: The great paradox of poetry is that specific, concrete, sensory images are a far better tool for conveying abstract emotional states than are the words for the abstract things themselves. You cannot effectively describe a thing in terms of itself. When you say, "I am me," what you say may be technically correct, but you're not actually telling me anything.
That's because abstract language is so subjective as to be effectively meaningless. The word love, in a poem, tells me nothing: my heart, a fluttering budgie in the birdcage of my ribs, however risible an image, at least makes me feel something, while idea-words like days, thoughts, love, dream, youth, and life just hang there, like vapor, and have no. impact. whatsoever.
That's what your writing teachers meant when they said "Show, don't tell."
The first one's not bad, either—little whiffs of Joyce and of Whitman's "barbaric YAWP" in the initial formulation—but it too drifts off into the ether (also, "bare" and "bashful" would seem to contradictory, esp. in conjunction with the linking verb "blossom"—I can see initial bashfulness, i.e. emotional constriction, blossoming i.e. expanding into bareness i.e. openheartedness, but not the other way around).
The second one, though—phew! "Childhood's youth" is a howler, for starters, and furthermore, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ON ABOUT? I keep re-reading it to see if there are words that I've missed, or something, but man, it just isn't there. Is this a reminiscence of childhood? Is the speaker a child now? What is s/he "waiting" for? What are "thoughts traversing unexplored dreams," anyway?
Twenty words is plenty of room to create a complete and tangible impression. The whole point of haiku, for instance, is not simply that it is short, but that it is self-contained.
Beauty of language—meter, rhythm, the many varieties of rhyme—is a toolset, not an end in itself. Love love love love lovely lovely love is a soothing set of sounds, but it really doesn't add much to the discourse on the human condition. A poem shouldn't tell us what it is about; it should just be about what it is about.
Kna'amean? |
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