Pre- AP English

PoliSci79
Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:49:03 +0000

Hi I’m a huge poetry lover and have actually competed in a few poetry competitions so let me see if I can offer some advice!

Firstly while I think the general idea is fantastic you focused a bit too much on the rhyme and neglected the rhythm. When you write poetry it should have a clear beat throughout, and while it doesn’t have to be consistent (it can actually be really helpful to put emphasis on a particular line by breaking the rhythm) it does still have to follow a bit of a pattern. The easiest way to make sure you have the beat is to recite your poem and listen to see if it follows any sort of rhythm. It might just be from my personal reading but I couldn’t really detect any specific pattern of rhythm in the poem. Additionally while I appreciate that you tried to make sure it rhymed, you generally want to pick a pattern for a rhyme scheme. Except for some specific types of poetry such as free-verse, poetry is all about formulating patterns and knowing when to break from your established pattern for dramatic effect. An example of a rhyme pattern would be ABAB…, which would have line 1 rhyme with line 3 and line 2 rhyme with line 4 and so on. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that specifically but you want a pattern of rhymes throughout the poem rather than just focusing on making sure you have a set number of internal rhymes. Of course all this advice could be totally off depending on the assignment you were given (I’m assuming this is an assignment since you titled it Pre-AP English) so feel free to disregard if it’s not relevant to the assignment but I think in generally this could help improve it.

Hope that was helpful!