What are you impressions of this little thing I wrote?

Question

I woke up this morning with this phrase on my mind. Why? I haven't the slightest idea. I thought maybe it was a fragment of a quote hanging around the back of my mind. I looked and looked and looked, but found none. So I sat here and wrote what came to mind. What do you think of it?

The Proud and the Profane

In battle’s thirsty heat,
or war’s raging storm,
there is but two kinds upon the field,
the proud and the profane.

So give me, my brother, thy hand,
and together we shall face the fight.
Together, we die,
the proud and the profane.

Ere the pennants raise,
or proud flags fly,
we here, stand the line,
as the proud and the profane.

When after the battle is wrought,
the two go before the king,
where in judgment stand,
the proud and the profane.

© 2 April 2007

There is a 1956 movie starring William Holden by this name. It is based on the book "The Magnificant Bastards" by Lucie Herndon Crockett

to no name (answer no.6) The coward and the fool would not appear on the field. For when the battle begins, you are either proud (charging in or returning stroke for stroke) or profane (ducking for cover and swearing a bluestreak).

Answer 1

You've got the start of something, but I think it will need a bit of work if you want to make a serious poem out of it. To put it another way... I think I'm getting some feeling from it but it seems a little scattered to me, and the form of it could stand some revision.

Okay. You have free verse. No rhyming, no meter. These things, of course, aren't mandatory for a poem, but when they are absent it does put more emphasis on what you DO have. A poem with a distinct meter tends to read well. It flows at a regular pace. Your poem does not, and I notice it. I presume that this is not part of the effect you are trying to achieve, so I suggest adding a sort of meter so it is less noticable.

Likewise with your repetition. One of the few things that tie this down to 'poetry' instead of prose is your repeated line at the end of every stanza. In the third one you changed the line, but when I read it without the 'as' I don't get a meaningful difference. Even if you choose not to use any kind of strict meter, I recommend bringing the lengths of lines more into correspondance as well. In a sense that last line of each stanza is the centrepiece, and I think you do it a disservice by being so chaotic around it. Lead up to it in a systematic way, just as you don't build a house by slapping boards together, don't do this with a poem, either.

Punctuation also has an effect on how your poem is read. You have a lot of it in there; I think too much. An end-of-line normally puts a pause of a sort, so really you only need to put punctuation there if the sentance in your stanza grammatically demands it. Punctuation is kind of like make-up - if you throw too much it it distracts rather than accentuates. And while you seem to have too many commas, you don't have any semicolons, dashes, colons, exclamation marks, etc, etc. You could add a lot of emphasis where you wanted if you used more of these (I loved an exclamation after the assertion of fighting together in stanza 2). Similarly, you might want to think about capitalizing more, which turns them into a sort of iconic super-proud and super-profane... something larger than just mundane nouns (maybe with proud, profane, king, battle, and so on).

Lastly, I'm not sure entirely where the message is leading. In stanza 1 we get your premise (which I don't necessarily agree with, but that's a premise for you). Stanza 3 seems to talk again just more of what's going on. Setting material. Thus is seems to me that it belong after stanza 1. Premise, then setting. If you put stanza 2 after that you seem to have a resolution in brotherhood and I'd say you were pretty much good.

You also need to watch your POV. Sometimes you refer to the actors in third person, sometimes first, sometimes not at all. Be consistent, and I recommend bringing them more to the fore. Make them seem like two actual people. I like your use of 'we'... when I tinkered with your poem myself it seemed most evocative to make it all seem to be told by one, perhaps to the other. You might want to give that a whack.

As you can tell, I'm not quite sure WHAT to make of stanza 4. On the one hand, it seems to demean the entire struggle - everyone mentioned survives, so what they were doing wasn't really dangerous after all. Similarly, in the rest of your poem you don't seem to mention anything that might require judgement; one wonders what the point of it is now. I think you can redeem it, if you wish, by making it a bit more vague. Suggest that perhaps it's not some mortal king who's judging the soldiers but a divine providence, or future generations, or some other distant, inaccessible, powerful entity instead of just some guy. Also put in something to make it more relevant. Make the battle an allegory for life and suggest that you face this life's judgement in the same way you face the battle itself. That puts a nice bow on it all.

Don't take all this criticism in a negative way, though. That's just what I saw and what I think would make it better. Take what you can use and ignore what you disagree with. It is YOUR poem, after all. But I wouldn't bother if I didn't see potential in there. Go for it!

Answer 2

Some of the best things i have written, i had no idea of where they came from or why...so my advice is: Stop thinking in "the Why" (that slows you down). Just keep writing what your heart tells you to, and let your readers figure out the why for themselves.
If you speak from the heart/write from your soul, then your more likely to tough your readers right where they live!(just my opinion)

Answer 3

I'm a published Poet and I must say I was taken aback by your poem. I like it very much and I think you have just found something about yourself that you didn't know. You are a poet. Keep writing, don't give up.

Answer 4

(laughs)
Good poem sophist.
...
But what of the coward and the fool :)

Answer 5

that's great darlin'! Keep writing.

Answer 6

It is very good.

Answer 7

nice. congratulations.