Sorry I missed this round. I thought I had more time. Oh well, everyone tied for first place!

Free verse, so no structural constraints. It's always hard to try and derive some meaning from how the poet decides to break things into lines or stanzas. Like if this was written out as paragraphs, would it lose anything for it?

It creates a nice mood, linking the similarities between tadpoles and caterpillars, and then branching out to liken them to a child as well. That's where it shines, in the tone and atmosphere it creates.

I like the interwoven rhyme scheme. I assume it's an existing form, but not one I'm familiar with. I'm not sure what the "amphibious singers" are. At first I assumed frogs, since they're a classic example of metamorphosis, but a little further in, I wondered if it was something like mermaids or sirens, the latter particularly because of the language making the speaker sound allured by having a more open persona, along with the use of "piscine." Structurally, I can find no fault with the rhymes or rhythms. Fun piece, and of course I identify with it.

Structurally, this is mostly unconstrained, with no rhythm and only a couple lines from each stanza rhyming. I like the argument between fish and frog, though I'm a little surprised the fish doesn't make a point of the tadpole (and possibly the frog, depending on how large a type of fish it is) being something it eats. Though you only have limited space, and they made their main points. I have to say, the fish makes the better point, when he cites what he's able to do, while the frog can only cite what he sees others do.

I like the setup to this, but the structural constraints often make it so that the plot advancement per line is a little small (heh), and there's a lot of the middle that ends up being very vague. I'm also wondering how the fish even knew of the river and bay or anything else beyond where it lived. It was also an odd shift to have most of the poem feel like it was in the fish's perspective, only for it to turn out to be a third-person storyteller at the end. I like the sentiment that little steps add up to big ones.

>>Pascoite

Thanks, Pasco:

The form doesn't have a name as far as I know. The rhyme scheme is what they call chain rhyme where lines in one stanza rhyme with lines in the next, and the rhythm is a variation on what they call common meter using three-beat anapests instead of the usual two-beat iambs.

My intention was to make the first two stanzas a dialogue between the fish, the introverts, and the frogs, the extroverts, where they express how much they envy the other, then have a narrator come in in the last two stanzas and says how they'll never admit that they envy each other. A little more tinktering, and I think that'll come through better. :)

Mike