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In the Autumn Leaves
The crowds of oak and pine conceal
A sitting one. Along the road
They blend, but he a stack of red
A mantelpiece and slab instead
And chimney up a second floor
Suggest a household seen of yore.
A fire took it, all but bones
And pardoned from demolishment
He seems to me a man, who waits
Arraignment from the higher fates
Whose business I might scarcely know
But, stately, dockets me, I trow
Like all the families gone advance
Who gathered ‘round that comely hearth
In prideful commonality.
The softness of the goldenrods
Surrounds that square, and lectures hue
To flecking winds and land to wilt
—All this to come again at tilt
Of spring return. But pose
The bricks, in amber, through the close!
And in a wonder, I confuse
That ever-joining ‘round the fire
With staging deigned for wilderness.
A sitting one. Along the road
They blend, but he a stack of red
A mantelpiece and slab instead
And chimney up a second floor
Suggest a household seen of yore.
A fire took it, all but bones
And pardoned from demolishment
He seems to me a man, who waits
Arraignment from the higher fates
Whose business I might scarcely know
But, stately, dockets me, I trow
Like all the families gone advance
Who gathered ‘round that comely hearth
In prideful commonality.
The softness of the goldenrods
Surrounds that square, and lectures hue
To flecking winds and land to wilt
—All this to come again at tilt
Of spring return. But pose
The bricks, in amber, through the close!
And in a wonder, I confuse
That ever-joining ‘round the fire
With staging deigned for wilderness.
So... I like the mood of this, and the language use was good. But I'm lost on several fronts. One, only the longer stanzas have a rhyme scheme, and only in that they end with two couplets. I'm no scholar of poetic forms, so I wouldn't know if this is a traditional one, but it seems closer to free verse, or at least close to blank verse, as the lines are all iambic tetrameter. I spent so much time looking to see what rhyme scheme there might be that I got distracted from the actual poetry. Like the previous one I read, the meter has one hiccup that relies on a word, "fire," that can be heard as two different syllable counts. I think it's more common to use it as one syllable, but it has to be two to fit the meter. Excusable enough, but you play it both ways: the second time you use the word, it has to be one syllable to fit the meter. Well, plus "wilderness" is kind of wedged into the meter, as you normally wouldn't stress the final syllable of it when speaking.
As to meaning... I get that the speaker finds a burned-out house in the woods and muses on how it fits with its environs. That part was fine. But the ending seemed to be making a point out of that, yet what it was saying went over my head.
As to meaning... I get that the speaker finds a burned-out house in the woods and muses on how it fits with its environs. That part was fine. But the ending seemed to be making a point out of that, yet what it was saying went over my head.
Like an autumn leaf, a stanza seems to have fallen from this poem, and leaves the conclusion a little dried up.