I'm a sucker:

For big story poem things like this, so I'm all for it.

Still, commenting on the form first, author, if you're trying to do "The Wreck of the Hesperus," the even-numbered lines have extra syllables...though Longfellow couldn't keep a proper rhythm, either, throwing in extra syllables and pulling them out of lines all over the place for no apparent reason. And the rhyme scheme's kind of backwards from Longfellow's, too. I do like the way the rhymes run through multiple stanzas, but having "here" and "hear" there at the end is kind of cheating.

As for the content, I don't think I'd like to live in this future. :) And I'm not quite sure what happens in the second-to-last stanza. Do they strip the ship even after the narrator's told them there's nothing there?

Mike

Thee meter is flawless here, ad the story is interesting to boot. I think someone did this same structure once before and gave it a name, but I can't remember what. I like the way it works, though. The sound ending the last line of a stanza will end the second line of the next one, the end of the second becomes the rhyming first and third, and the pattern loops around from the poem's end back to the beginning.

We even get to know the character and his situation quite well. If I have one complaint, and I'm not sure I'd even call it one, is that the end feels anticlimactic. Yet that's kind of the point: that the protagonist fades back into his life, since there's nothing he can do about it. It does make me wonder what actual difference he made, and that also may be the point. The one survivor wasn't in any shape to become slave labor. She probably would have died anyway, and I haven't gotten a picture of this society detailed enough to know whether it would be worth it to them to try nursing her back to health.

Like >>Baal Bunny I'm not sure what's happened. It seemed like they sent him over to determine if anything of worth was there, and he told them no. So what are they stripping? And had the lady died by then, or he had concealed her? Killed her out of mercy? They just didn't notice her?

Thanks, >>Pascoite and the other person who voted!

I think this might need another set of stanzas at the end to wrap everything up better and maybe make it not so horribly depressing. Then it can start on the rounds to the various magazines!

Mike

Thanks again to >>Pascoite:

For the comments. I did indeed write another set of stanzas for this and sold it to the website Silver Blade where it appears in their current issue. :)

Mike