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The Lay of Luna
She looks beyond the window pane
Calms her terror, and grooms her mane.
In the night sky, there far aloft
Her vessel shines, and shadows soft
Spread on the earth. The hours flow.
She blinks and sighs, and then lies low.
Her dreams follow a somber path,
Memories rush: her wicked wrath,
Shrill is her laugh, proud her stance,
Corrupt her heart, feral her glance.
She taunts and mocks: “You, sister weak!
Shall you defend the light they seek?
Shall you stand fast against the night?
Or shall you yield, as it is right,
For I’ve become what you so feared.
You made me meek, and yet I cleared
That evil curse you cast on me.
Afraid no more of what I’d be
If I killed you, ruthless tyrant,
And freed the land from that giant?
No need there is for your command
One shall suffice to rule the land.
The sun and moon, alone I can
Move on and on. There is no ban
On my power, o sister wrong!
Foolish was I all those years long.
And when you die, under my blow,
Mourn I shall not. No torch shall glow.
No one shall cry, even a bird,
No tear be shed, no sob be heard.
In loneliness, you shall be lost,
Your soul shall rove the land of frost.
All you cherish’d I shall plunder,
Smash and trample, tear asunder,
Until at last, nothing from thee
Could be gather’d on land or sea.
Memories past I shall destroy,
And all my might I shall employ
To vile your name. You they shall hate
And join my mirth when your last fate
We shall recall. Who shall pity
A princess fed by vanity?
Too long above your sun has shone,
Too long have you govern’d alone.
Always second the moon you set
With no excuse, with no regret.
Now at last, the moon rebels.
Your fate is near. I hear the bells
Tolling, a knell. How sinister
For me to say: ‘goodbye sister!’
And yet” – she laughs – “Now ’tis time!
The stars are right, the clock has chim’d.”
Her voice threatens, her eye of ice.
Her sister shakes, she knows the price,
That she will pay, had she to wield
The dire gems. There is no shield
That will protect against their might.
For that reason, she would not fight,
Rather perish, ere the dawn came,
But the kingdom would do the same:
All her subjects, every critter,
Even the land would then wither,
Hope would be lost. Upon the throne,
would reign a queen with heart of stone,
Never asleep, never away,
All would wizen under her sway.
“No sister dear, I won’t fight thee.
Lower the moon! ’Tis your duty!
O Luna sweet, where have you gone?”
“Don’t call me that! From this day on,
As Nightmare Moon, I shall be known,
Equestria, I claim my own.
Yet a last task, I have to see
Let me prepare to slaughter thee.”
And with these words, she casts magic.
Celestia runs, dodges the trick.
“Sister sister, why do you flee?
There is no place, as you can see,
No crack, no cave, no safe or room
Where you can hide, escape your doom.”
Another bolt, another cry.
Celestia falls down from the sky.
Her white body lies in the mud
Stained and bruised, covered in blood.
Dead she is not, but she has swoon’d.
Darkness descends, is she maroon’d?
Yet she still breathes. Lo and behold!
Shiny crystals all set in gold
Appear in turn. Celestia sighs,
Rises and moves, breaking her ties.
Now she ascends, ready to meet
Her sister dark. A final feat.
“O sister dear, please pardon me
I never was your enemy.”
The jewels shine, as rays of light
Spring from their core, colored and bright.
But Nightmare Moon first does resist
With all her strength, to say the least.
Will she succeed? Slowly she yields
As the rays close, piercing the shields
That she brought up. They all shatter.
Magic breaks through with high clatter.
Nightmare moon shrieks, when the rays hit—
Luna twitches. Her moonlight lit
Bedroom is still. But she has yelp’d,
Crying out, begging for help.
Slowly she wakes and feels round her
The warm embrace of her sister.
Calms her terror, and grooms her mane.
In the night sky, there far aloft
Her vessel shines, and shadows soft
Spread on the earth. The hours flow.
She blinks and sighs, and then lies low.
Her dreams follow a somber path,
Memories rush: her wicked wrath,
Shrill is her laugh, proud her stance,
Corrupt her heart, feral her glance.
She taunts and mocks: “You, sister weak!
Shall you defend the light they seek?
Shall you stand fast against the night?
Or shall you yield, as it is right,
For I’ve become what you so feared.
You made me meek, and yet I cleared
That evil curse you cast on me.
Afraid no more of what I’d be
If I killed you, ruthless tyrant,
And freed the land from that giant?
No need there is for your command
One shall suffice to rule the land.
The sun and moon, alone I can
Move on and on. There is no ban
On my power, o sister wrong!
Foolish was I all those years long.
And when you die, under my blow,
Mourn I shall not. No torch shall glow.
No one shall cry, even a bird,
No tear be shed, no sob be heard.
In loneliness, you shall be lost,
Your soul shall rove the land of frost.
All you cherish’d I shall plunder,
Smash and trample, tear asunder,
Until at last, nothing from thee
Could be gather’d on land or sea.
Memories past I shall destroy,
And all my might I shall employ
To vile your name. You they shall hate
And join my mirth when your last fate
We shall recall. Who shall pity
A princess fed by vanity?
Too long above your sun has shone,
Too long have you govern’d alone.
Always second the moon you set
With no excuse, with no regret.
Now at last, the moon rebels.
Your fate is near. I hear the bells
Tolling, a knell. How sinister
For me to say: ‘goodbye sister!’
And yet” – she laughs – “Now ’tis time!
The stars are right, the clock has chim’d.”
Her voice threatens, her eye of ice.
Her sister shakes, she knows the price,
That she will pay, had she to wield
The dire gems. There is no shield
That will protect against their might.
For that reason, she would not fight,
Rather perish, ere the dawn came,
But the kingdom would do the same:
All her subjects, every critter,
Even the land would then wither,
Hope would be lost. Upon the throne,
would reign a queen with heart of stone,
Never asleep, never away,
All would wizen under her sway.
“No sister dear, I won’t fight thee.
Lower the moon! ’Tis your duty!
O Luna sweet, where have you gone?”
“Don’t call me that! From this day on,
As Nightmare Moon, I shall be known,
Equestria, I claim my own.
Yet a last task, I have to see
Let me prepare to slaughter thee.”
And with these words, she casts magic.
Celestia runs, dodges the trick.
“Sister sister, why do you flee?
There is no place, as you can see,
No crack, no cave, no safe or room
Where you can hide, escape your doom.”
Another bolt, another cry.
Celestia falls down from the sky.
Her white body lies in the mud
Stained and bruised, covered in blood.
Dead she is not, but she has swoon’d.
Darkness descends, is she maroon’d?
Yet she still breathes. Lo and behold!
Shiny crystals all set in gold
Appear in turn. Celestia sighs,
Rises and moves, breaking her ties.
Now she ascends, ready to meet
Her sister dark. A final feat.
“O sister dear, please pardon me
I never was your enemy.”
The jewels shine, as rays of light
Spring from their core, colored and bright.
But Nightmare Moon first does resist
With all her strength, to say the least.
Will she succeed? Slowly she yields
As the rays close, piercing the shields
That she brought up. They all shatter.
Magic breaks through with high clatter.
Nightmare moon shrieks, when the rays hit—
Luna twitches. Her moonlight lit
Bedroom is still. But she has yelp’d,
Crying out, begging for help.
Slowly she wakes and feels round her
The warm embrace of her sister.
On a poem this long, I'm not sure if AABBCCDD is really the best approach to take. It leads to a high level of repetition; AABB type stuff works better in shorter poems, but in long poems, it ends up feeling kind of awkward. I generally find that more complicated rhyme schemes or alternating rhyme schemes (ABABCDCD, for instance) end up working better with longer works, and also makes it easier to write without sounding awkward.
There were a lot of awkward lines in this as well:
The second line is awkward here; "as it is right" is an awkward construction, and doesn't really flow with the pattern of the previous line. Keeping a constant syllable count can help, but there are other patterns, like stressed and unstressed syllables, that are important as well, and often, which are more important than syllables.
There's other awkward bits as well:
All of those lines feel awkward in context, and I don't even know why you used the awkward "No need is there for your command" versus "There is no need for your command".
My advice here would be to read it out loud and see where you stumble over the words; the poem should flow naturally, but I kept stumbling as I read it due to odd constructions and its cadence seeming to falter.
There were a lot of awkward lines in this as well:
Shall you stand fast against the night?
Or shall you yield, as it is right,
The second line is awkward here; "as it is right" is an awkward construction, and doesn't really flow with the pattern of the previous line. Keeping a constant syllable count can help, but there are other patterns, like stressed and unstressed syllables, that are important as well, and often, which are more important than syllables.
There's other awkward bits as well:
That evil curse you cast on me.
Afraid no more of what I’d be
[bIf I killed you, ruthless tyrant,
And freed the land from that giant?
No need there is for your command[/b]
One shall suffice to rule the land.
All of those lines feel awkward in context, and I don't even know why you used the awkward "No need is there for your command" versus "There is no need for your command".
My advice here would be to read it out loud and see where you stumble over the words; the poem should flow naturally, but I kept stumbling as I read it due to odd constructions and its cadence seeming to falter.
Poetry is always tough to judge when you don't know the author's intent. And I'm not just talking about what it means. Here, I'm talking about structural decisions.
You have 8 syllables per line (allowing that "hour" can be stretched into 2, that is), but there isn't a consistent stress pattern. Maybe you didn't try to have one. Who knows? Well, the 9th line only has 7 syllables, and there are a few others.
Long poems are even harder, when you have a rhyme scheme. There are only so many good ones to fit the story, and then you risk getting repetitive or really stretching for some. And stretch you did. The meter and the rhymes both show strain the longer the poem goes on, and a one-day writing period is very restrictive in allowing for the kind of fine-tuning this desperately needs.
So, that's all structural stuff, the added layer of difficulty that comes with a poem. How about the story? This is a story contest, after all.
One strength of poetry is that it can take a simple story and make it sound more elegant. At its core, this is a rather simple story. We see what appears to be a recap of Nightmare Moon's battle with Celestia from a thousand years ago, and then we get the "it was all a dream!" ending. However, there is a time and place for such an ending, and this is an instance where it actually works. The problem with most dream reveals is that it makes the entire story inconsequential. Interesting as it may have been to read, you did essentially waste your time reading something that didn't matter. In this case, it did, because Luna is emotionally affected by her dream. However, not much is made of that. There's just this tiny denouement of Luna realizing that wasn't actually happening, then taking comfort in her sister. But it's a quick and easy comfort, something she didn't have to work for at all, so it lacks tension, and there's not an emotional arc to her recovery. She merely feels better in an instant.
Yes, poetry is hard mode, but it was your choice to use it, so when I get bogged down in the odd rhythms and rhymes and get taken out of the story by that, that's the risk you take.
You have 8 syllables per line (allowing that "hour" can be stretched into 2, that is), but there isn't a consistent stress pattern. Maybe you didn't try to have one. Who knows? Well, the 9th line only has 7 syllables, and there are a few others.
Long poems are even harder, when you have a rhyme scheme. There are only so many good ones to fit the story, and then you risk getting repetitive or really stretching for some. And stretch you did. The meter and the rhymes both show strain the longer the poem goes on, and a one-day writing period is very restrictive in allowing for the kind of fine-tuning this desperately needs.
So, that's all structural stuff, the added layer of difficulty that comes with a poem. How about the story? This is a story contest, after all.
One strength of poetry is that it can take a simple story and make it sound more elegant. At its core, this is a rather simple story. We see what appears to be a recap of Nightmare Moon's battle with Celestia from a thousand years ago, and then we get the "it was all a dream!" ending. However, there is a time and place for such an ending, and this is an instance where it actually works. The problem with most dream reveals is that it makes the entire story inconsequential. Interesting as it may have been to read, you did essentially waste your time reading something that didn't matter. In this case, it did, because Luna is emotionally affected by her dream. However, not much is made of that. There's just this tiny denouement of Luna realizing that wasn't actually happening, then taking comfort in her sister. But it's a quick and easy comfort, something she didn't have to work for at all, so it lacks tension, and there's not an emotional arc to her recovery. She merely feels better in an instant.
Yes, poetry is hard mode, but it was your choice to use it, so when I get bogged down in the odd rhythms and rhymes and get taken out of the story by that, that's the risk you take.
Disclaimer: Any poetry more refined than the limerick is usually not to my taste (and lost on me), but I try to be objective.
Luna's monologue bit seems too long, and has a different tone than the narrative person. Rhyming "wither" with "critter" felt off, as did "critter" itself among all the more flowery Shakespearean English. "Magic" and "Trick" also don't rhyme. (Several other rhymes stood out amiss as well, but less glaringly so.) At the overall level of story, I felt that, despite the lush linguistics, this came across as only a very simplistic retelling of the basic Celestia/Nightmare fight we've seen in canon, without adding anything new to either characters view.
Luna's monologue bit seems too long, and has a different tone than the narrative person. Rhyming "wither" with "critter" felt off, as did "critter" itself among all the more flowery Shakespearean English. "Magic" and "Trick" also don't rhyme. (Several other rhymes stood out amiss as well, but less glaringly so.) At the overall level of story, I felt that, despite the lush linguistics, this came across as only a very simplistic retelling of the basic Celestia/Nightmare fight we've seen in canon, without adding anything new to either characters view.
>>TitaniumDragon
>>Pascoite
>>Xepher
Corejo and Quill kept telling me I should write poetry, so here it is. I put no effort into writing a story. I just picked up whatever was at hand and tried to squeeze it into rhymes. Period. Frankly, if Roger permitted it, I would have published that out of the official contest. The goal here wasn’t to compete, but rather to know what was wrong and why.
Iambic tetrameter with rhyming couplets is copied from Tolkien’s Lay of Leithian, which is 4,200 verses long. Good luck reading it TD! :P
Of course, I have two main obstacles to overcome with English poetry. First is iambs. French has no tonic accent, so French poetry is entirely built on syllables (no iambs). Figuring that out is quite hard and explains the uneven rhythm in places. Next thing is that I pronounce some words wrong. For instance, Cassius had to explain me that rebels was pronounced more like, say, /ray-bulls/ and not /ree-bells/ as I thought (that explains the slanty rebels/bells rhyme). Or that “hour”, despite being pronounced /a-were/ with a hiatus, is considered one syllable formed by a triphthong. (‘Magic’ and ‘trick’ don’t rhyme? How so? I don’t hear the difference and my dictionary gives the same phonetic ending.) Etc.
You could say I could get help from online rhyming dictionaries or other resources. Sure, but I find them really inconsistent. For example, howmanysyllables.com indicates /hour/ is monosyllabic, but suggests it rhymes with sour (OK), but also tour (!) and dour, which is likely more debatable.
The short of it being that this was not written as a true entry, but rather as an exercice. And it was also evidence that both Corejo and Quill are wrong: I should NOT write poetry. Well, okay, I should write poetry out of the WriteOff and get better at it! :P Still, if one of you around there has the time and courage to give me a detailed insight of what was wrong, I’d be really grateful.
Good luck to the finalists, and thanks everyone!
>>Pascoite
>>Xepher
Corejo and Quill kept telling me I should write poetry, so here it is. I put no effort into writing a story. I just picked up whatever was at hand and tried to squeeze it into rhymes. Period. Frankly, if Roger permitted it, I would have published that out of the official contest. The goal here wasn’t to compete, but rather to know what was wrong and why.
Iambic tetrameter with rhyming couplets is copied from Tolkien’s Lay of Leithian, which is 4,200 verses long. Good luck reading it TD! :P
Of course, I have two main obstacles to overcome with English poetry. First is iambs. French has no tonic accent, so French poetry is entirely built on syllables (no iambs). Figuring that out is quite hard and explains the uneven rhythm in places. Next thing is that I pronounce some words wrong. For instance, Cassius had to explain me that rebels was pronounced more like, say, /ray-bulls/ and not /ree-bells/ as I thought (that explains the slanty rebels/bells rhyme). Or that “hour”, despite being pronounced /a-were/ with a hiatus, is considered one syllable formed by a triphthong. (‘Magic’ and ‘trick’ don’t rhyme? How so? I don’t hear the difference and my dictionary gives the same phonetic ending.) Etc.
You could say I could get help from online rhyming dictionaries or other resources. Sure, but I find them really inconsistent. For example, howmanysyllables.com indicates /hour/ is monosyllabic, but suggests it rhymes with sour (OK), but also tour (!) and dour, which is likely more debatable.
The short of it being that this was not written as a true entry, but rather as an exercice. And it was also evidence that both Corejo and Quill are wrong: I should NOT write poetry. Well, okay, I should write poetry out of the WriteOff and get better at it! :P Still, if one of you around there has the time and courage to give me a detailed insight of what was wrong, I’d be really grateful.
Good luck to the finalists, and thanks everyone!
>>Monokeras
Don't worry too much, I can't write poetry in my native English, much less in another language. I didn't even suspect that you were doing this in a second language, so it was good enough to my non-poetic ears on that count.
As to the specific rhyme..
magic is "ma-jik", two syllables
"trick" is "trik", one syllable. The "ik" at the end is the same, but the rest of the last syllable ("tr" vs. "j") is not the same. Whereas a word like "tragic" ("tra-jik") would rhyme, as it has the same "jik" phonetic for the ENTIRE final syllable.
Don't worry too much, I can't write poetry in my native English, much less in another language. I didn't even suspect that you were doing this in a second language, so it was good enough to my non-poetic ears on that count.
As to the specific rhyme..
magic is "ma-jik", two syllables
"trick" is "trik", one syllable. The "ik" at the end is the same, but the rest of the last syllable ("tr" vs. "j") is not the same. Whereas a word like "tragic" ("tra-jik") would rhyme, as it has the same "jik" phonetic for the ENTIRE final syllable.
>>Monokeras
I find that rhymezone is a pretty good resource as far as rhyming dictionaries go. Of course, you always have to sanity check things.
As for mispronouncing words... how could that ever be?
http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
I find that rhymezone is a pretty good resource as far as rhyming dictionaries go. Of course, you always have to sanity check things.
As for mispronouncing words... how could that ever be?
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
>>TitaniumDragon
This poem was written by a dutchman by the way. Shall that suggest that English experts are to be found exclusively outside the native English-speaking pool? :)
This poem was written by a dutchman by the way. Shall that suggest that English experts are to be found exclusively outside the native English-speaking pool? :)