The sun
The sun is a treasure chest full of gold
The gold shines through your face
The sun is the light of my heart
The sun is having a ridiculous race
The sun is an ice cream in a cone
The sun is my favourite place
The sun is like a hot bun baked
The sun is the end of my shoelace
3 comments:
Hi Biya!
My name is Avani and I’ll be one of your moderators this year. Firstly can I apologise for taking so long to tell you what I thought of this poem - I’m afraid I’ve been stuck in bed with the ‘flu. After looking at your first piece, I’ve got to say I’m really looking forward to working with you. I think we both have quite a lot in common when it comes to the way we like to write!
The first thing I noticed when I read your poem was the wonderful extent of your imagination; you compare the sun to everything from a ‘treasure chest full of gold’ to and ‘ice cream cone’. I think my favourite line is the last one: ‘The sun is the end of my shoelace’ - how did you come up with that? I think it’s a stroke of genius, so ambiguous that I’m wondering what it could possibly mean even after at least about fifteen reads. You’ve definitely managed to come up with an original metaphor like the task requires!
Another part of me is wondering if you developed that line not necessarily to fit the metaphor part of the poem, but to fulfil the rules about rhyme set out in the task. If that’s the case that you’ve certainly chosen some words that rhyme together excellently. Do you think that perhaps your brilliant focus on rhyme, however, might have taken away from the relation of your metaphors with the sun? If you look at englishguru’s example poem you’ll see that even though ‘road’ and ‘explode’ rhyme, the word ‘explode’ also helps the build the metaphor of the unsteady and ‘dynamite’ nature of the world that they are trying to describe. Does that make sense? In your poem, the rhymes work really well and most of the metaphors do as well (especially the first which you have developed it even further so that the sun represents not just the treasure, but also the ‘you’ person in the poem so that the sun has both a physical and emotional resemblance), but perhaps there are one or two that could use a bit of work.
I think I understand what you are going for when you use the image of a ‘hot bun baked’ and it provides an especially pleasant contrast to the image of the ‘ice cream in a cone’. You’re trying to say the sun is so hot that it reminds you of bun straight out of the oven, in one metaphor, and in the other one, you saying the sun reminds you of a hot day where you would like an ice cream to cool you down, right? They are very good ideas, but I wonder if you can continue them in the following lines like you have in the first half of the poem. Is there a link you could find between ‘ice cream in a cone’ and ‘favourite place’ or ‘hot bun baked’ and ‘shoe lace’. I have an idea for how you could perhaps improve the first one and maybe you could have a go at thinking of a way for the second one? Is one of your favourite places somewhere you can get an ‘ice cream cone’ from, by any chance? How about you change the lines so they read something like: ‘The sun is an ice cream in a cone/ At the beach, which is my favourite place’.? Of course you can change ‘the beach’ to any other place you like! Also, don’t be afraid to use punctuation at the end of your lines to separate your ideas.
Phew! That was a lot, wasn’t it? I hope it made sense! I know you can do the links, because you have done them brilliantly in the first four lines. I really like the way you’ve done it in the third and fourth lines where you show how important the sun is to you by saying it’s the ‘light of your heart’ and then saying how quickly the time of day goes away in the following line by saying the sun is running in a ‘race’. It is very reminiscent of the example poem by Valerie Bloom, so well done!
Overall, I think you can tell I really enjoyed reading your poem! You’ve used a fabulous range of metaphors, which are really original! I can’t wait to read your next piece!
~ Avani
Not much I can add to Avani's fantastic comments on your poem, Biya - although I must say that I, too, loved what you wrote. It as an excellent start to your work on wordvoodoo, and I am really looking forward to what you do with the following tasks!
I think your most successful metaphor is your first one, because it does exactly what I was looking for: it takes a metaphor and EXTENDS it across two lines. This is, perhaps, where the rest of your metaphors - excellent though they are - are perhaps slightly less successful, because cramming each of them into only one line leaves them a little thin and undeveloped (and also means that almost all your lines begin with the same two words, which can get a bit repetitive). Why not look again at Valerie Bloom's poem and see how she extends each of her metaphors; Millzos' poem on this very blog is also an excellent example to learn from.
I, too, loved the final metaphor (line 8) for its sheer originality and strangeness. At first I was so dazzled by how unique an idea you had created that I fell in love with it; but the more I look at it, I wonder how much, perhaps, you simply fell into the 'rhyme trap' I warned you about. Maybe you can clear this up for me?
Lastly, beware of the simile which strayed into Line 7. This was a metaphor task; similes will be next time.
All in all, though, I was delighted with what you have done here, and, provided you take on board this comments, I just know you are going to produce some fantastic writing on wordvoodoo. Well done!
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