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Poetry
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Family Research
By robey
05 April 2008

Hi

This is my first offering !

I wrote this one day after I had spent a very wet and cold day. searching for the gravestone of my great,great Auntie.

The inscription on the stone gave me the birth date and the date of death, which was useful for my research.

I finally found out that Alice had died of Typhoid at the age of 27, leaving 4 young children.

Life must have been hard for her, I would love to know more about her, but of course, one can only presume the kind of life she would have had.

I keep a daily journal now, recording life in the 21st centuary, maybe a great,great niece of mine will be interested in the kind of life I have one day !!

Robey


Family Research



 The one that lies beneath the stone,
 Is one that I have never known.
 I have a picture of her face,
 And know that our lives are interlaced.


 She died so young, before her time.
 I know she is part of my line.
 What life had she, compared to mine?


 Record in detail all your life,
 Including troubles, and the strife,
 Your loves and loss, before you
 Start to gather moss,
 That covers the stone you lie beneath.
 When you have died and bequeathed.

Reviews
contradictions between form and content
Written by fellpony (1715 comments posted) 5th April 2008
Gravestones make you think, don't they? Though sometimes the absence of a gravestone is more significant. 
 
Your first stanza has a classic abcb rhyme scheme, which changes in stanza 2 and, unfortunately, stumbles quite a bit in stanza 3. I don't mind this, because sometimes it can echo a disintegration in the poem which is intentional, but here it contradicts the content, which implies disorder and loss in the first 2 stanzas but encourages tidy "record keeping" in stanza 3. The final couplet is weakened by the effort to rhyme beneath and bequeathed. 
 
You start out with a fairly strict metre, too, in stanza 1. This gets a little lost in line 2 of stanza 2 where your scheme wants you to stress "is" and "of" - it wouldn't take a lot of tweaking to ease that uncertainty - then starts to wobble rather more in stanza 3. Comments as above, on rhyme.  
 
You obviously understand some poetic techniques and are trying hard to use them to underpin serious thoughts. Don't be discouraged by my remarks - when weaknesses are pointed out you can do something about them, can't you, whereas if they are ignored, you're none the wiser. Keep posting :)

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