The Nature of Roots [Archive] - Music & Musician Forums

Permanent Solution

05-09-2008, 01:51 AM

Comments are appreciated and rewarded in one way or another.

Wind blows not like a hurricane
Rather like the top of a mountain
The world below overlooked
As a simple tree struggles in vain

Uprooted by the intensity of the force
And sent into a ferocious spin
The twigs struggle for purchase
But against such gusts, no recourse

Desperation is the struggle for survival
A reminder of the insignificance that stands
In support of self against the breeze

The hateful strikes come without break
Against the innocent without sin
The only crime committed is existence
But punishment is great for that mistake

Desperation is the struggle for survival
A reminder of the insignificance that stands
In support of self against the breeze

The earth reaches for the roots as they are torn
But with such opposition they cannot win
Unity in the face of such nature is
So futile, and so forlorn

The failure is of the earth though
Unsupportive of itself, it is weak
It erodes itself so that when the wind comes
All is torn away in the storm

Surf

06-08-2008, 05:42 PM

Wind blows not like a hurricane
Rather like the top of a mountain
The world below overlooked
As a simple tree struggles in vain

Good opening line. To be honest, great opening stanza. I think its the most impressive one of the piece, because it does the hard job of setting the tone or the piece, but at the same time doing it very very well. The language and imagery is excellent, the juxtaposition works very well, yet at the same time works on a steady flow of ideas. Basically, I think this stanza does it all right. No complaints at all.

Uprooted by the intensity of the force
And sent into a ferocious spin
The twigs struggle for purchase
But against such gusts, no recourse

Desperation is the struggle for survival
A reminder of the insignificance that stands
In support of self against the breeze

These do a good job of following the first, but they seem to suffer a little from the word choices. The first line of the second stanza, for instance, seems too..... I'm not sure how to phrase it, but I'll go with heavily structured, kind of like [word] by the [word] of the [force], where by the words in brackets seem disjointed and oddly thrown together. I would work on rephrasing it, maybe something like Uprooted by the forceful intensity or something similar. The less connectives seem to make it flow better in my head. Similarly, you do rely on a lot of bigger words, Desperation, insignificance, ferocious all of which break up the flow of the lines. I'd take a simpler word, maybe in a few of these lines, just so it doesn't sound so complex when it doesn't need to be. Don't think I'm saying its bad though. Everything else is fine; I've just taken far too many words to try and explain why one or two words don't fit. I like it, but some of the words break up the flow. God I realise I haven't done real crits in ages. Sorry about this. Now I'm rambling, anyway......

The hateful strikes come without break
Against the innocent without sin
The only crime committed is existence
But punishment is great for that mistake

Desperation is the struggle for survival
A reminder of the insignificance that stands
In support of self against the breeze

Again, all fine, but I'll pick up on one little thing that did stand out. You seem to be switching mainly to your message here: the metaphor lying underneath the roots. Well, anyway, the only mention of the image from the earlier stanzas is in the last line. I think it would work better, and be more subtle and rewarding to the reader if you were to wrap the words up in the imagery, give it something to relate to and it makes it both clearer and more complex; deeper and more satisfying.

A really good method for this that I use is to draw a clock face - well, basically draw a circle then mark twelve points around it. Put the thing that you're writing about at the top, in this case roots, and work your way around the points, writing in something that you associate with roots - solid things, things you can turn into imagery. Go all around the circle, all twelve points. All of the things must relate to one another, so by the time you get to the last dot, you can still see the connection back to the first. An example in list form would be something like:

Roots
earth
trees
wind
leaves
rocks
minerals
worms
etc etc back to roots.

This is a massive detour from what I'm really saying, but its a useful exercie I just remembered that seemed like it would help you out a bit. If you include some of these things in the piece, it becomes obvious to the reader that when you refer to them, then you're referring back to the metaphor; they make really helpful reference points and allow you to explore imagery in a really useful way.

So back to the piece.

The earth reaches for the roots as they are torn
But with such opposition they cannot win
Unity in the face of such nature is
So futile, and so forlorn

The failure is of the earth though
Unsupportive of itself, it is weak
It erodes itself so that when the wind comes
All is torn away in the storm

Both ending verses are excellent. There's the right balance between imagery and metaphor and you finish on a every satisfying and cathartic note. well done.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. Its something different to what I normally read round here (you've got your own style really) and its really good to crit. The reason I've written so much, and I apologise, is that I've seen something here that I've been guilty of doing in the past, so I'm trying to help out with things a bit. But then I started ranting and going on. And yeah, I haven't critted properly in a while so I'm a bit rusty and I think you've taken the blunt of it. Well done man.