[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Alessio—

Your poem is in the medieval troubadour tradition of the “complaint,” in which the speaker addresses his beloved, informing her (usually in a repeated refrain) that if she does not love him he will die. The form was so popular in the fourteenth century that Chaucer parodied it in his “Complaint to His Purse.”

The archaic language is appropriate in this context, but even though the dictionary might label a usage as “archaic” or “obsolete,” such usages might sound not ancient, but merely odd to modern readers. I have never before seen “spurn” used as a noun, and I have never before encountered the form “strook.”

Here are some thoughts as I read through the poem:

S1L1: You need to add a “to” in “try to oppose.” You could change “spurns” to “spurning” and change “downturned” to “downturning” to improve the rhyme.

S1L2: “Aback” is familiar to modern readers in the expression, “I was taken aback.” The older meaning of “to the rear” might be what you mean here, but it is not clear. Since later in the poem you mention her hauling his corpse to every state, I thought perhaps it meant that his body was stuffed in the trunk of her car. Also the “aback/lap” rhyme could be improved. How about “And weary of the nights we roamed the map,”?

S1L4: “Charnel lap” is a striking image, but also a bit confusing. Is she a zombie? “Charnel” means “relating to decomposing flesh” and is related to the word “carnal,” (which might make better sense here). Modern readers would be familiar with “charnel house” as an old-fashioned word for a morgue. Is she dead? I thought the N was the dead one.

S2L3-4: The possessive “joy’s” lacks mention of the noun possessed by joy. I don’t usually think of fruit being used as bait for fish. If you want to keep the /f/ alliteration, you might replace “ripened fruit” with “glittering fly.”

S3L1: “Enforce perennial stay” stumped me. I can’t figure out what you mean here. Does it mean that the hook in his cheek is forcing him to remain with her? “Stay” used as a noun can mean “a visit” (like a two-night stay in Las Vegas), but in modern usage it also means “a postponement,” like “a stay of execution,” so the line could also mean that the hook in his cheek causes an indefinite postponement of his ultimate fate.

S4: Has she killed him? Is she dragging his body around with her? Is he asking her to bury him? I like the sound of “loveless lifeless sea.” Maybe put a comma between “loveless” and “lifeless.”

Finally, I notice that you use hexameter alexandrines at the ends of S3 and S4. Could you make S1L4 and S2L4 alexandrines, too? Or, alternatively, could you make the alexandrines in S3 and S4 pentameter?

I hope some of this is useful.

Glenn