Austin

like a really cool dude and this is great reading. The theme left me wondering who Austin is to you as opposed to what - just a curiosity :-) I like the what very much. Thanks, Mark

where do they go? cheers, Jess

Ya just gotta know how to say good bye and if Austin don't give you the oppertunity - shame on Austin

Lie Mark I wondered who/what was Austin to you? I like these lines especially:- He was a teacher of the universe, and a student of it’s will. His eyes were the windows of his soul… ..and taught our eyes how to focus on the vision :- I enjoyed reading this. It tells a briliant story,:-) Kaz It's impossible to smile on the outside without feeling better on the inside.

What I like about this poem is its narrative lean – kind of Wordsworthian - a Lyrical Ballad – the language really spoken by man as Wordsworth said in the preface to his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads – puts me in the mind of Wordsworth’s poem Lucy Gray – a girl (who said Wordsworth, was as pretty as a common yellow flow growing beside the front door steeps) who went out to meet her mother coming from town and was lost in a snow approaching snow storm and was never seen again – they found her footsteps in the snow leading out and stopping halfway across a footbridge – people in the village wonder to this day what had become of Lucy Gray – kind of like the way the narrator wonders what’s become of Austin – the poem is also Wordsworthian in that it uses nature to convey human feelings – a characteristic of the Romantic Poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Byron and Keats. Where I think this poem falls short is the connections or lead-in of one stanza to the next – the thought process for each stanza comes to an end on the last line of the stanza and does not follow through to the next making it disjointed and hard to understand – Wordsworth said, poetry should be as clear as water – not abstract – and he’s absolutely right – it’s almost impossible for the reader to make a connection with a poem that has no meaning, so that the reader can the start with what he perceives the meaning to be and then start peeling back the layers – can get there in this poem – recommend that you write it all as one stanza first and then go back and separate your thoughts as they move through the poem into stanzas. I think this is a good start to a Lyrical Ballad - I recommend you start the poem with this line –“ He’s now the sound echoing through the canyon,/and the blur that blinds our eyes in the sun. He was a teacher of the universe, and a student of it’s will./His eyes were the windows of his soul…/..and taught our eyes how to focus on the vision./The vision of love.” let the reader know right up front that you’re talking about some one that is gone. There’s a lot of good stuff in this poem it just needs to be sorted out – I enjoyed reainding it! Best, Randy