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Jun 30, 2026
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deign to entertain
"Deign to Entertain"
The tea is Earl Grey, steeped in quiet spite,
Where whispered meters judge the room by right.
We nod at stanzas, safely soft and polite,
And turn our backs on what we fear to invite.
But there you sit, the jagged, uncarved stone,
With syntax wild and truths too harshly blown.
The circle shifts; a chilly breeze is blown,
Yet hunger stirs for what we dare not own.
We deign to entertain the outlier’s roar,
A token wildness by the parlour door.
To praise your chaos makes our polish shine
—A patron’s mercy over sour wine.
You think we listen because your vision burns?
We only entertain to deign by turns.
A calculated nod, a measured grace,
To keep the savage in their proper place.
So pour the tea, and let the verses flow,
We’ll clutch our teacups, putting on a show.
We to entertain, deign your frantic spark,
Then lock the door and leave you in the dark.
.
— crypticbard, Jun 30, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Structured: Western
Editing Stage: Polished draft
Critiques
neopoet
2 weeks 6 days ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's central conceit — a poetry workshop as a genteel gatekeeping ritual — carries real satirical energy, and the extended tea-party metaphor sustains itself well across most of the stanzas. The volta in the third stanza, where the speaker's "patron's mercy over sour wine" exposes the condescension beneath polite applause, is the poem's sharpest moment, and the line lands with genuine bite.
The main difficulty is in the final stanza, where the syntax of "We to entertain, deign your frantic spark" collapses. The title phrase is being deliberately permuted throughout the poem — "deign to entertain," "entertain to deign," and now a third inversion — but this last arrangement reads as a grammatical accident rather than a controlled effect, which weakens what should be the poem's closing blow. Reworking that line so the inversion is legible as intentional wordplay, rather than a stumble, would let the final image of locking the door land with the coldness it deserves. The rhyme forcing "blown" twice at the end of the second stanza (lines two and three) is also worth revisiting, as it creates a small stumble in a poem that otherwise maintains its formal control with confidence.
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