The Lunatic Asylum Stories - Anna Hunter’s Story

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

This poem takes on a difficult historical subject and commits fully to its narrative arc, moving from the speaker's early hopes through institutional cruelty to a final loss of hope. That structure, framed by prologue and epilogue, gives the piece a clear shape, and the return to the phrase about wanting to be the perfect wife and mother in the final stanza lands with real weight because the reader has now seen everything that lay between the wish and the ruin.

The strongest writing appears where concrete physical detail carries the horror without needing to explain it. The five teeth broken on the gag, the maggot and fungal food shared by twenty-one, the thick crust on the skin and the hair chopped off, the number in place of a name on the tombstone: these images do the work of the poem far more powerfully than the moments that name emotion directly. When the speaker says her heart broke as she fell to her knees, the feeling is told rather than shown, and it is comparatively weaker than the image of the newspaper held out by a laughing nurse. That contrast points toward a useful principle for revision: the poem trusts its images most when it lets them speak alone, and it might cut phrases that summarize feeling ("it was quite traumatic," "we were sad") in favor of more of the specific, unforgettable detail it already knows how to make.

The rhyme scheme is a source of both energy and strain. The insistent couplets propel the narrative, but in several places the need for a rhyme forces the syntax or diction into awkwardness. "I was naive & dumb" reaches for a rhyme with "numb," and the flatness of "dumb" undercuts the devastation of the surrounding lines. Similarly, "it is not in any way a delight" feels padded to reach "plight." One approach worth considering is loosening the meter so the rhymes fall more naturally, or allowing some slant rhymes so the line lengths need not stretch or compress to hit an exact match. The lines already vary considerably in length, and tightening them would let the rhymes feel earned rather than obligatory.

A few smaller matters would benefit from attention: "Henry" appears lowercase once ("No, it cannot be henry"), "feel to my knees" seems to intend "fell," and "uncurable" is more commonly "incurable." The em dash and ampersand usage is inconsistent as well. These are surface corrections, but in a poem this raw they matter, because a stray error can briefly pull a reader out of an otherwise immersive moment.

One larger craft question concerns pacing in the middle section. The catalogue of atrocities is relentless, which suits the subject, but the relentlessness also flattens the individual horrors into a list where each has roughly equal weight. Choosing one or two moments to slow down and render in fuller detail, while gesturing more briefly at others, would create the variation in intensity that makes any single horror hit hardest. The human zoo passage, where the speaker wonders what the visitors say when they look at her, is the emotional center and could bear more space than the lines immediately around it.

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There are times when your rhyme and meter are pretty good, but there are also times when you just miss the meter and although the words rhyme; The line fails, when telling a long and complex tale in poetic form, it needs to develop a rhythm, and when your meter is good it can carry you through a shaky spot. [Not that you want any]. As you make the meter, you will find that the words flow natural, the sounds slide into the next word and end with the proper emphasis.

I was told I had hysteria, 
a woman sickness of the mind

At first the place was friendly, 
the staff was even kind.

Doctors are implied, as it is a hospital, but want to remain in the background in view of the cruel and violent nature of the necessary treatment.                
Who knows? maybe they weren't even doctors!

Anyway, I just wanted you to see what you can do with the lines that you have.
~ Geezer. 

 the potential in this piece and your descriptive writing. I think that you can make changes now, early in your writing career; that will stand you in good stead for the coming stories and poems that you write. I am glad that you see my criticism as a thing to learn from and not as an attack on you. Many young and amateur writers write their hearts out and when critiqued, think "I guess I'm not good enough" or some such. Or get mad because they see it as a put-down for who they are, or what they've written. If I see a subject that I do not think that I can be objective about, I don't comment or critique. Simple. Keep writing, reading and experimenting.      

~ Geezer.