I once wrote three different poems. Here they are.
Ice
Icy shards burn like myriad cold fires,
small and bitter and pricking,
biting like fragments of blade, icy steel,
forged in the smithies of winter.
The crystals catch the light,
cold stars captured in glassy prisons,
burning with light and chill breezes,
the Arctic in my hand, stinging it by nature,
wounding me in war (winter is the soldier)
and drawing blood with bright, chill light.
As can be seen, the poem is intended to evoke a mental picture of ice by appealing to the most salient senses (sight and especially touch).
Grief
Icy shards burn like myriad cold fires,
small and bitter and pricking,
biting like fragments of blade, icy steel,
forged in the smithies of winter.
The crystals catch the light,
cold stars captured in glassy prisons,
burning with light and chill breezes,
the Arctic in my hand, stinging it by nature,
wounding me in war (winter is the soldier)
and drawing blood with bright, chill light.
This poem, of course, is very different; it attempts to give a characterization of grief through an objective correlate, namely ice, and seeks to identify several aspects in which ice is (as it were) grief-like. A much more metaphorical poem.
Logic
Icy shards burn like myriad cold fires,
small and bitter and pricking,
biting like fragments of blade, icy steel,
forged in the smithies of winter.
The crystals catch the light,
cold stars captured in glassy prisons,
burning with light and chill breezes,
the Arctic in my hand, stinging it by nature,
wounding me in war (winter is the soldier)
and drawing blood with bright, chill light.
The difference in this poem is obvious; it makes use of several standard images of logic (ice, as in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen"; notice also the war images, which are almost trite and cliched in their application to reason and logic).
