Again I appreciated the rhyme. Flawless. It this seems like it sort of possesed you, it has that eary supernatural vibe. It also seems personal ( I could be reading my own life and ideas into it) as if your inspiration WS perfectly in tune to an emotion of yours, the writer.
Really beautifully written. The more I read of yours the more your character and depth of talent are revealed as it should with anyone of note. I hope that your pieces find themselves in their own contemporary collection one day.
I need to find out who Mistress Maven is, if you are citing some character I ought to have read about but didn't. Can't get much out of this piece otherwise. Maybe that is a fault in it, or maybe in me! But it is well written in every way that I enjoy, so this praise is not really so faint as it probably seems!
You automatically get a 10 point advantage for writing in rhyme. This is somewhat different than the initial version I read, if memory serves. Iinitially said I enjoyed it but found it a little bumpy. This is not and has a little better theme/direction if memory also serves.
I was also thanking you earlier for giving me a new word of the day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven
which it helps to understand to get the full elegance of things. The closing Maven (raven) "never more" is a cute nod to Poe.
I think it could use an opening stanza added to set the stage, introduce the Mistress, etc. to let us know you are talking to her instead of us, perhaps letting us know a little more about her nature and propensities. I note you did a little of that in the discription which I did not notice earlier. Cool stuff.
This strikes me as a some what morbid nursery rhyme. Just the flow and the rhyming scheme of the whole thing. Though I enjoyed the subject and context within the piece, very gripping.
~Dominique