No End

You asked for a critique in the forums. I approach this with some trepidation, not least because I don't normally critique poetry.

This is miscategorized. It's neither free nor blank verse. You have rhymes, slant rhymes, varied but definite meter, and you occasionally alliterate. "Free verse" does not mean we do whatever we want, and many poets have found it restrictive in its own way. I think you'd be better off if you'd pick a structure and stick with it.

You seem to have often chosen words more for their sound than their meaning, and the result often strikes me as unintentionally nonsensical. I can't even figure out what the first line is supposed to mean. "Mettle" is a personal quality and already metaphorical in origin; to abstract it to something independent of any persons is odd. Worse than what? Why is "nature" in scare quotes?

But then you come out with something like "Man's best curse", an excellent description of human death in Tolkien's mythology. (Much better than your alternative. "Primal" is not only Shakespearean -- Tolkien hated Shakespeare -- but it's not relevant. Claudius' "primal eldest curse" was fratricide, which doesn't happen in RotK that I can recall.)

"Sword and ax wield but pain" could make a good intro to the next lines -- I might suggest the British spelling "axe" instead -- but I have no idea what you intend by them. Nor the next pair of couplets for that matter; they don't seem to be saying anything at all. "Kneed your worst" sounds like someone's getting a cheap shot to the crotch more than anything else.

The next quatrain alternates very good lines with lines that appear to be filler. I especially like "The searing flicker swells in heart" which appears to encompass multiple motifs simultaneously. But the last line in particular doesn't work: what does "ragged [a?]part" mean?

"Unmatched values lost evermore" could be fine if "value" were singular. "Values" means something like mores, seeing them "lost evermore" doesn't match anything in your source. "Over-more" strikes me as an attempt to sound Tolkien-esque while repeating on "more", but it's not actually meaningful. I guess it's something like "even more", but I can't see what you might be comparing it to. The next line displays fine alliteration, but unless you're stepping out of the frame to point out the whole thing was fictional, corresponds to nothing in RotK.

The last line is good as is; far superior to your alternate.

I ended up looking at this almost line-by-line because I couldn't find a more holistic way to read it. One part doesn't seem to relate well to another, almost like they were disjoint thoughts. I assume this is due to my inability to make sense of much of it, and if I could I would see a thematic unity behind it all, but if it's there it's very obscure.

If you were aiming for something like Tolkien's own poetry here I'd have something else to say, but as the genre is completely different I believe you were going for something else.

To sum up, if the quality of the whole were that of your best lines here, where you manage to neatly allude to concepts, events, and characters -- sometimes pointing up relations among more than one in a single line -- then we'd have an excellent piece of work on our hands. As it is, it just doesn't come together for me.