Young Writers Society

Hey! Chits here for review.

Firstly, it's a really good start. For a beginner, it's appreciable.
Your poem is about the children playing outside, whom you can see from the window. It's a good subject and a very natural one. You have tried to simplify your words. While reading it, I can really feel the happiness on the faces of small children. It's a very simple and cheerful one.

Now, coming to the improvement part, it seems that you have simply put the words without much thinking. There is lack of variety of words, I mean that there's a lot of repetition. Also there's no rhyming scheme. You should try to do some rhyming. Even if it is not so easy but it's not that difficult as well.

Overall, the first attempt is good. By practicing more, you can have perfection.

Good luck! Keep writing.

Hello there and happy RevMo (even if I am a bit late to the reviewing party)! I, a bold Knight of the Green Room, am here today to review you.

First things first, you have a lot of repetition going on in this, and while repetition is a great poetic device to use, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and I think this poem suffers from too much repetition.

Another thing I noticed is that you have punctuation at the end of every line, which you may have been taught is a requirement of poetry, even though it actually isn't. You'll want to stick with the requirements for the contest, of course, but if you're interested in developing your poetic knowledge and skills, you might want to consider leaving out the end-of-line punctuation and start-of-line capitalization, as well as varying the lengths of your lines.

There's actually a pretty thorough article in the KB on-site that touches upon punctuation in poetry, which you can read here. I also recommend reading through the capitalization one linked to in there as well.

As far as the concept goes, though, I think you have a solid one, and the basic flow of ideas works really well. You have a lot of wiggle room to play around with how you want to develop the ideas here, and I think that if you were to incorporate more vivid descriptions and contrasts while also toning down a bit on the repetition, you'd have a pretty solid poem.

Also, if you're interested in maybe adopting a form for this piece that uses repetition, the villainelle would be a really good fit as it makes heavy use of repetition, and it's a more traditional form so you could stick with your capitalization and punctuation conventions without issue.

Hey there, here to review your poem.

Formatting
So, I think one simple point of improvement would be to break some of this up into stanzas. Not every poem needs stanzas, but it is a way to organize the piece into themes and actions so that readers don't get lost. With the ample use of repetition in this poem I think stanzas would help readers follow what's happening.

Action
Another aspect that could use improvement is the "action" element. Just like any good story, a narrative poem will often have the basic elements of a good plot. ie. characters, conflict, action, resolution. This isn't to say you need to have a full-fledged novel within the poem, but having a little conflict or action goes a long way in engaging the reader's attention and helps the poem come to life. In this poem there are two elements for potential action 1) the speaker -- in this poem the speaker really did nothing, they just watched children and analyzed it. But, I think that's okay given that it seems to be part of their character to be unable to be outside or do action anymore. So we're left with the second option 2) the children -- the children in the poem could have a little more action to make the poem come to life. Rather than just saying they "rolled", "chased", and "played" (all fairly generic terms) I would suggest to try to paint a more vivid specific scene of what the children are doing.

Poetic Devices
You might also consider adding a few more poetic elements like metaphor, assonance, or figurative language to bring a little more excitement to the poem.

Consistency
One element that you did really well in this piece was consistency. I'm a big proponent of consistency in poems - in line length, capitalization, tone, and punctuation -- in my opinion this makes a poem seem cohesive, well-thought out, and polished. Your poem had a consistent flow, tone, and capitalization pattern all the way through -- so good job on that. As far as punctuation, I think there was a bit of excessive usage of commas and this ended up stilting the poem's flow a bit for me. I would suggest only using a comma where it is grammatically necessary but that's just my suggestion. Here's a resource you can use for some opinions on punctuation in poetry: Punctuation in Poetry .

Overall Impressions
Overall, I this is a good start and despite the ending being a bit sad I enjoyed reading it. Your theme also came out very clearly of this older person watching with maybe jealousy upon a group of children being playful, remembering the days of their youth. Best of luck in your poetry competition! If you have any questions about my review, don't hesitate to ask.

~alliyah