Young Writers Society

Hey there! I'm here for a quick review on this lovely poem.

So, first off, I love the metaphor and imagery you've got going here. You're taking a common, everyday event and making it fresh and interesting, which is awesome. I really only have a few suggestions to make this a bit easier to read.

Stanzas
It'd be really nice if you would break each season up into its own stanza. You might want to break it up even father than that, but by seasons is definitely a good way to go. If you don't know how to do that on YWS, never fear! I'll tell you. It's a bit counterintuitive, but you press "enter" to form a new stanza, not a new line within that stanza. To form a new line, you have to press "shift+enter." So you end up pressing "shift+enter" a lot and "enter" only at the beginning of a new stanza.

Emotion
You do a wonderful job of description here - I can really feel each season, and it brings back lots of memories. There's only one thing missing, and that's emotion. People usually read poetry not only to admire the beautiful constructs of language, but also to feel something. Here, you have a lot of the beautiful language, but very little of the emotion behind it is coming through for me. Show us how the narrator feels about each season. What memories do each one stir, what feelings does the narrator associate them with? Make it more personal, so that everyone can relate to it. It doesn't matter what the emotions are, whether they be peace and joy, or more negative ones like fear or sadness.


And I think that's all I've got for you! Good work on this. Good luck, and keep writing!

Hey!

Welcome to YWS. Since you're new, I'm going to go ahead and show you the guide I'm going to be using to make this critique for your poem. Hopefully it can help you get into the flow of reviewing too.

The YWS Critique Sandwich

I am also going to give you a comprehensive (hopefully) guide to formatting poetry on YWS. If it doesn't help, there are links at the bottom of it that should give you a better idea of what's going on and how it works.

How to Format Poetry

Now then, let's move on to the poem. I really like the flow and vocabulary you used for the poem. It flows very well and smoothly from one state to the next which gives us a good feel for what's going on while providing enough detail that it feels rich and alive. I think the seasons idea is sort of trite and done before, but how you did it made it refreshing and well done. I'm happy to say I haven't read this poem before even though I've seen the idea before.

I do feel like you need to work on your punctuation and capitalization though because this doesn't feel like a poem that needs to be capitalized at the beginning of each line, instead it seems like it would do better with stanzas, and capitalization only at the beginning of sentences. This would give it a more modern edge along with presenting it with a softer transition from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. That should help draw readers into the poem and since this is a mildly long poem, it'll keep them reading without noticing it, especially with the shorter lines.

Over all of the seasons, I think you need to work a little longer on spring. It feels like it's been brushed over compared to the other seasons and it's suffering for it. Spring might be soft, gentle, new and kind, but it also has melting snow and the fragility of young things. The thing I always think about in spring is the cold chill that's still melting away. I don't really feel that with "freedom" as your descriptor and I don't see it in the ending either. because we don't really get the warming so much as just the chill.

Overall, the poem is really good. It's well written, it's easy to read, it's clear, and it flows very well. The main problem is that it doesn't really pop because of the subject matter, but there's not much to do about that. It is what it is. The thing you can change is updating the capitalization in the poem to reflect a more modern feel which will allow the words to flow easier and the eyes to move along the poem naturally.

Hopefully this helps! If you're curious about what other articles we have about poetry, there's an index of them here: Poetry Tutorials Article Index

Aley

Hey Taylor! A late welcome to YWS.
This is a pretty great poem- I love works about seasons!! I'm just going to make done suggestions and comments, you don't have to change anything if you don't want to.

You may want to break this into multiple stanzas. I think it improves the flow of the poem, and you would really only have to divide it into four- one for each stanza. If you had stanza breaks before it was published, then I know that's happened to me a lot. I just use a period in a blank line sometime to indicate a break. It works pretty well if you want to do that!

I'm not going to judge your capitalisation, because it's certainly a style choice, but having each line capitalised seems to break the flow a bit. Again, very much a style choice.

I noticed you said "Rose-tinted glasses" twice, I like the repetition that connects the beginning and end of the poem. This also connects spring and summer, and gives the illusion only a circle or cycle, like seasons naturally are. Nicely done! (Doesn't that phrase belong to a song as well?)

I liked your description of winter. You included frost and dead grass, but no snow. I have lots of snow here, and I think it's pretty common to see only snow in poetry about winter. I like your outlook on it.

Heathered snowdrops cast to the ground

To form glass puddles.