Public-domain archive
October Field
A working draft, checked by the editor
The fence leans where the summer left it,
the grass gone brittle, gold and dry,
I walk the rows that we once planted
and watch the geese unzip the sky.
The house still holds your coat and thimble,
the kettle keeps its patient steam,
and every window frames the winter
that walks toward us through the trees.A sample draft, shown with its full editor's report.
- Grammar & spelling
- Clean copy. One deliberate compression worth keeping: "the grass gone brittle" (line 2) rides on an implied has — it reads as voice, not error.
- Rhyme strength
- Stanza 1 lands a true rhyme (dry / sky). Stanza 2 softens to a slant pair (steam / trees) — if the drift is deliberate, keep it; if you want stanza 1's click, the closing word has to do two things at once: hold the kitchen image and land a fuller vowel.
- Meter & rhythm
- Loose tetrameter throughout, comfortably conversational. Line 5 runs a foot long ("The house still holds your coat and thimble") — dropping still restores the pulse without losing the sense.
- Weakest line
- Line 8: "that walks toward us through the trees" — walks doubles line 3's walk and flattens the image. The verb is the one place this line can still surprise: what is the winter's approach actually like underfoot — heavy, slow, resisted?
- What's working
- "watch the geese unzip the sky" is the draft's best verb — concrete, kinetic, earned. And the domestic inventory (coat, thimble, kettle) builds the elegy without once naming grief. Protect both in revision.
A representative report. Your own run reads your actual line breaks and references them by number — paste a draft above to get the same treatment.