Warm-up — The First Draft Is Not the Poem
Beginners often think a poem is written in one sitting. Real poets know: the first draft is the raw material. The POEM is what you make from it.
The writer Ernest Hemingway is often said to have called the first draft of anything rubbish (he used a stronger word). Whether or not he said it, the point holds: getting words down is one job; making them into a poem is a different job.
Why first drafts can't be the finished thing
- You can't hear it yet. When you're writing, you can't tell which lines land and which don't. You're too close.
- You haven't found the centre. You don't know what the poem is really about until you've finished the first draft. Often the real subject only emerges at the end.
- You used the easy word. The first word that came to mind was rarely the best one. Revision is the chance to find the right word.
- You said too much. First drafts always over-explain. Revision is mostly cutting.
The cold read principle
You can only revise a poem honestly if you read it as a STRANGER would. The way to do that: leave it. Put it away for at least a day. A week if you can. Then come back and read it cold. You will see immediately what works and what doesn't.
If you only ever read your poem the moment after you wrote it, you will only ever hear what you MEANT to write — not what you actually wrote.
Writers have long repeated the advice "kill your darlings". The idea goes back to the critic Arthur Quiller-Couch (1914), and it is often attributed to William Faulkner too. A "darling" is a line, image or phrase you LOVE — but which is not actually serving the poem. Maybe it's clever but it doesn't fit. Maybe it's beautiful but it's not in the right poem.
The mark of a serious writer is the willingness to cut their best lines if those lines don't earn their place. Save the cut lines — they may belong in a different poem one day. But the poem you're working on now is not a museum for your favourite sentences.
Vocabulary — Eight Revision Tools
Before & After — One Poem, Two Drafts
Here is the same poem in its first draft and its revised version. Read both carefully, then look at the annotations to see what was changed and why.
The Garden After After my father died, the garden was sad. The flowers seemed to droop. The grass needed cutting but nobody cut it. The weeds came up everywhere. The bench where he used to sit was empty. It made me feel really lonely. I went out there one day and looked around. I thought about how much he loved gardening. I picked up his old gardening fork. It was rusty from sitting in the rain. I thought I should do some weeding. I did it for an hour. It made me feel a bit better. I think he would have been pleased.
The Garden After After my father died, the lavender bowed where his hands had stopped tending it. The grass remembered him as a season, not a man. The bench was a held breath. I went out one Saturday in May and found his fork in the shed, red with three winters of rain. I held it. The handle was the wrong weight in my hand. I weeded for an hour. The blackbird watched. The lavender did not stand up but it looked at me for the first time.
What changed, and why
Before: "the garden was sad" / "the flowers seemed to droop"
After: "the lavender bowed"
One specific flower replaces two vague references. Lavender carries a fragrance the reader almost smells. "The flowers seemed to droop" is a generic sentence.
Before: "It made me feel really lonely."
After: [cut entirely]
The image of the bowed lavender already does this work. Adding "I felt lonely" tells the reader what they should already be feeling. CUT.
Before: "The grass needed cutting but nobody cut it. / The weeds came up everywhere. / The bench where he used to sit was empty."
After: "The grass remembered him as a season, not a man. // The bench was a held breath."
Three flat descriptive lines replaced with two metaphors. The poem now says MORE in fewer words — and the metaphors carry feeling that the description didn't.
Before: "I went out there one day"
After: "I went out one Saturday in May"
"One day" is vague. "One Saturday in May" places the reader in a specific moment. Specificity is almost always free — it costs nothing and adds everything.
Before: "It was rusty from sitting in the rain"
After: "red with three winters of rain"
"Rusty" is what every garden fork is. "Red with three winters" tells you HOW LONG since anyone touched it — and turns rust into a colour you can see.
Before: "I think he would have been pleased."
After: [cut, replaced]
The original ending tells the reader what to feel. The new ending — "The lavender did not stand up / but it looked at me for the first time" — shows it. The reader feels the relief without being told to feel it.
The revised version is shorter than the first draft and says far more. The second one is a poem. The first was a record of an experience.
Drill — Rewrite the Weak Line
Below are five lines from rough drafts. Each has a specific problem. Use the revision tool named to rewrite it.
"He drove a sand-coloured Volvo that had outlasted two marriages." — specific car, specific colour, and a detail that suggests him as much as the car.
"When she walked into the room I stood up before I knew I had stood up." — the action of standing up tells the reader everything.
"I stood at the bus stop in the rain until my fingers stopped feeling." — three details (place, weather, sensation) in one line. The "long time" is implied by the cold hands.
"The leaves came down sideways." — three words. The wind is in the word "sideways" — no need for swirling, twirling, or dancing.
"My grandmother made a stew that tasted of patience." — one specific dish, one unexpected description. The word "patience" suggests time AND her temperament at once.
A Real Poem — Wordsworth Revises
So far you have looked at poems written for this lesson. Now read a real poem by a real poet. Read it aloud before you do anything else.
A host of dancing Daffodils;
Along the Lake, beneath the trees…
…
In such a laughing company
1815 (revised)
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees…
…
In such a jocund company
Wordsworth kept changing this poem after it was first printed. In 1815 he made a number of changes, including a whole new stanza. Here are three of them to study.
A routine for reading any poem
- Read it aloud, slowly. Then read it again.
- Ask who is speaking, and to whom. What is the situation?
- Say what happens in plain English. One or two sentences, no technique words yet.
- Notice the techniques and their effect. Do not just name them; say what each one does.
- Respond. What did you feel? Which line stays with you? Do you agree with the poem?
Look closer
Think about each question and answer out loud, then open the reveal to compare.
Possible reasons: the poem already uses "dancing" later (the daffodils are "fluttering and dancing", the waves "danced", the heart "dances"), so he avoided repeating it too early; and "golden" adds a colour, a stronger image that you can see straight away.
Discuss: "jocund" is older and more formal, and sounds more poetic. But "laughing" is simple and warm. This is a real choice: some readers prefer the plain word. There is no single right answer; what matters is that the poet thought about it.
Scale. The flowers are compared to the stars in the Milky Way, "never-ending", and the speaker counts "ten thousand" at a glance. The new stanza turns a pleasant walk into something vast, which prepares for the emotional ending.
"golden" for "dancing": specificity/image. "jocund" for "laughing": edit (word choice). The new stanza: a structural revision. Notice that revising can mean adding as well as cutting.
Language for talking about poems
Use these when you speak or write about any poem.
Say what is happening
- The poem opens with…
- The speaker is…
- The poet addresses…
- The mood shifts when…
Name a technique
- The poet uses [technique] to…
- There is a striking image of…
- The repetition of "…" emphasises…
Explain the effect
- This creates a sense of…
- This suggests that…
- The reader is left feeling…
- It reminds me of…
Give your view
- What struck me most was…
- I found … effective because…
- I'm not convinced that…
- For me, the strongest line is…
Say it
- Which version of line 4 do you prefer, "dancing Daffodils" or "golden daffodils"? Why?
- Is it wrong to change a poem after it is published? Should poets stop revising at some point?
- What is the last change you made to something you wrote, and why?
Write it: a short analysis
Write four or five sentences about the poem. Use this shape: what the poet does → an example from the poem → the effect on the reader → your view.
I think Wordsworth's change from "dancing Daffodils" to "golden daffodils" was a good decision because it gives the reader an immediate picture of colour. In the first version the word "dancing" would have appeared before the stanza about the flowers actually dancing, so changing it avoids repetition. It also fits the idea of a bright, sunlit scene. For me, the change makes the poem more visual and less predictable, although I can see why some readers would miss the movement in the earlier word.
Your Turn — Revise a Poem You've Written
Open your notebook (or this lesson series) and find a poem you've written in any of the previous lessons. If you haven't written one recently, write a quick four-stanza poem about anything (10 minutes) and then come back here.
Now apply the revision toolkit. The questions below take you through it in order.
Paste your original poem here
Now answer these questions about your draft
Now write the revised version
Read both versions aloud. Which one is the poem?
Free Write — Draft and Revise in One Sitting
Final exercise of the series. You will write a NEW poem and then revise it — all within this session. This is unusual (revision normally needs a cold gap), but the practice teaches you to revise as a habit, not a special occasion.
- Take any poem from this series and cut it by a third.
- Take one abstract word in your poem and replace it with something you can see.
- Read your draft aloud and underline the line you skipped over. Change or cut it.
- Write a new poem in 10 minutes, then cut its last stanza and see if it still works.
Use one of these as your first line, or ignore them completely. A first line only has to get you moving. You can change it later.
The end of the series
You've now worked through:
- Foundations — what poetry is and the eight foundational tools.
- Sound — the music-making toolkit.
- Image & Metaphor — going deeper into how images do work.
- Forms — when structure helps and when it hurts.
- Slam & Spoken Word — writing for the stage.
- Revision — the work after the first draft.
That's a complete pass through the major tools of writing poetry. Six lessons does not make you a poet. It makes you somebody who has the equipment.
What makes you a poet is keeping going. Write the next poem. Read other poets. Revise. Read your work aloud. Then write the one after that. The skill compounds — every poem you finish makes the next one slightly easier.
You started this series unable to name a metaphor. You finish it knowing how to write one, how to extend one across a whole poem, how to read one aloud for an audience, and how to revise a draft until the poem comes out. That's not nothing.