[Jennifer Gordon]

Thanks to the DG for referencing Frost's "Mowing" as it was enlightening and too beautifully fitting. After that, aside from the occasional rhyming, doesn't this pretty work classify rather as blank verse than otherwise? Shakespearean, it is as lax as its father in strict iambic metre, yet seems to flow better than the previous, albeit bearing a haunting sense of the first two finalist sonnets in that it addresses the inevitable vanity of life, drawing too pointedly religious notes in speaking of Peter who by some strains of christianity own authority at the gate and final tally.

I couldn't help feeling as if the unidentified W. is either a lover or close friend, the intimacy and poignant loneliness of being apart at harvest's reckoning stirring me as a too classic reference to that time of year, apples falsely held as the forbidden fruit coming in for a weighty point as they go to waste.

The inevitable closing couplet nicely rounding this private lesson off, I can't help wondering what our theme was this year.

[Martin Rocek]

A bit too much Frost in the beginning; then I was put off by the baldness of "Makes me as sad", and the couplet is a strange mixture of a plain statement in slightly awkward language in the last line; one expects something like "I shall leave
many calendars to sort, but none to save", etc.

So all in all, not one of my top choices, but glad to have read it.