Three Dollar Quill

I let things get kind of late, and there are some other things I want to work on, so I'm going to try taking some quick notes on things I could change in the poem.

• Early on, I have "the land". Perhaps it should be "this land" or "these lands".
• My punctuation seems kind of inconsistent.
• I'm saying "from health to hurt" at one point, and I'd like to get "healing" to work instead.
• I think I went back and further on whether to break the lines midway through always at the nine-syllable mark, or at the internal rhyme. These usually line up. But, I mean, in the third stanza, they don't.
• I don't like "Thanks, all" as the beginning of a speech.
• Hm, I'm rhyming "then" and "kin".
• Just noticed I used "forsake" twice in three stanzas, and I don't think it's serving any helpful function.
• In the fifth stanza, see if I can swipe a syllable from the beginning of the last line, so I can change out "lapse" for "collapse".
• Is "ere" a contraction, and also, am I using it correctly?
• In the eighth stanza, it would be great if the last line's word order were a bit closer to spoken English somehow.
• I forget what's going on with some of the metaphors in the ninth stanza.
• Should the stanzas that are part of a speech all start with quotation marks?
• In the tenth stanza, am I rhyming the "el" in "elder" with the "hel" in "helping"? I think that's what's going on, and it's a doozy. Should I break the words across the lines?
• Okay, I've got a period in the middle of a line in the twelfth stanza, so I should probably err on the side of including periods.
• In the thirteenth stanza I've got a "from" that I think should be some other word, not sure what.
• I forgot to close the quote marks at the end of the thirteenth stanza.
• I forget why I spelled "stormed" "storm'd".
• Okay, "home" and "down" are, as rhymes go, way too slant for me.
• Forgot the closing quote on the eighteenth stanza.
• The twentieth stanza rhymes "clashed" and "lash", which isn't quite as slant, but I'd like it to be closer.
• "then" and "in". Maybe this is just A Thing with this poem?
• In the twenty-fifth stanza, I'd like to find some way to change "almost" to "practically". Also, "in" and "mend"...
• The last line of the twenty-sixth stanza is a bit awkward.
• I'd like to find another word than "sore" for the twenty-seventh stanza.
• Using "struck" for a rhyme in the twenty-sixth and twenty-eighth stanzas. Maybe there's potential for parallelism there, but if so, it's not realized yet.
• The twenty-ninth stanza feels generally awkward. As does the thirtieth. And the thirty-first.
• The phrasing is also a bit awkward in the two stanzas after those.
• Okay, reading the last stanza, definitely want to use "these lands" in the first.

Oof, I'm trying to figure out if this is more or less issues than I was expecting. Some of the punctuation problems kind of caught me off guard.

Anyway, I should wrap up for now. This initial pass is enough for now. Later, I'll write this down to turn it into a checklist.

For now, I've got other things I need to focus on.

Good night.