To me, reading is second to breathing. Sometimes, I hold my books in my hand instead of putting them in my backpack, so that I feel closer to the stories they hold; I’m a flip away from falling into their worlds. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have a lot of time to read during this past year, and I’ve taken advantage of it, to the point where my mom has taken to shaking her head across from me at the dinner table and saying, “You read too much. Why don’t you go out more?”

Writing, however, especially writing about current events and politics, comes much less naturally to me. I once spent three hours reading about a current event that intrigued me in the New York Times and listened to a few podcasts about it (The Daily, The Economist). I wanted to write a short opinion piece on what I had learned and what I believed should be done next, but it never materialized. The cursor blinked at me from the top left corner of my Google Doc, blipping in and out like the ideas I was trying desperately to tie down and organize. I planned, gathered evidence, and fretted; nothing. Questions arose: Who gave me the right? I’m a high schooler gathering scraps of evidence on the internet; there is so much I don’t know, and I can only capture the broad strokes, parrot what the experts are already saying. Wouldn’t it be best to wait for time to offer some perspective on the situation? I didn’t want to write something overly emotional or cringingly didactic, caught up in the fiery rhetoric that often drives the present moment but is lost upon history. And there was also an element of laziness and perhaps one of perfectionism. I wanted the hypothetical article to have the perfect balance of reason, emotion, historical perspective, and present nuance. I wanted every sentence, every word, to be chosen correctly to serve the purpose of my article with dignity. And with these lofty goals, I never got off the ground. 

After this happened a few times with a handful of current events, I realized that shooting for the stars is not the best strategy if you never actually shoot. I didn’t start out reading Morrison, and I won’t start out writing like Ross Douthat or Caitlin Flanagan. I’ll handle some subjects clumsily and go too far (or not far enough) on others, just as I read Louis Sachar’s Holes and failed to understand, as a simple plot detail, why the spell had been broken at the end. If, in two years, I regret or cringe at or want to expunge forever from the face of the earth something I wrote now, that’s growth. I think regret is a tricky thing, because often the consequences of the mistake that you regret is what gave you, in the present, wisdom to regret it. (Note: excessive moralizing.)

I’m the same in conversation; I love listening to my parents talk about work and the stock market, and I send a news story to one of my friends every other day to ask them what they know and what they think about it. Listening and reading is like an immersion in someone else’s world, so much so that my opinions and political beliefs sometimes sway towards whoever I last had exposure to, whether in conversation or in a book. But I want to find my own voice, however imperfect; I want to keep an open mind, but also to stake out a position and stand up for it; I want to be able to organize and contribute my thoughts to the ongoing discourse, and have faith that even if no one reads or learns from what I say, I will improve so that one day, my writing may prove worth reading. 

In this spirit, I’ve committed myself to writing my next blog about something that happened a couple weeks ago in the world and will continue to have ramifications in the future. This commitment will require for me, first and foremost, to not procrastinate; one of the reasons why I did not write the blog this week is because it’s due 24 hours from this writing. I’ve laid out a general plan for the blog, and I hope that over the next two weeks, I’ll be able to execute it. 

One of the quotes from William Strunk’s Elements of Style that stood out to me was, “Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” Although I’m not sure if I agree with this in its absolute tone, especially in journalism, a profession that has, at times in our history, driven social change*, I like to remind myself of this quote. I am also my audience. My voice, materialized by my will, shaped by my experiences, and added to the chorus, is enough in itself. 

*For more info, and for those interested in journalism, I’d recommend Christopher Daly’s Covering America: A Narrative History of the Nation’s Journalism. It’s a long read, but its narrative format and preponderance of primary sources and anecdotes made it a page-turner for me. 

Exemplary of the French form of poetry rondeau redoublé, Dorothy Parker’s “Rondeau Redoublé (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble, at That)” portrays how one’s perception of the world is wholly subject to one’s emotional state. Written in the first person perspective that focuses upon one individual, the poem nevertheless retains universal appeal through commonly held emotions and imagery. Through the simple, ubiquitous feeling of missing someone dear, Parker explores how a heart in despair closes itself to all beauty and joy beyond that which it desires. 

In the first quatrain, Parker employs the imagery of a passing day to contrast the freshness of the world and the darkness of her emotions. The stanza is filled with colorful words that juxtapose each other in tone. First, the first four words – “The same to me” – establish an indifference to the narrator’s external environment; thus, the tonal juxtaposition later on serves to emphasize the unconnectedness between the narrator’s environment and their emotions. Further, words and phrases of opposite moods are placed either near each other or in parallel positions in the poem, hinting at how the narrator’s mood should rise and fall parallel to the beauty and joy of the world around her, but does not; on the contrary, it completely juxtaposes it. This juxtaposition begins with “sombre” and “gay,” placed just three words apart in the first line. Further, the second and fourth lines mirror each other as exact tonal opposites: an uplifting “joyous” is replaced with the slow, resigned “melancholy,” and “rosy morn” with “night.” The two lines hold a similar position in the body of the stanza, as their last words rhyme under the rules a rondeau redoublé,  but they describe two opposite times of day that inspire starkly different emotions. Thus, within the first stanza, Parker uses words that are tonal opposites to establish the disconnect between the beauty of the world around the narrator and their own sentiments, a disconnect that will grow more pervasive throughout her poem. Parker also provides the reason for this disconnect – “Because my dearest love is gone away” – a vague and short description that does not limit the poem’s applicability and may refer to any “love,” be it person, thing, activity. Through the brevity and ambiguity of this line, Parker allows her poem to function as a broader, more universal meditation on the distortive effects of despair and loss. 

The structure of the second quatrain is similar to the first; here, parallel structure of rhyming lines arises once more. While the first stanza used the different times of day to evoke different emotions, the second stanza contrasts the stages of life with active and passive verbs and nouns. For example, “Summer” is capitalized in the second line, suggesting that it is a metaphor for the productivity of midlife, just as farmers are busy monitoring and ploughing their crops during the summer. The activity around the narrator is so great that the world “sway[s],” suggesting a surplus of motion. Yet, in the first and third lines, the narrator is resigned; his spirit is cloaked in “cerements” for a funeral, and his heart is filled with “loneliness.” These metaphors for the spirit’s appearance suggest a helpless, mute resignation to the death of any new possibilities. This juxtaposition of tone, which shifts dramatically with each line, again vividly portrays the phenomenon of when one’s inner life is harshly divorced from one’s environment. 

Throughout the third and fourth quatrains, Parker continues to employ natural imagery. She personifies nature in the first two lines of the third quatrain – breezes “play” and waves “dash… in glorious might” – serving to emphasize the liveliness of the outside world in contrast to what has been written about the narrator’s emotional state. Breezes and waves are free, intangible elements of nature; they are ubiquitous, uncontainable, and always on the move. Thus, they may serve as symbols for freedom and unlimited potential, things that the narrator is obstructed from. However, in the third line of the third quatrain, Parker does something different from the second and third quatrains: instead of describing separately the conditions of her narrator’s soul and those of the world around them, she describes her narrator’s active reaction to the world, writing, “I thrill no longer to the sparkling day.” This subtle shift is the pivot in the poem that gives its central theme of loss its compelling nature: the despair that had haunted the narrator’s soul in the second and third quatrains begins to affect how they perceive and react to the world around them. It is no longer simply juxtaposed to their environment; now, it becomes active, projecting itself onto the narrator’s world and inhibiting them from appreciating beauty. This shift continues into the fourth stanza, where tonally opposite words in the first two lines of the fourth quatrain – “ungraceful” and “swallow’s flight,” “blue” and “sullen gray” – describe not the narrator’s soul and the world, but rather the split between the reality of the world and the narrator’s perception of it. Parker makes this change explicitly clear in the third line of the fourth stanza, writing, “My soul discerns no beauty in their sight.” Thus, through a subtle shift in subject throughout the third and fourth stanzas, Parker considerably expands the power of her poem’s central phenomenon: not only that loss of one great love can plunge the spirit into hopelessness, but that this hopelessness can precipitate the loss of the ability to love and appreciate other things in life. 

In the fifth quatrain, Parker’s tone undergoes a shift with the word “Let,” which begins the first and third lines. In the first three lines the intensity of the activity of the world is once again personified to the effect of contrasting what comes later in the quatrain; roses “fling afar” their “crimson” – not the duller “red,” but “crimson” – spray, daisies “splash,” and poppies bloom “hotly as [they] may.” All three lines describe the activities of different kinds of flowers, and with the description “virgin daisies” in the second line, these flowers may symbolize the innocence and passion of youth. With the last line, however, the narrator turns away from all of this beauty, both physical and symbolic, and returns to the “melancholy night” in their heart. Although “Let” has many different possible connotations, it nearly always implies the occurrence of events that one allows to pass, implicitly suggesting that one has the power to prevent them. Here, the conclusive line of this quatrain imbues “let” with permissiveness and even spitefulness: let the world “sway” and “sparkle” and “bloom”; one’s soul will remain melancholy. In contrast with previous quatrains, in which the narrator simply states, or even appears to lament, their inability to appreciate the beauty of the world, here, “let” gives this inability a sense of choice on the narrator’s part, implying that the narrator may be choosing to ignore the lively world. By creating this sense of autonomy, Parker suggests that despair can also strip one’s world of its beauty by influencing one to renounce the enjoyment of beauty in things other than that which one misses. With a simple word, “let,” she hints at yet another dimension the message of this poem takes on, namely that despair can not only deprive one of the ability to love and wonder at the world, but make one lose the desire to have that ability. 

At the end of the fifth quatrain, one of the hallmarks of a rondeau redoublé poem becomes clear; the last lines of the second through fifth quatrains are an exact repeat of the first through fourth lines, respectively, of the first quatrain. This structure underlines the stagnance of the narrator’s condition. As each quatrain returns inevitably to the sentiments expressed at the beginning of the poem, there is no significant change in the narrator’s perspective, situation, or feelings. The quatrains are limited severely by this rule, as it pre-determines a quarter of their content, just as the “riotous,” “rippling” world is limited by the narrator’s inability, voluntary or involuntary, to allow the radiance of the world to permeate the desolate confines of his soul. Thus, the form the poem itself takes is reflective of the despairing, limited feeling it embodies. 

Finally, in the sixth quatrain, Parker’s audience shifts. Her narrator begins to converse with the thing or person that they long for, instead of addressing a bystander, as they have been throughout the poem; what they had described as “my dearest love” in the fourth quatrain, they now address as “you,” “oh love,” and “my dear.” The vivid imagery and words of contrasting tone of the first five quatrains is also absent in the sixth, which retains a despairing tone throughout – “pitiable plight,” “lost its light.” These differences mark the sixth quatrain as fundamentally different from the others. It functions both as an addendum and a conclusion: an address to the object of desire and a conclusion in the third line that succinctly summarizes the gist of the poem: “This little world of mine has lost its light.” Yet the feeling of contrast persists more subtly in the fourth line, where the narrator implores, “I hope to God, my dear…” Having been stagnant, resigned, and indifferent to the world around them for the entire poem until this point, the narrator now reveals the one wish they have with a burst of unprecedented passion, an entreatment of a higher being. This idea of opposing sentiments, emotional states, and appearances pervades the poem through Parker’s choice of words (as seen) and demonstrates the profound impact that loss has: the narrator yearns for and finds beauty in nothing but that one thing or person which they love, and while the world is beautiful, their spirit is helplessly locked in despair. Finally, faithful to the rondeau redoublé structure, Parker ends the poem with “The same to me,” the same words that began the poem. As described above, she returns to the sentiments expressed in the beginning of the poem, reinforcing the idea that because of their loss, the narrator is caught in a circular, unchanging moment of emotional and spiritual stagnance. Thus, through using conflicting diction, a unique poetic structure, and natural imagery, Parker builds a compelling and universal image of how loss deeply transforms one’s inner life.