Potpourri Blog Post #3

Sorting Laundry by Elisavietta Ritchie

THEME: the insight about human life that is revealed in a literary work

 The theme of this poem is that the more one thinks about a situation and picks away at every single little detail, the more the situation is blown out of proportion. The theme is revealed through the structure of the poem. I noticed a sort of progression with the poem as I read it. The first stanza showed me that I was reading about someone folding laundry, but it was what that person wast thinking about as she folded that was what the poem was about. The articles of laundry that she is pulling out and folding all have significance to the kind of relationship that the speaker has with her significant other. They have had a healthy, long relationship with light, color, and fun involved. They aren't perfect, but they still stay strong and get by. Most importantly, the articles get smaller and smaller as each one is pulled out and folded. The speaker is getting smaller and smaller into the details of what she is thinking about as she is folding. This helps lead to the shift in lines 39 to 42. The speaker is thinking and pulls out a "broken necklace of good gold you brought from Kuwait, the strangely tailored shirt left by a former lover...." (Ritchie). The tone shift goes to a sort of panic in the speaker. She starts to think about what would happen if her significant other were to leave her and how she wouldn't be able to deal or cope emotionally with the loss. This progression shows what happens when (I'm sure everyone has done this because I know I have) we freak out about something that is going perfectly fine and we are happy with things. We look at the small things and pick away until it is literally the worse possible situation and, in reality, we are just over-reacting.