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“Empty Pens”There’s something in a lonely empty penThat wants to stay alive. I cannot tellWhat in me fears the tools of common men,Lost of all ink, I cannot say farewell.Five empty pens wait silently—alone,Upon my desk they lie without a use.Five empty men lie not with pens but bones,The love of life they’ll no longer abuse.But here I sit and write and hold the sixth,The oil lamp tonight slowly runs low.My hand betrays the mind with pen affixed,And writes and writes and lets the black ink flow.When will this pen, this pen with which I write,Sit with the past five pens of past nights?Rationale Essay: “Empty Pens”I suppose that my first step in writing my sonnet was finding a central idea. After exhausting probably every sonnet that I could find online for inspiration, finding this idea was the part that I struggled with most. I wanted to write about something important to me, and I considered for a long time writing about living as a first-generation Asian American or as an IB student juggling the stresses of a self-inflicted excess of work. But in what was admittedly my first sonnet, I found that these things were too amorphous and complex for me to capture, at least to the degree that I felt would do justice to the passion I felt about them. I needed something simpler, easier to tackle, and so I looked around the area and, by whatever serendipity exists in the world, I found myself considering the empty pens that had collected in the cup of writing utensils on my desk. So I took them out and I counted them (there were five) and from there the first weak silhouette of my sonnet took form.Before I jump into my writing process I should provide some background on the pens as a symbol to me. They’re Pilot G2 gel pens, always black, always 0.7 mm. They’re my pen of choice for most things, but most importantly I use them to journal. I’ve journaled every day since last October and, as one can imagine, it uses up a lot of ink. But when I use a pen for a couple of weeks or a month and it starts to run dry, there’s something in me that can’t throw it away. It’s not hard for me to toss out other trash or even typical pens, but for some reason these pens are always different. Why do I care so much about this pen just because I had used it for journaling for an insignificant portion of my life? What makes people hold such sentimental feelings about objects that objectively have no value? These were the questions that I wanted to answer in my sonnet, about why a person “fears the tools of common men.”I’d never really considered why I kept the pens before; it was just something that I did, almost instinctually. In writing my sonnet, I looked deeper into myself for the first time and at my motives for journaling in the first place: I wanted a place where I could write my life down, to leave a record of the person I was becoming. So, to me, the pens and writing with the pens were symbols of progressing through life, almost like writing progresses across a page. The empty pens came to represent the past that I had lived, now used up and empty. In a sense, people live their life through their own metaphorical pens, and everyone has empty pens that they keep lying around, either of guilt or of fondness. It’s sort of a lonely concept that a person can have all of these wonderful and terrible memories hidden away, so that was my motive behind the line “wait silently—alone.” The word “alone” is physically separated from the rest of the poem, and it contributes to this sort of lonely mood that I developed. These memories, they’re forlorn, they “lie without a use,” but we still keep them around. For the first six lines of my sonnet, this sentimentality and progression through life were the concepts that I channeled.The next six lines before the concluding couplet, however, began to take on a separate meaning. There’s a sort of macabre imagery about a person writing their life away in pens that slowly run out of ink. Ink is a pen’s lifeblood, and so if the pens represent a person’s progression through life, there’s always this question in the background of when those pens are going to run out. So the first two lines of the second stanza, about “five empty pens,” became the next two lines of the stanza, about “five empty men.” This parallel between the pen and men reinforces the pens as a symbol for a person’s progression through life. This shift in meaning peaks between the second and third lines of the second stanza, the physical middle of the three quatrains of the sonnet, when “lie” takes on a double meaning. At first, the pens “lie” physically on a desk, but right after that, in the next line, the men “lie not with pens but bones,” meaning that they do not lie with pens in a fibbing sense anymore (writing lies) but rather that they lie in their graves. These men are dead; the “love of life they will no more abuse.” So the symbol of pens as a progression through life established by the first six lines is examined from a different, darker angle as the poem progresses.In the last quatrain of the poem, I turned the sonnet more inward, back to my personal experience with pens and writing. I found it wonderfully ironic that while I wrote about the last five pens that were empty, I was using the sixth pen to write my sonnet. So even while looking back on past memories, I was still moving forward. There’s a sort of meta-poetical concept in the last stanza, with me writing about myself writing, and from the perspective of the writer, there’s a very odd je ne sais quoi that comes from that. It made me think about how the first two stanzas that I had written applied to me, and it made me wonder when I, myself, would run out of pens, so to speak. The image of the “oil lamp… slowly run[ning] low” built this sort of suspense that I felt about eventually not having a pen left to write with, or a life left to live. And so while my mind wanted to stop and save the ink, my hand continued to write, captured in the final two lines of the third quatrain as “my hand betrays the mind with pen affixed… [letting] the black ink flow.” Emotionally, in my mind, I don’t want to move on and live my life, but physically, in my hand, there isn’t a way to slow down this ever-moving being of time.I wanted to draw these ideas to a close in the final couplet of my sonnet, but not so completely as to confine my sonnet to a single meaning. In my opinion, there should be some space for contribution of the reader’s own experiences and beliefs on the final meaning of the poem, and so my goal in closing was to give it a sense of finality without choking it completely. I tried to create a sense of the ink in the sixth pen running out, and to leave the reader with a sense of moving on to the seventh. The repetition in “this pen, this pen” emulated the feeling of when a pen is beginning to run dry and writing physically takes on a sort of stuttery, feeling as the pen reaches its end and the ink comes out spotty. Finally, the poem culminates with “sit with the past five pens of past nights,” with alliteration creating a rhythm of rushing towards an end but, more importantly, with a catalexis omitting the last syllable to symbolize the sixth pen finally running out of ink. The reader is left with a sense of finality but still without full closure with the last syllable hanging open for him to finish, parting with a question.So, from beginning to end, my sonnet evolved in meaning, all drawing from a central image that I found laying on my desk. The writing of my poem progressed organically and took turns that I hadn’t intended from the beginning, sort of how a person’s life progresses organically and unpredictably as people write their own lives. Ultimately, the process of writing this sonnet helped me turn inward and communicate my own ideas about life, living, and death, all within the context of the writing process itself. Even now, as I write this essay, I am using ink, and so too am I progressing through life.And now I’m writing about writing an essay about writing a poem about writing a poem.That’s a whole lot of meta. ................
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