Eight times the speaker says the same word, and by the end we start to wonder who is being convinced. "Promissed" opens the first two lines of every stanza, and that repetition drives the whole poem. There is no scene, no second person, no named cause of pain. We get a list of vows that sounds like someone talking quietly to themselves.
The tense matters. "Promissed" is past, so these promises were already made, and the poem never says they were kept. The only present-tense moment comes in the third stanza, in the phrase "what I am doing here", and it is a confession of confusion. The speaker has resolutions in the past and no clear sense of purpose now. The spelling with its doubled "s" may be deliberate or a slip, but either way it makes the word look slightly heavier and less steady. Seen again and again, it starts to feel like a word being pressed too hard.
The vows also escalate. They begin with suppressing feeling: to "let it all go" and "throw / My emotions away from me". Then comes endurance: to be "stronger" and "hold longer". Then survival and meaning: to "live through" and find "a clue". Last comes the hope to "live in joy" and not "destroy / Myself". The ambition shrinks from controlling emotions to simply staying intact. The poem also contradicts itself without noticing. In the first stanza the speaker wants to let go, and in the second to hold on. Perhaps that is the point, since someone in distress often wants both at once. Throwing emotions "away from me" is a telling image too, because it treats feelings as objects that can be flung off, while the phrase "from me" admits they are part of the speaker.
The sound pattern carries much of the meaning. In each stanza the first two lines rhyme ("go" and "throw", "stronger" and "longer", "through" and "clue", "joy" and "destroy"), and the short, three-beat lines have a steady, chant-like pulse. The third line of each stanza breaks the pattern. It runs longer, finds no rhyme ("me", "before", "here", "to"), and loosens the rhythm. It is as if each vow starts out confident and neat, then loses its footing when it has to say what it actually means. The poem sets its promises in rhyme, and the rhyme does not hold to the end.
Some of the rhymes are quietly cruel. "Joy" is paired with "destroy", so the word for happiness cannot appear without its opposite beside it. "Clue" brings in the idea of a mystery, with life as a puzzle the speaker is supposed to solve but cannot. "Live through" is also left without an object. Live through what? The poem refuses to say, and that blank lets readers fill in their own difficulties.
The ending is the most unsettling part. "Promissed to not destroy / Myself as I wish to" can be read two ways. The speaker may be promising not to destroy themselves, as they wish not to. Or they may be promising not to destroy themselves in the way they wish to, which admits a pull toward self-harm. The grammar will not settle it. The final line ends on the dangling "to", with no full stop. Where the earlier promises sounded firm, this one trails off, and the poem's last word leans toward something unfinished.
The title "Doot" is unexplained. It looks like "doubt" with a letter missing, though that is only an inference, since the poem never says. If the reading holds, the title names what runs underneath every stanza: a promise made out of doubt.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it does, and how well that works. It has no grand metaphors and no tidy lesson, only a plain word repeated until it begins to sound fragile. The form acts out its theme: rhymes promise order, the longer last lines break it, and a poem about vows ends without a vow completed. Readers who have ever made a resolution to themselves and doubted it in the same breath will recognise the voice.