We’re due for another Thursday Love poem feature, and so in the spirit of “Thursday,” a sort-of love poem by one of my poetic heroines, Edna St. Vincent Millay, I give you a piece from another New York mistress of words and wit, Dorothy Parker.
If you’re not familiar with the Thursday Love Poem feature, just go ahead and enjoy the poem below first, but then go back and click on that Thursday link in the first line of this post in order to get the original poem that inspired this irreverent tribute to love.
Like Vincent (as Millay liked to be called), Parker was both a poet and a social activist in the 1920’s New York literary scene. They were quite progressive ladies, though their poetry did not go the way of the Modernists, into ideas and abstractions, in the mid 30’s.
The Dorothy Parker Society has created a great little website dedicated to her and you should check it out. They even have a pretty hefty audio archive of Dorothy’s readings, including today’s:
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet–
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
David J. Bauman 
Oh…for some reason..my distorted mind perhaps…this made me think of …well this…enjoyed the post.
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haha, must be the period dress?
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Reblogged this on No more wriggling out of writing …… and commented:
I have been so busy lately; Shell Shocked Britain has, of course taken over my life as I come up to publication in October, but it has meant that I have paid less attention to my favourite poetry bloggers. Top of the list is David J. Beauman who has featured on my blog a few times and who kindly read my own poem ‘Life Force’ in his wonderful warm tones.
He has posted this poem for his Thursday Love Poem slot (he is from the States so I only get to see it on a Friday…) and it is by one of my favourites – Dorothy Parker. I love the way she subverts the genre, fooling the reader in two classically romantic stanzas only to re-focus the whole theme in the last, with her inimitable caustic wit.
Just had to share it with you!
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I commented on your blog, Suzie! Thank you!
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Reblogged this on Vector Charley and commented:
A day without Dorothy Parker is a day without Dorothy Parker.
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