[Here, Kinney provides a discussion concerning Parker's use of meter and verbal simplicity to better satirize her view of society.]

LIGHT VERSE: “COUNTING UP, EXULTINGLY”

When the wry, regular, and apparently easy poems of Parker were selected for her first book in 1926, she had been writing and publishing short verses for more than 11 years. Parker was determined from the start to write satire from her woman's point of view—to exaggerate reality through stereotype, repetition, cataloguing, or hyperbole—rather than to write nonsense verse. She also wanted her verse to be simple, as colloquial as possible, for that way she could extend her satire to those who spoke as her lines speak—but she found, even composing longhand (later, with criticism, she would compose on the typewriter), that she continually crossed out words that were not simple enough. She was encouraged in her search for substance coupled with a simple style by F. P. A., when he was on The Mail and she was still at Vogue. Her first published poem, “Any Porch,” is revealing.

“I'm reading that new thing of Locke's—
So whimsical, isn't he? Yes—”
“My dear, have you seen those new smocks?
They're nightgowns—no more, and no less.”
“I don't call Mrs. Brown bad,
She's un-moral, dear, not immoral—”
“Well, really, it makes me so mad
To think what I paid for that coral!”
“My husband says, often, ‘Elsie,
You feel things too deeply, you do—”
“Yes, forty a month, if you please,
Oh, servants impose on me, too.”

(VF, September 1915, 32; Silverstein, 70-71)

The poem continues for six more stanzas, a deliberate exercise in heteroglossia long before the advent of Mikhail Bakhtin, locating at once a practice that would only continue, if more subtly, throughout her career. As her reader searches for a point of entry within the superficial litany—time passing through triviality—the juxtaposition of all the comments makes each of them clichéd. Each expression judges all the others, and in turn is open to judgment. “Any Porch” is anyplace and about anyone including, potentially, Parker's readers.

It did not take Parker long to learn that the iamb was her most forceful foot and that strict meter had a kind of dogtrot rhythm that would reinforce the commonness of the ideas and of the people she would write about, even when lines varied in the number of feet. Clichés, too, worked better when falling into taut quatrains and full rhymes. We do not know how many unpublished starts she made after “Any Porch,” but her second publication, “A Musical Comedy Thought,” shows such a technical advance.

My heart is fairly melting at the thought of Julian Eltinge;
His vice versa, Vesta Tilley, too.
Our language is so dexterous, let us call them ambi-sexterous,—
Why hasn't this occurred before to you?

(VF, June 1916, 126; Silverstein, 86)

The poem relies too heavily on a Nash-like neologism, but her third published poem has married simple diction, iambic meter, and full rhyme without any crutches. “The Gunman and the Debutante” begins,

A wild and wicked gunman—one who held a gang in thrall—
A menace to the lives of me and you,
Was counting up, exultingly, the day's successful haul—
As gunmen are extremely apt to do.
A string of pearls, a watch or two, a roll of bills, a ring,
Some pocketbooks—about a dozen, say—
An emerald tiara—oh, a very pretty thing!
Yes, really, quite a gratifying day.

(VF, October 1916, p. 120; Silverstein, 72-73)

The trisyllabic tiara is a particular challenge, but even this early, Dorothy Rothschild attempted to work into regular metrics the long and unusual word, jolting the most monotonous ideas and monotonal rhythms, breaking open language and thought through dialectic.

Somewhat surprisingly—and disappointingly, from our later perspective—Dorothy Rothschild now began parodying vers libre, then especially fashionable. Beginning with the February 1917 Vanity Fair, she wrote a series of “hate songs” in which her compact descriptions of typed personalities resemble the captions she had written for Vogue. The satire is glib, the targets wide, the rhythms of stanzas (which vary in length) slack. “Men: A Hate Song,” the first, is subtitled “I hate men. They irritate me” and opens with the “Serious Thinkers.”

There are the Serious Thinkers,—
There ought to be a law against them.
They see life, as through shell-rimmed glasses, darkly.
They are always drawing their weary hands
Across their wan brows.
They talk about Humanity
As if they had just invented it;
They have to keep helping it along.
They revel in strikes
And they are eternally getting up petitions.
They are doing a wonderful thing for the Great Unwashed,—
They are living right down among them.
They can hardly wait
For “The Masses” to appear on the newsstands,
And they read all those Russian novels,—
The sex best sellers.

(65)

The strength of such poetry lies in a distanced tone and clever observations. It is also a poetry that must always hit the bull's-eye, and so quickly grows tiresome. But such poems made her very popular then, and she went on to write more for Vanity Fair and a good many for Life, on relatives (with a stanza on husbands from a liberated woman's perspective); on actresses, actors, bohemians, slackers, and office colleagues; on bores, the drama, parties, movies, books, the younger set, summer resorts, wives, and college boys; and F. P. A. and others parodied or imitated the form.¹

Parker's free verse can be likened to prose lists and conversational fragments she wrote for Life, but with another parody, called “Oh, Look—I Can Do It, Too” in Vanity Fair for December 1918 (48; Silverstein, 76-77), she began turning her attention to French forms, the ballade and rondeau, made popular by Eugene Field, Austin Dobson, and F. P. A. Once again she remained multivoiced; still she strove to look casual. “Ballade of Big Plans” takes its chorus from Julia Cane: “She loved him. He knew it. And love was a game that two could play at.” The last stanza and envoy read,

Recollections can only bore us;
Now it's over, and now it's through
Our day is dead as a dinosaurus.
Other the paths that you pursue.
What is she doing to spend her day at?
Fun demands, at a minimum, two—
And love is a game that two can play at.
Prince, I'm packing away the rue:
I'll show them something to shout “Hooray” at.
I've got somebody else in view.
And love is a game that two can play at.(2)

The clichés skewer Julia Cane—and other popular works middle-class in taste and finally empty of meaning because of their conventionality. The residual wit available to poetry by which the last line, supplying a contrary attitude, provides a backward-looking tension dialogically, reverberates here by itself being a cliché. Thus the victory of any sort is potentially illusive and delusive. Compare the earlier “Idyl”:

While, all forgotten, the world rolls along,
Think of us two, in a world of our own
Now that you've thought of it seriously—
Isn't it grand that it never can be?

(Life, July 7, 1921, 3; Silverstein, 93)

Soon this became predictable, so she tried other overriding structures, such as “moral tales” where the punch line in the final maxim both opposes the preceding lines with its more distanced tone and moves the particular into a congruent generalization.

Gracie, with her golden curls,
Took her mother's string of pearls.
Figuring—as who would not?—
It would pawn for quite a lot.
Picture, then, her indignation
When she found it imitation!
Though her grief she tries to smother,
Grace can't feel the same towards Mother!
All pretence and sham detest;
Work for nothing but the best.

(Life, May 4, 1922, 7; Silverstein, 124)

Like mother, like daughter (if she but knew it). Yet “the best” in the final line here—given both the prevalent situation and the inadequate moral—remains deliberately ambiguous. Another exercise in affecting overall structure is her “Somewhat Delayed Spring Song.”

Crocuses are springing,
Birds are lightly winging,
Corydon is singing,
To his rustic lute;
Sullen winter passes,
Shepherds meet their lasses,
Tender-tinted grasses
Shoot.
All the world's a-thrilling,
Meadow larks are shrilling,
Little brooks are trilling,
You, alone, are mute;
Why do you delay it?
Love's a game—let's play it,
Go ahead and say it—
Shoot!

(SEP, September 30, 1922, 105; Silverstein, 137)

Last to be developed, then, was what has become the recognizable Parker persona, that of the woman who is both exploited and thick-skinned, who is put upon but can equally well put down others. “Song” suggests this with cynical wisdom.

Clarabelle has golden hair,
Mabel's eyes are blue,
Nancy's form is passing fair,
Mary's heart is true.
Chloë's heart has proved to be
Something else again;
Not so much on looks is she,
But she gets the men.

(SEP, November 18, 1922, 93; Silverstein, 144)

The rueful conclusion—what would become another Parker hallmark—combines innocence and worldliness, acceptance and condemnation. The final attitude in such dialogic writing—if there is any final attitude—rests with the reader.

“Folk Song” has the same idea, but reverses the roles.

Rafe's a fine young gentleman;
Tom's with virtue blest.
Jack, he broke my heart and ran,—
I love him the best.

(Life, October 16, 1924, 7; Silverstein, 163)

The earlier “Invictus,” built by clichés, has still more subtlety.

Black though my record as darkest jet,
Give me, I beg, my devil's due;
Only remember, I've never yet
Said, “How's the world been treating you?”

(Life, January 27, 1921, 161; Silverstein, 84)

So tight is her control by 1923 that she can be compared, and fruitfully, to Heinrich Heine.³ Little wonder that by then her “little woman” persona was being widely imitated.⁴ She had found, by trial and error, the subject and stance that characterize the best of her poetry.

Notes

1. See, for example, The World, March 19, 1922, 11:1; January 2, 1925, 9:1. The first series here lists Dorothy's “hate songs” in VF, the second her “hymns of hate” in Life; see Silverstein, 187.

2. Quoted by F. P. A. in Innocent Merriment (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942), 159-60. For F. P. A.'s parodied response see his column in The World for September 22, 1924, 13:1. F. P. A. credits Villon with teaching him the form. An early example of Parker's rondeaus is in SEP, November 11, 1922, 84; see Silverstein, 142.

3. Cf., for example, “Ich trat in jene hallen” or “Es liegt der heisse Sommer,” which Joseph Auslander translates:

   The fervent flame of Summer
   Lies in your lovely cheek;
   But in your heart the Winter
   Lies old and cold and bleak.
   All this will change, my precious,
   And sooner than you seek:
   The Summer in your heart, dear,
   The Winter in your cheek.

   (Heinrich Heine, Bittersweet Poems [Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Peter Pauper Press, 1956], 19).

4. The best-known imitator of Parker is Fanny Heaslip Lea. See as an example her “Obituary” in Harper's Bazaar, March 1931, 156. My research has uncovered 68 poems in Life between 1920-1926 that Parker omitted from her volumes of published poetry, as well as 15 from Vanity Fair (1915-1920), 6 from The World (1923-1929), 5 from New Yorker (1925-1938), and 8 from The Saturday Evening Post (1922-1923). All are reprinted in Silverstein.