Since, according to the old proverb, death and taxes are the only certainties in life, we assume that Dorothy Parker means by her title that the poems of the collection were equally inevitable. But since all assumptions are likely to be fallible when dealing with the literary output of this pleasing and disconcerting lady, we discreetly withdraw from further pursuit of the subject. Death and Taxes is a thin book, housing something like half a hundred short poems—several are very short indeed. But invariably the quality is in inverse ratio to the quantity.

Dorothy Parker's function in the body literary and the body social is too well known to require more than a word. It consists for the most part in jabbing with pins, but she jabs with such contagiously impish pleasure that it is not polite to be other than pleased to be a victim. And why should one not be pleased? This spritely poet is not malicious, although she is generally satirical. Refusing to be malicious, a satirical poet perhaps sacrifices something of cutting strength. Pope, the Earl of Rochester (with his memorable quatrain on Charles II), Jonathan Swift, Matthew Prior—English satirical poets such as these slashed with a vigor one will not find in the versicles of Dorothy Parker. But the latter will be read with more genuine pleasure on the part of most. Perhaps the nearest Mrs. Parker comes to vinegar unmixed with honey is in this epitaph for a very rich man:

He'd have the best, and that was
none too good;
No barrier could hold before his terms.
terms.
He lies below, correct in cypress
wood,
And entertains the most exclusive
worms.

But even here, even if there is some slight acidity, the conception is sufficiently whimsical to draw a smile.

The most nearly humorous piece in the collection is, perhaps, one of six stanzas bearing the caption, “The Danger of Writing Defiant Verse.” It begins with the statement, “Now I have another lad,” and he is not at all an ardent wooer, a matter of great relief, as advertised in the poem up to the final stanza, which is as follows:

He's none to kiss away my mind—
A slower way is his.
Oh, Lord! On reading this I find
A silly lot he is.

As such verse should be, if it is to be at all, these epigrammatic lyrics in Death and Taxes are frequently as nearly perfect as one may hope for in this more careless age. The collection does not, as a whole, maintain the perfection of Housman, but this, “My Own,” could not be scorned by The Shropshire Lad himself:

Then let them point my every tear
And let them mock and moan;
Another week, another year,
And I'll be with my own
Who slumber now by night and day
In fields of level brown;
Whose hearts within their breasts
were clay
Before they laid them down.

For a last word, the reviewer will return to one of the several epitaphs in the little group labeled as a whole, “Tombstones in the Starlight.” The lines are for an actress:

Her name, cut clear upon this mar-
ble cross,
Shines as it shone when she was
still on earth;
While tenderly the mild, agreeable
moss
Obscures the figures of her date of
birth.

Death and Taxes, besides being a small package of literary delights, is also significant in the progression of the author. The magazines and the columnists early helped Dorothy Parker to such triumph that something less than her best is so easy for her to get away with that, even in this small volume, she too often yields to temptation. This is a pity, for Dorothy Parker can at times so mingle the serious and the gay, can so pack truth into the twist of a line, that a very high place in the line of English minor poets—a line that can boast such names as Lovelace and Herrick—can be hers for the winning. Occasionally she does win.