Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), whose birthday is today, endures as an emblematic early New Yorker voice. As a book reviewer for that magazine, in the persona of the “Constant Reader,” she once wrote of A.A. Milne’s “The House at Pooh Corner” that “although the work is in prose, there are frequent droppings into more cadenced whimsy . . . and it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in ‘The House at Pooh Corner’ at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up.” Parker’s voice, arch and lacerating, carries into her poems as well, though often enough the character who undergoes the laceration is the speaker herself. In “Convalescent,” for example, the pentameter abab quatrains exude the brittle, determined cheer of the spurned lover who is just fine, my darlings, really, never better. Each line begins with a trochaic foot — an opening attack, the stressed syllable like a hammer stroke — as if to underscore her determination, even to the closing lines where the speaker’s resolve melts away.  

Convalescent 
by Dorothy Parker 

How shall I wail, that wasn’t meant for weeping? 
     Love has run and left me, oh, what then? 
Dream, then, I must, who never can be sleeping; 
What if I should meet Love, once again? 

What if I met him, walking on the highway? 
Let him see how lightly I should care. 
He’d travel his way, I would follow my way; 
Hum a little song, and pass him there. 

What if at night, beneath a sky of ashes, 
He should seek my doorstep, pale with need? 
There he could lie, and dry would be my lashes; 
Let him stop his noise, and let me read. 

Oh, but I’m gay, that’s better off without him; 
Would he’d come and see me, laughing here. 
Lord!  Don’t I know I’d have my arms about him, 
Crying to him, “Oh, come in, my dear!” 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.