along with two of our favorite romantic poems from dorothy parker, “inventory” and “two-volume novel”, we would like to add another one by the great lady to our silly saint valentine’s day arsenal…(not that the economy-pumping holiday means a lot to us)
Men
They hail you as their morning star
Because you are the way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They’ll try to make you different;
And once they have you, safe and sound,
They want to change you all around.
Your moods and ways they put a curse on;
They’d make of you another person.
They cannot let you go your gait;
They influence and educate.
They’d alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired.
and we didn’t even lowercase it out of respect for mrs. parker. here’s to you, the aging spinsters, the romantically illiterate, the misfits…
I don’t think that poem’s very nice. all kinds of people can hurt all kinds of other people. the male sex has no monopoly on that, believe me. some of us are actually quite nice if you get to know us. if I saw a poem saying something similar about Women I’d think it was a piece of misogynist trash.
oh joe I’m sure that some men have written similarly scathing poems about their ladyfriends, have they not? as a lit prof, I’m sure you can cite examples, but please leave ms. parker be! I don’t think she would have written it if she didn’t have some serious life experience to back it up, and she wasn’t exactly famous for being “nice”!