Enough Rope: Poems • by Dorothy Parker

☀ You can borrow and read Enough Rope: Poems by Dorothy Parker free below. ☀

This ebook of Dorothy Parker*‘s poems is her first volume, published in 1926 when she was 33 years old. Her tempestuous love life was already well established — her first divorce was two years away — and her poetry had found its main themes of unhappy love and obsession with death and, more specifically, suicide.

But Parker is famous for her wit, and her poems are thoroughly enjoyable despite her tendencies towards doomed love affairs, depression, and cynicism. Her aim is true; she cleverly and charmingly maps out the big hells in relationships and life.

Witty, Funny Poems About Miserable Love and the Pull of Death

The poems in Part One of Enough Rope mostly are influenced by her obsession with death — entwined with her inability to stay happy in love. But if death fills her consciousness, she imagines it as a sort of friend, as in this last stanza from Epitaph for a Darling Lady.

Leave for her a red young rose,
Go your way, and save your pity;
She is happy, for she knows
That her dust is very pretty.

Part Two of Enough Rope is less death-involved, although the reaper still shows up. One of Parker’s trademarks is to write sweetly about love and then skewer the whole pretty poem with a cynical closing line, as in these last lines of Love Song:

He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart,—
And I wish somebody’d shoot him.

A recurring theme is the foolishness and pain and ultimate disaster of being the one in a romantic relationship who “loves more”. The final stanza of To a Much Too Unfortunate Lady sets out the bitter truth.

Tender though the love he bore,
You had loved a little more….
Lady, go and curse your star,
Thus Love is, and thus you are.

Her sense of hopelessness about romantic love is succinctly expressed in this first stanza of her poem, Threnody (a threnody is a lament).

Lilacs blossom just as sweet
Now my heart is shattered.
If I bowled it down the street,
Who’s to say it mattered?

Strains of Feminism in Poems of Romantic Love Gone Wrong

Despite Parker’s longing for men, there’s a strong feminist streak running through this intelligent woman’s work, as in the poem, Indian Summer.

In youth, it was a way I had
To do my best to please;
And change, with every passing lad,
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!

The same pull and push, the same battle between women and men, is succinctly expressed in the closing stanza of Song of One of the Girls.

I’m of the glamorous ladies
At whose beckoning history shook.
But you are a man, and see only my pan,
So I stay at home with a book.

In 1934, Parker married a man she called “queer as a billy goat”, stayed married to him despite alcoholism and affairs until their divorce in 1947, remarried the same man in 1950, separated from him in 1952, and got back together with him in 1961, staying until his death in 1963.

Ultimately, Parker did not die from suicide — although she had attempted it once or twice in early years — but of a heart attack at age 73, after a long, successful career as a writer of short stories and Academy-Award-winning screenplays.

Read online, download, or Buy This Ebook of Dorothy Parker’s Poems

You can read online or download (no need to borrow) the book Enough Rope: Poems by Dorothy Parker free via the nonprofit Internet Archive (we recommend you read it online using the Internet Archive’s built-in BookReader, or download a pdf, since the OCR software used to create the epub version does not do a good job with poems), or buy* a book with this and additional content from Amazon.