Poem of the Day: ‘A Well-Worn Story’ 

As we shall be reminded by Friday’s Poem of the Day, T. S. Eliot named April “the cruellest month.” In today’s selection for this week of April poetry, Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), in fine, utterly characteristic bitter fettle, shows us not the cruelty of April, but a cruelty in April. In common-meter abab quatrains, she relates, as the title tells us, a “well-worn story,” in which a man appears as a figure of stone and metal, while the woman he doesn’t love bleeds her heart out through her gown, a humiliating “wet red stain.” Having spoiled her good dress, in the end she proceeds, equally humiliatingly, to “spoil a page with rhymes,” telling about it.