Poem of the Day: ‘Convalescent’

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.