Dorothy Parker Poems

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

The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron
...

This, no song of an ingénue,
This, no ballad of innocence;
This, the rhyme of a lady who
Followed ever her natural bents.
...

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
...

Love is sharper than stones or sticks;
Lone as the sea, and deeper blue;
Loud in the night as a clock that ticks;
Longer-lived than the Wandering Jew.
...

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
...

Were you to cross the world, my dear,
To work or love or fight,
I could be calm and wistful here,
And close my eyes at night.
...

Some men, some men
Cannot pass a
Book shop.
(Lady, make your mind up, and wait your life away.)
...

This level reach of blue is not my sea;
Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,
Whose quiet ripples meet obediently
A marked and measured line, one after one.
...