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

 Some men, some men
 Cannot pass a
 Crap game.
 (He said he'd come at moonrise, and here's another day!)

 Some men, some men
 Cannot pass a
 Bar-room.
 (Wait about, and hang about, and that's the way it goes.)

 Some men, some men
 Cannot pass a
 Woman.
 (Heaven never send me another one of those!)

 Some men, some men
 Cannot pass a
 Golf course.
 (Read a book, and sew a seam, and slumber if you can.)

 Some men, some men
 Cannot pass a
 Haberdasher's.
 (All your life you wait around for some damn man!)

While Parker can always be counted on to combine delightfully witty content with a just-so metre, it is is usually the message of the poem that stands out. Today’s poem, the very aptly named ‘Chant For Dark Hours’, is an exception - indeed, given how cutting she’s capable of being, the words seem deliberately toned down to balance the hypnotic rhythm.

The metre is very well constructed - the first three lines of each verse deliberately dragged out with a preponderance of accented syllables, to give a dull, heavy, effect, and then the fourth line shifting to a more tripping rhythm, speeding the reader to the verse’s conclusion. Note, too, the way the poem ends with three consecutive stresses - as nice a way of driving home the point as any I’ve seen.

Theme

This week’s theme is ‘the pleasures of strong rhythm’ - see
poem #558 for a fuller explanation.

Links

We’ve run several Dorothy Parker poems - see the index

- The Wondering Minstrels

A biography is at poem #150

Postscript

As much as the metre, it was the opening lines that first attracted me to this poem (for tolerably obvious reasons :))

— Martin