Symptom Recital by Dorothy Parker
"Symptom Recital" by Dorothy Parker is a poetic exploration of the speaker's self-perceived flaws and emotional struggles, framed within the structure of ten rhyming couplets. The poem employs a consistent iambic tetrameter, allowing for a rhythmic and melodic quality as the speaker lists various negative traits and feelings, including self-loathing and disconnection from others. Parker's speaker exhibits a critical view of herself, expressing disdain for her physical appearance and emotional state, while also hinting at a deeper conflict regarding love and relationships.
In a surprising twist, the poem culminates with the realization that despite her grievances, she is destined to fall in love again, portraying love not as a joyous experience but rather as a tormenting affliction. This perspective challenges the romantic idealization of love, illustrating it instead as a cyclical struggle that the speaker faces repeatedly. The structured repetition in the poem reflects both the monotony of her symptoms and the inevitability of her emotional journey. Overall, Parker's work serves as a poignant commentary on the complexity of human emotion, particularly in the realm of love, blending humor with a raw, candid examination of personal vulnerabilities.
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Symptom Recital by Dorothy Parker
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1926 (collected in Enough Rope, 1926)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Symptom Recital” proceeds, again, to list a series of unpleasant traits or characteristics which the speaker is feeling in a parallel grammatical form and in ten couplets rhyming aa, bb, cc, and so on. The rhythm is virtually all iambic tretrameter in four accents per line. The speaker enumerates her bitter mind, her dislike of her legs and hands, her sneering at “simple folks,” and her inability to take jokes or find peace. She sees the world and herself as “tripe” and empty, hates herself, senses her “soul” is crushed, and she “shudders” at the thought of men. At the penultimate line, an ellipsis after “men” indicates the pause before the joke, or “turn,” as she realizes “I’m due to fall in love again.”
Again, the hidden attitude and tone of voice is in conflict with the parade of “symptoms” of disease she recites, which turn out to be those of being in love. Love is not an ecstatic state (the romantic cliché) but a raging disease, a self-torture she will again endure. She is about to go back into hell, a repetition that is also a cycle, a repetition mirrored in the line structures. Each line (with the exception of three that begin with “My” and one with “For”) starts out exactly the same: “I” plus a simple verb that shows her “diseased” symptoms. Her recital is also a public artistic rendering, like a piano recital.
Bibliography
Capron, Marion. “Dorothy Parker.” In Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, edited by Malcolm Cowley. Reprint. New York: Viking Press, 1979.
Frewin, Leslie. The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
Gill, Brendan. Introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker. Rev. and enlarged ed. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
Keats, John. You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.
Kinney, Arthur. Dorothy Parker. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker, A Biography: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Villard Books, 1988.
Melzer, Sondra. The Rhetoric of Rage: Women in Dorothy Parker. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.
Pettit, Rhonda S. A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000.