Dear readers,
In the last half a decade or more, I have generally refrained from commemorating birthdays, graduations, weddings, bar mitzvahs and the like on this forum, due 100% to the fact that for every one of those I would remember, there are 12 I would forget. However, when a founding member gets engaged, and when other readers rally around her cause, I’m flexible enough to rethink policy. So to MV super-commenter Sara Cohan of Nashville, TN, she of the well-researched reply, the personal anecdote, the genocide fetish, the Dorothy Parker fan club, and the undying love of teaching, we wish many many years of happiness, happiness unbesmirched by the kind of bitter irony Parker creates below. I learned something about poetry in producing this week’s edition: the poem is written in what is called “common measure”: Rhymed quatrains where the first and third lines have four beats, and the second and fourth three. It lends an inherent musicality (if it’s not your taste, you might call it “sing-songy”). Parker has upped the challenge for herself. While the form only calls for rhyme at line endings 2 and 4, Parker has rhymed all the lines. It’s wonderful, morbid, and funny. -ed.
Love Song
My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—
Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world,—
And I wish I’d never met him.
My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet,
And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams,—
And I wish he were in Asia.
My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway of the morrows.
He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart,—
And I wish somebody’d shoot him.
-1926
Monday's Verse 
And notably:
“Matt and Co.
Nicholson Baker, in The Anthologist, argues that there is indeed a fourth beat to the 2nd and 4th lines of the stanza–in the form of a silent thump.
He would read:
My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after. (Ba Dum!)
His argument is compelling, and if you hear the “sing songy” rhythm of this poem, I dare you not to hear the thump.
~jmm”