Comment 1 of 2, added on October 3rd, 2004 at 7:16 AM.

For all her wit and success, Dorothy Parker comes across as deep-down sad,
and this little poem suggests her feeling that life is empty for her.

The title, meaning 'For lack of anything better' is itself sad, suggesting
things that are second-best.

Parker's cleverness comes across in her apparently random choice of nouns
in the first two lines:

Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme-

The words are simple, short, everyday, but when you take them in slowly
they make you feel you are in a dodgem car in a fair, being bumped off
course again and again. 'Travel' - what next? Travel broadens the mind? To
travel hopefully is better than to arrive? But the next word is 'trouble.'
Unexpected, but it could be setting out another train of thought, that
travelling is often uncomfortable, tiring, even risky. We wait for the
third word.

'Music'. Our dodgem is knocked right off course now. What on earth has that
got to do with traval and trouble? The answer is, of course, 'nothing'.
When 'art' follows 'music', we are momentarily lulled into a feeling that
we know here we are headed. Music and art - these go together happily. The
poem is presenting us with a list of the big abstractions.

Line 2 knocks us of course yet again. From big abstractions to a small,
personal one: a kiss. Things get still more disconcerting with 'a frock'.
How ever did we get from the big things like trouble and music, to a frock?
It's becoming a jumble.

The last of the list, 'a rhyme', makes it very personal to Parker. She does
not say 'poetry', to go with music and art, nor even 'rhyme', which would
be fairly general. No, it is a particular rhyme that this writer of verse
means.

With that last word, we may have reached an inkling of what the poem is
about: activities and objects that mean much to Dorothy Parker. The title
has warned us that they are in some way second-best. What will she say
about them?

I never said they feed my heart,
But still they pass my time.

So sad! She lists a representative selection of what fills her life, and
then admits that they do not 'feed her heart'. A powerful expression. The
heart is the inmost being of a person, and Parker's heart is shrivelling up
for lack of nourishment. She is a shell, she claims. There is nothing vital
at her core.

So what of all these assorted words in the first half of the poem? None of
them feeds her heart. They pass the time.

But she doesn't say 'They pass the time'. She says 'they pass my time,'
making it a purely personal statement of ... what? futility? emptiness?
lack of love? dissatisfaction?

Sad for Dorothy Parker. How does the list affect us? Could we make a
similar list for the 21st century, including surfing the net, muzak, the
Sunday papers? Do we have in our lives things that feed the heart, or are
our lives empty and unsatisfied, so that we need to fill them with things
that pass our time, faute de mieux?

David from United Kingdom