General Review of the Sex Situation
Woman wants monogamy;Man delights in novelty.Love is woman's moon and sun;Man has other forms of fun.Woman lives but in her lord;Count to ten, and man is bored.With this the gist and sum of it,What earthly good can come of it?
Words in this poem
- gist n.
- A resting place. [OF. giste abode, lodgings, F. gîte, fr. gésir to lie, L. jac, prop., to be thrown, hence, to lie, fr. jacre to throw. In the second sense fr. OF. gist, F. gît, ]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
General Review of the Sex Situation is in the public domain. This text is taken from Enough Rope: Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #68353; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Dorothy Parker, General Review of the Sex Situation, in Enough Rope (1926), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #68353, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-enough-rope/general-review-of-the-sex-situation.html, id L27397.
Form and metre
General Review of the Sex Situation is 8 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets, 75% of the lines. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 94%).
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in trochaic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 --AABBCC monogamy · novelty · sunA · funA · lordB · boredB · itC · itC
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Woman wants monogamy; | 7 | /˘·˘/˘˘ |
| Man delights in novelty. | 7 | ·˘/·/˘˘ |
| Love is woman's moon and sun; | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Man has other forms of fun. | 7 | ··/˘··· |
| Woman lives but in her lord; | 7 | /˘····· |
| Count to ten, and man is bored. | 8 | ·······˘ |
| With this the gist and sum of it, | 8 | ········ |
| What earthly good can come of it? | 8 | ·/˘····· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.