The Red Dress by Dorothy Parker Analysis: 2022

Context: Dorothy Parker is a writer, critic, poet, screenwriter from America, who was famous in different countries for her screenplays and poetry. Her collection of poem has been amongst the bestsellers in America. The screenplays that she had written had won many awards. She served in the editorial board of Vanity Fair and Vogue for a long period of time.

In this poem, the poet is describing about her dream when she was a young girl. She had a dream about her lover and her love life. She had dreams about his appearance and his behaviour. She also dreamt that she would love him, and be happy with him. She thought that everyone would look at them with respect, and envy them. But the poet is disappointed as in reality, as she is a woman now, her relationship is unlike she dreamt, and she is unhappy about it.

She has used the metaphor red dress for her dreams. Red colour is symbolic to love and passion in literature and arts across cultures. Here, the dress becomes symbolic to her dreams and expectations, which she wears to find the man of her dreams and fall in love with him.

She dreamt that this person would change her life and flip her world, a person who would never lie to her. His eyes would have a sparkle, and his hair would shine like metal in the sunlight. His heart would be full of love for her. She says that now she is grown into a woman, and the dreams she had during her young days about her love life did not come true.

Rhyming Scheme and Structure: The rhyming scheme and structure in this poem have been followed uniformly and thoroughly in the poem. The rhyming scheme in this poem is a b a b. For example:

And he would be a gallant one,-a
With stars behind his eyes,-b
And hair like metal in the sun,-a
And lips too warm for lies.-b

In this poem, the poet has also taken help of punctuations to put pauses, where she thinks she needed to. This helps in channelizing the thoughts and emotions of the poet in the poem, and helps the readers to understand where to pause and where to stop. This helps the poet to bring a rhythm in the poems, and helps the readers to understand what exactly the poet wants to say.

The poem also has a structure where the poet has broken the sentences where she wanted to capture an expression and or a moment. This helps the poet to let there be a flow in the poem, and the context and meaning is easily understood by the readers. These are some efficient ways of writing a poem and capturing the expressions in them.

Theme: The theme of this poem is imager, love, sadness, and disappointment. This poem is about the poet having dreams and expectations about her love life and her man of dreams. She uses beautiful imagery to describe the features of the man that is in her dreams. She also uses beautiful metaphors to describe her love and affection as a red dress which is in rich in colour. It being rich in colour shows the depth of her love and affection. She wants to tell that she is in deep love with the man of her dreams, and she knows how he is going to look and how he is going to be.

Deep Meaning: The deep meaning of this poem is that the poet dreamt of her love life when she was a small girl, like every other small girl. She had a dream and imagination of her lover and her love life. But the dream was shattered as the reality hit her and she understood that some dreams never come true. Do go through The Red Dress Summary here.

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