De Profundis

De Profundis
By Dorothy Parker

Oh, is it, then, Utopian
To hope that I may meet a man
Who’ll not relate, in accents suave,
The tales of girls he used to have?

The poem today is short and sweet. (I don’t know that Dorothy Parker was ever “sweet” in her prose. It’s just an expression.) Dorothy Parker always goes straight to the point, and usually in a humorous way. A founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker’s work was known for its scathing wit and intellectual commentary. She may have used humor, but there is often a lot of truth in what she says. In this poem, she basically is saying: In a perfect world, I would meet a man who won’t tell me about his past lovers. We probably have all known people who are constantly comparing people to others in their past. We may have even had a boyfriend who constantly told us about his ex-lovers. While it’s good to know about someone’s past, we don’t need to hear them compare us to those who they have known in the past.

De Profundis is Latin: “from the depths.” De profundis often refers to Psalm 130, traditionally known as the De Profundis (“Out of the depths”), from its opening words in Latin. There are several works in literature titled “De Profundis,” several of which include more serious poetry. These include:

• De Profundis (letter), an 1897 work written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment, in the form of a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas
• “De Profundis,” a poem by Federico García Lorca, set to music in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14
• “De Profundis,” a 1998 poem by Regina Derieva
• “De Profundis,” a poem by J. Slauerhoff in the 1928 collection Eldorado
• “De Profundis”, a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle written in 1892
• “AMERICA ’62: De Profundis,” a 2007 prose piece by Panos Ioannides
• Suspiria de Profundis, a collection of essays by Thomas De Quincey

Appropriately, the watermark at the bottom of the photo above reads, “GAYS WITH STORIES.”