The Red Dress
I always saw, I always said
If I were grown and free,
I’d have a gown of reddest red
As fine as you could see,
To wear out walking, sleek and slow,
Upon a Summer day,
And there’d be one to see me so
And flip the world away.
"A Girl in a Red Dress," Pietro Antonio Rotari, 1775. El Paso Museum of Art.
And he would be a gallant one,
With stars behind his eyes,
And hair like metal in the sun,
And lips too warm for lies.
I always saw us, gay and good,
High honored in the town.
Now I am grown to womanhood…
I have the silly gown. (212)
Parker, Dorothy. The Portable Dorothy Parker. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.
What is it to be grown and free? Or just grown?