“Parsley” by Rita Dove: Analysis of the Poem

Rita Dove forces readers into the mind of a dictator who orders mass murder over a word his victims cannot pronounce. "Parsley" splits into two sections that mirror each other like a knife blade and its reflection, both beautiful and deadly. The first half, "The Cane Fields," gives voice to Haitian workers who cannot roll their r's when saying "perejil," the Spanish word for parsley. The second half, "The Palace," enters the thoughts of Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican general who in 1937 used this pronunciation test to identify and massacre thousands of Haitians living along the border.

Dove refuses to let readers stay comfortable in simple outrage. Instead, she builds a poem where lush imagery and careful music seduce us into understanding how a man can love his mother, grieve a dead parrot, and still commit genocide. The poem matters because it shows that evil does not announce itself with obvious signs but hides inside ordinary human feelings twisted into something monstrous.

The massacre Dove writes about actually happened in October 1937, though historians still argue about the exact death toll, which ranges from five thousand to twenty thousand people. Trujillo wanted to "whiten" the Dominican Republic and saw Haitian immigrants as a threat to his vision of national identity. Soldiers moved through villages asking people to say "perejil," and those who pronounced it with a flat r instead of a rolled one were killed. Dove discovered this history while researching her family background and felt compelled to write about it. She published the poem in her 1983 collection "Museum," which won the Pulitzer Prize. The parsley itself becomes a symbol of how language and power intertwine, how something as small as a single sound can mark a person for death. Dove chose to write in tercets, three-line stanzas that create a measured, almost hypnotic rhythm that mirrors the way violence can become routine.

The first section gives readers the workers' perspective through images that blend labor and death. Dove writes about cane fields where "there is a parrot imitating spring" and workers whose "every word / is a coal that falls in your mouth." The language here feels thick and physical, words described as objects that burn and weigh. The parrot becomes important because it connects to Trujillo's grief later, but here it mocks the workers by repeating sounds they cannot make. Dove does not give these workers individual names or stories, which bothered me when I first read the poem in my contemporary poetry class. Then I realized she was showing how Trujillo saw them, as a mass rather than as people. The image of the parrot "imitating spring" suggests fake renewal, false hope. Spring should mean growth and life, but in these fields it means nothing. The workers know their pronunciation marks them, yet they have no way to change how their mouths shape sounds learned in childhood.

The second section shifts into Trujillo's consciousness and becomes deeply unsettling because Dove makes him human. She describes his grief for his mother, who "could roll an R like a queen," and for his dead parrot, whose name was also Perejil. Trujillo remembers his mother's touch and mourns the bird with real feeling. Dove writes that "there is a parrot imitating spring" in both sections, linking oppressor and oppressed through this image. The general orders brandy and thinks about his parrot's green feathers while planning murder. This juxtaposition shows how someone can experience genuine emotion and still be cruel. Dove never excuses Trujillo, but she refuses to make him a cartoon villain. When I discussed this poem with my roommate, who is studying psychology, she pointed out how Dove illustrates compartmentalization, the way people can separate their actions from their self-image. Trujillo does not think he is evil. He thinks he is protecting something he loves, which makes him more dangerous than if he simply enjoyed violence.

Some readers argue that Dove gives too much attention to Trujillo's inner life and not enough to his victims. They say the poem risks creating sympathy for a murderer. I worried about this too until I realized that understanding is not the same as forgiving. Dove writes from Trujillo's perspective precisely because it is uncomfortable and necessary. If we believe that only monsters commit atrocities, then we fail to recognize the warning signs in ourselves and others. Real people planned and carried out the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and countless other horrors. They had mothers and pets and favorite foods. Dove's poem insists that we look at this truth rather than hide behind the idea that evil is always obvious and always other. The risk of humanizing Trujillo is smaller than the risk of pretending that cruelty only comes from inhuman sources.

"Parsley" stays with me because it demonstrates poetry's power to complicate rather than simplify. Dove uses sound and imagery to create beauty out of historical horror, which itself raises questions about what art should do with atrocity. The poem does not offer solutions or clear moral instruction. Instead, it leaves me thinking about how language creates identity and how identity becomes an excuse for violence. I notice now how often people use small differences to justify large cruelties, how easily "they talk differently" becomes "they are dangerous." Dove wrote this poem decades ago about events that happened decades before that, yet it feels urgent every time I read it. The parsley keeps growing, green and ordinary, while carrying the weight of all those deaths. I cannot look at the herb the same way anymore, which might be exactly what Dove wanted.

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