I found this poem in an old email and don't remember where it came from or exactly how it got there. Sometimes I input poems from The New Yorker and email them to myself. I didn't know the poet, so I googled him. Mr. Dunn's poem History is too good not to share, one of those I read and wish I wrote.
HISTORY
It's like this, the king marries
a commoner, and the populace cheers.
She doesn't even know how to curtsy,
but he loves her manners in bed.
Why doesn't the king do what his father did,
the king's mother wonders---
those peasant girls brought in
through that secret entrance, that's how
a kingdom works best. But marriage!
The king's mother won't come out
of her room, and a strange democracy
radiates throughout the land,
which causes widespread dreaming,
a general hopefulness. This is,
of course, how people get hurt,
how history gets its ziggy shape,
The king locks his wife in the tower
because she's begun to ride
her horse far into the woods.
How unqueenly to come back
to the castle like that,
so sweaty and flushed. The only answer,
his mother decides, is stricter rules---
no whispering in the corridors,
no gaiety in the fields.
The king announces his wife is very tired
and has decided to lie down,
and issues an edict that all things yours
are once again his.
This is the kind of law
history loves, which contains
its own demise. The villagers conspire
for years, waiting for the right time,
which never arrives. There's only
that one person, not exactly brave,
but too unhappy to be reasonable,
who crosses the moat, scales the walls.
Stephen Dunn
"The good poem illuminates its subject so that we can see it as the poet wished, and in ways he could not have anticipated. It follows that such illumination is twofold: the light of the mind, which the poet employs like a miner's beam, and that other light which emanates from the words on the page in conjunction with themselves, a radiance the poet caused but never can fully control." —Stephen Dunn
Stephen Dunn (1939-present) is an American poet born in New York, New York. Author of more than ten collections of poetry, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2001 for his collection, Different Hours. He has taught at Wichita State University, University of Washington, Columbia University and Princeton University, among others. He taught for many years at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He currently resides in Port Republic NJ.
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Comments
I swear to you, I made it through a particularly trying year of my life because of his poetry.
Thank you for this.
Thank you for introducing him to me.
:-)