“I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to.”

Carol Ann Duffy, whose appointment as Great Britain’s Poet Laureate was announced today. She is the first woman to hold this position in its 341 year history. A decade ago, Ms. Duffy allowed as how she would eschew the PL’s traditional role as provider of verse for various royal events, such as the wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones. (That task fell to Andrew Motion, who had just been named Poet Laureate at the time.)


She woke up old at last, alone,
bones in a bed, not a tooth
in her head, half dead, shuffled
and limped downstairs
in the rag of her nightdress,
smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared
at her hand--twigs, stained gloves--
wheezed and coughed, pulled on
the coat that hung from a hook
on the door, lay on the sofa,
dozed, snored.

She was History.
She'd seen them ease him down
from the Cross, his mother gasping
for breath, as though his death
was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,
spears in the earth;

been there
when the fisherman swore he was back
from the dead; seen the basilicas rise
in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched
for a hundred years as the air of Rome
turned into stone . . . .

from History by Carol Ann Duffy