Douglas Dunn (#poetry)

 

Chateau d'If

Her photographs of white embrasures glow

Against impossible blue, the sea and sky

Contemptuous of how men fortify

The State's iniquity. I do not know

Exactly all we talked about or did.

I was wearing my blue jacket, my off-white

French slacks. She posed me as a blue vignette--

"Lean on these battlements, then turn your head."

I can't remember, but I can't forget

Our outing to the Chateau d'If, kept now

In these rectangles of a printed light,

Other than that she liked the day, and how

She said she'd read that book of martyrdom.

"Let's stay a while, then take the last boat home."

 

-Douglas Dunn

 

Douglas Dunn was a Scottish poet who died last Friday at the age of 83. I've featured him once before on the blog. This is from his book Elegies, which came out in 1985 and won the Whitbread Prize. The elegies were for his first wife Lesley Balfour Dunn, who died at the age of 37. She was an artist (not just photography--"infallible in art//That pleased her--water, oil, or lithograph" says another poem.)

 

Looking at an old photograph led Dunn to write this sonnet about a moment in their past. There are a number of other sonnets in the volume, though not all. Still most use some formal structure.

 

Chateau d'If is, of course, the prison/fortress in Marseilles' bay, where Edmond Dantes is sent early in The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Alcatraz, you can take a boat out to visit. 

 

 

 

It's only at the Chateau d'If moment that The Count of Monte Cristo is a book of martyrdom, but that suits the mood and the moment of the poem.