A Holy Crusade for the 21st Century

History by Carol Ann Duffy

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;

witnessed the wars,
the bloody crusades, knew them by date
and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,
Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words
of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers
hung by the neck,

seen up-close
how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,
how the dictator strutting and stuttering film
blew out his brains, how the children waved
their little hands from the trains. She woke again,
cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.
Bricks through the window now, thieves
in the night. When they rang on her bell
there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed
on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted
onto the floor.

I love this poem. I've been a little obsessed with it for a couple days now. I found it when I was wandering through the wikipedia page for "poet laureate". Duffy's name was listed as the current poet laureate for the United Kingdom. Curious, I looked for something she'd written and found "History". Had I read more about her before I read the poem, I might not have been so interested. Carol Ann Duffy is one of many contemporary authors who is making a name for herself while being an openly lesbian woman. I'm not repulsed by her sexuality so much as I am by the thought that, perhaps, many of these women wouldn't be so novel if not for their preferences. Do we like them because they're gay? Or because they're really good? Does society demand we over-appreciate them to make up for cruel treatment of homoseuxals in the past or does society genuinely love the works these women produce? I don't know. I can't know. There is no way to know.

However, this is probably one of the better poems I've read in my life. I love it. I loved it before I knew she was a lesbian and therefore I can admit, openly, that I appreciate Carol Ann Duffy's work with absolutely no regard to her sex life. I love her personification of History as an old woman, underappreciated, abused, ignored. She is not dead, but neither is she alive. No one is tending to her needs and soon, it seems, she will die. Alone with no offspring to carry on her legacy. Is that where our history is going?

I took several history classes in the past few years as part of an exploration into what I thought might be the field I'd like to spend the rest of my life in. I found, quickly, that history is really not for me, though it is extremely interesting. We spent whole class periods discussing whether or not the study of history was useful, how it should be done, and why. To be honest, we never really discovered a true answer to those questions. It is largely a grey area. The study of history has been abused, rendered perverse, by so many different cultures and generations, it is almost impossible to retell the past without someone's bias interfering anymore. Frustrated, I once cried out, "What's the point!?" to which my professor responded, "History! We do it for the sake of history."

History for history's sake. No agenda, no expected answers to be got. It seems almost... like an unrealistic dream. An impossibility. But that is the job of the historian. To look at the past for no reason other than to make certain that the past can persist unchanged, unbiased, and without perversion. A holy calling, to be sure. So I salute you, historians, and your crusade. Keep on keeping on, and all that. Also, Carol Ann Duffy? I would totally take you on a date if you were into that.