A king comes to dinner, the dinner goes badly, and the host wanders off for a drink and a conversation with a cat. Dave Bonta's "Faux pas" runs to only eight lines, yet it holds a whole social disaster and its aftermath. The humour is deadpan, but the unease underneath is real.
Start with the first line: "I bought Henry the Fourth dinner." The royal name and its regnal number sit beside the casual verb "bought," as if the king were an old friend who happened to be in town. The poem never says which Henry he is or how the speaker came to be hosting him, and it doesn't stop to explain. We accept it the way we accept the logic of a dream, and the comedy depends on that straight face.
The next two lines locate the failure: "my expectation being too great, / it did not please him." The phrasing is stiff, almost legal, and slightly ambiguous. Does "it" mean the dinner or the expectation? Both readings work, and the overlap is the point. The speaker blames not the food but his own wanting too much. We never learn what was served or what the king said. The title promises a blunder, but the poem withholds the details, which suggests the real misstep was the over-eager wish to impress. The line "I drank a pot or two and parted" then moves briskly. "Pot" is an old word for a tankard, and the clipped p-sounds of "pot" and "parted" make the exit sound quick and a little embarrassed. Drinking is his only comfort, and "parted" stays vague about whether anyone said goodbye.
The second stanza leaves the dining room for the street. "A cat with one eye / was going my way" brings in a battered, half-seeing creature at the bottom of the social scale, the opposite of a king. There is a quiet wordplay here too. "Faux pas" is French for "false step," and the poem ends with two walkers going the same way after one has stumbled. Then the speaker speaks to the cat: "Strange fellow, tell me, / how is the king now?" The courtly "fellow" treats the animal like a man, and the question treats it as a source of court gossip. The cat is called strange, but the stranger one is the man, who cannot stop worrying about someone he has already left. The English proverb says a cat may look at a king, and the speaker seems to hope this cat has done exactly that and can report back.
Formally the poem is simple. It has no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, plain lines in two balanced four-line stanzas. The first stanza is past tense, a flat account of what happened. The second begins in the same mode but ends in direct speech, the only quoted words in the poem. The speaker's calm narration cracks into a spoken question, and the final word, "now," drags the whole episode out of the past and into the present. The dinner is over, but the anxiety isn't. The poem also ends on a question mark with no answer. The cat says nothing, and the king stays out of reach.
That restraint is much of what makes the poem worth reading. Nearly everyone has replayed a social failure afterwards, wondering how it looked to the person they wanted to please, and the poem catches that feeling without naming it. It does so with an odd, old-fashioned vocabulary of kings, pots and fellows, and with a one-eyed cat in place of a confidant. The poem suggests that trying hardest to please the powerful makes us ridiculous, and that the sting outlasts the evening. It gets this across in eight lines by leaving most things out.