Fairy tales usually end at the wedding. Mary F. C. Pratt's poem starts with the person who has to live with what comes before it: the prince's mother, who spends the whole story in a state of low-grade panic. The title promises relief, but the poem makes us wait for it, and the waiting is where the humour and the meaning come from.
The first stanza is a quick round of rejection. The prince "didn't succumb" to Sleeping Beauty, whom the poet dismisses as "that languisher awaiting awakening." The word "languisher" is invented-sounding and a little sneering, and the repeated *aw* sounds in "awaiting awakening" drag the line out, as if the phrase were yawning. Cinderella fares no better: she is "self-righteousness waiting to happen." That twists the familiar idiom "an accident waiting to happen" and turns the famously patient, put-upon heroine into a future prig. Then comes a dry aside, "since it was his business, / she didn't tell him that." The mother has opinions but knows when to keep them to herself, and that restraint is one of her best traits.
She does speak up once, with a warning that reads as gentle family comedy. Her son, she says, might not enjoy a mother-in-law "who'd imprison her daughter in a rock / or sell her for a salad." The second image seems to point to the story of Rapunzel, where a child is handed over because of a craving for greens. The poem treats these horrors as if they were ordinary in-law problems, and the bathos is the joke.
Then the pace changes. "When he left on his quest, / like all good mothers, / she held her breath. / For years." The stanza is the shortest in the poem, and the single-word fragment "For years" is both a punchline and a real ache. Even in a comic poem, a parent's fear is not treated as silly. The next stanza lists her anxieties, "trees grown from goat guts, / lurking dragons, glass mountains," in the rhythm of a mind running through worst cases at three in the morning. The list ends in a drop in tone: nightmares about "the secret names of dwarves / and stupid princesses with sensitive skin." The princess with delicate skin is plainly a nod to the princess who can't sleep on a pea, and the word "stupid" shows what the mother really fears for her son: a lifetime of boredom with someone helpless.
The final stanza answers that fear. The prince returns with a woman "who had slipped in between the pages, / who could read between the lines." The line works two ways at once. She has literally entered the book, and she is also perceptive enough to see what the stories leave unsaid. Her "dowry" turns the usual idea of a bride's worth upside down. Instead of gold or beauty she brings "big feet and inky fingers," which is a quiet rebuke to Cinderella's tiny slipper. She also brings "songs about birds, stories about rabbits," and "a laugh that could shatter stone." Stone is what imprisoned the daughter in the mother-in-law's threat, so her laugh seems stronger than the very things that trap other heroines. The ink on her fingers suggests she writes as well as reads.
The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre, and that suits its tone. The lines are short, speakable and conversational, like an amused aside, and the stanzas shift in length as the mood does: the breathless list of fears is followed by a final stanza that feels roomier and warmer. Punctuation also does a lot of work, since the dashes in the first stanza set up asides and the semicolon-linked catalogue in the fourth keeps the worry running on.
The poem matters because it criticises fairy tales without turning solemn. It does not argue that stories are bad. It argues that the best partner for a hero is someone who knows how stories work and can't be fooled by them, and who adds her own songs and tales to the pile. A mother's relief, in this telling, is the relief of finding that her son has married someone alive, loud and ink-stained.