Anyone who has ever announced a diet to the world knows the sudden, suspicious burst of social activity that follows. Elizabeth von Schonberg's "Resolution" turns that universal experience into a short comic confession, and it manages to be funny without ever raising its voice. It is a poem about the distance between what we promise ourselves and what we actually do, and its central joke is that the speaker never quite admits the gap exists.
The first stanza is built as friendly warning. "Take my advice: don't try it," the speaker says, as if dieting were a hazardous sport. The tone is chatty and confiding, almost like a note passed across a table, and the advice comes with a sly condition: don't diet "unless you can scram." The speaker's proposed solution is not willpower but escape, which already tells us how little faith she has in resisting temptation. The real culprits, she suggests, are the friends. The moment a decision is made, "all the friends you ever knew / Start right in, inviting you / Out to dinner, lunch or tea." The list of meals is carefully chosen; it leaves almost no hour of the day unguarded. Whether the invitations really multiply or whether the speaker has simply started noticing them is left open, and that ambiguity is part of the humour. Resolve makes us see food everywhere.
The sharpest moment comes at the end of that stanza, when the speaker professes bewilderment: "it always puzzles me / How the scales can climb so far / With that snack of caviar!" Notice the word "snack." Caviar is among the most luxurious foods imaginable, yet she files it under casual nibbling, as though it were a handful of crackers. The exclamation mark seals the performance of innocence. We are meant to see through her, and the pleasure of the poem lies in being let in on the self-deception.
The second stanza, shorter and more tightly packed, delivers the confession. "Well, there WERE some things I tasted," she admits, and the capitalised "WERE" is a small gesture of defensiveness, the verbal equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Her excuse is a classic of the genre: "Seemed a shame to have them wasted." Eating becomes a virtue, a refusal of waste, which is exactly the kind of reasoning that makes dieters lose. The poem closes on its funniest line, "count calories—some day!" The dash creates a tiny pause before the postponement, and "some day" does all the work, since everyone knows that some day is never today. Even her plan to "find a hide-away" sounds less like discipline than like a fugitive's scheme.
Formally, the poem is light and quick, which suits its subject. The lines are short, in a bouncing rhythm close to a nursery jingle, and the rhymes arrive in neat couplets: "diet" and "try it," "find" and "mind," "knew" and "you," "tea" and "me." Some are playful, especially the double rhyme of "diet" with "try it," which sounds almost like a dare. The easy, predictable chiming mirrors the speaker's own breezy self-assurance; the form seems as relaxed about rules as she is. The shorter second stanza, with its fewer lines, even feels as if the resolution is cutting itself short.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It has no grand theme, yet it captures something true about human nature: we are expert negotiators with ourselves, and we can talk our way out of almost any promise. The title, "Resolution," becomes ironic by the end, since the only resolve on display is the resolve to put resolve off. The speaker is neither villain nor victim, just recognisably human, and that is why the poem still raises a smile. We laugh at her because we are laughing, a little, at ourselves.