The Crown Considers the Mystery of Dodi Fayed's Poem to Princess Diana
The Crown is a work of both fact and fiction, so which category does the poem on a silver plaque belong to?
Today, Prince Charles sits on the British throne with Queen Camilla at his side. Prince William is heir apparent and has three children with the Princess of Wales. Prince Harry lives in America with the Duchess of Sussex and their two children. The story of the real-life Windsors lives on, but the end of an era is nigh at Netflix: part two of the final season of The Crown debuts this week, concluding House of Windsor storylines that are still unfinished in the lives of the real family the show is based on.
As we inch toward the present day and prepare to say goodbye to Peter Morgan’s riveting dramatized version of history, let’s review where we left off in Episodes 3-4 of Season 6, both of which have to do with a poem Dodi Fayed penned for Princess Diana.
Love Dove
In the opening moments of Season 6 Episode 3, “Dis-Moi Oui,” we hear Diana on the phone with Susie Orbach, her therapist, while she’s on Dodi’s yacht. One of the first things she discusses is poetry.
SUSIE (ON PHONE): So, how is everything going over there?
DIANA: (sighs) A little mad, if I’m honest. Well, this morning, he came with a poem he’d written for me. Like him, it was very sweet. But slightly misjudged. Completely over the top. He even had it engraved on a silver plaque.
SUSIE: (chuckles softly)
DIANA: Yes. Everything rhymed. “Love” and “dove,” I think.
SUSIE: Right.
DIANA: There may have even been “ocean” and “potion.”
SUSIE: Oh dear.
We come to understand in this early part of Season 6 that Diana does not feel as deeply about Dodi as he does about her. Interestingly, we also learn that Dodi’s depth of feeling may be fabricated, too. The easy rhymes Diana describes fit well with a relationship that may have been lacking depth, artificial, or forced.
Even more unusual is that the poem is engraved on a silver plaque: a costly step that makes the writer’s words permanent and insinuates that they should be kept and proudly displayed, like a self-published metal broadside. The idea feels cringe, even to a publishing poet like myself.
Goodness. Did this really happen? What was the poem like in its entirety? Will we ever know?
A Journey
In Season 6 Episode 4, “Aftermath,” we are able to see the plaque Diana referenced in Episode 3. The famous, fated car crash at the Pont de l’Alma has taken place, and the British Royal Family and Mohamed Al-Fayed are grieving and dealing with, well, the aftermath of the accident.
The silver plaque that was only referenced in Episode 3 is now shown on screen, complete with the engraved poem. Mohamed had attempted to give it to the Windsors as an act of kindness after Dodi and Diana’s deaths, but it was returned to him. He clutches it and tells his interlocutor that Dodi and Diana were engaged when they died, though this was almost certainly not the case in real life.
Couldn’t make out the text of the poem as you watched? Not to worry. I watched the scene 15 times in order to transcribe it for you:
A JOURNEY Soaring high just like a dove, My heart embarks upon a flight Elated by this thing called love, It travels far by day and night For you have opened up my map Guiding me from land to ocean A new world for us to unwrap Spellbound, as if by magic potion. With all my heart, Dodi
It ain’t great! The ho-hum rhymes Diana referenced in the opening minutes of Episode 3 are there, complete with two other pairs of rhymes: “flight/night” and “map/unwrap.” The ABABCDCD rhyme scheme is like the octave of a Shakespearean sonnet.
The problem is that where the sonnet turns and then concludes through the course of another six lines (EFEFGG), this poem lacks such texture and development. It merely toggles back and forth, stretching to make it to the rhymes like a runner reaching out to just barely graze the finish line ribbon. The GG final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet helps the poem feel finished, as well, whereas Dodi’s simply ends.
That, one could say, is somewhat fitting for a fictionalized poem about a love between two people whose lives were cut short, but I’m almost certain I’m giving credit where none may be due.
The poem we see on screen was fabricated for the show, but it does have a basis in reality.
I Have Tried Many Things
Sally Bedell Smith, a frequent biographer of the British Royal Family, has written that Dodi Fayed did indeed give a poem engraved on a plaque to Diana while they were dating. But was it an original poem, or something else?
Reports of [the silver plaque] “stopped me dead in my tracks,” Tina Sinatra recalls. When she and Dodi dated in the 80s, he had admired a silver plaque in her house—a gift from her former husband, Richard Cohen, on their wedding day…
Dodi asked to borrow the plaque. “He loved it,” Sinatra tells me. “He promised me that he would copy and return it, and it became a running joke. After four, five, or six years, I knew I was not going to get it back.” Sinatra was actually touched to hear of Dodi’s gift to Diana. “It might not be the same plaque,” she says. “But if he loved it enough to pass to her, that’s very dear. It’s something I’ll always wonder about.”
The mystery only deepens with time. Perhaps Dodi presented Diana with an original poem he wrote on a plaque he himself commissioned, or perhaps he gave her the actual plaque that once belonged to Sinatra. The poem on Sinatra’s plaque is not much better than the one rendered on screen. In fact, it has even less to offer the eye and ear—more of a greeting card sentiment than an actual poem:
As if… I have tried many things, music and cities, the stars in their constellations and the sea—When I am not with you I am alone, for there is no one else, and there is nothing that comforts me but you.
This poem is no prize, but the gift of a poem intended for a Sinatra would be in line, in some ways, with the extravagant gifts Dodi was known to give: gifts that connoted power and prestige. Mohamed Al-Fayed purchased what he called Villa Windsor—the former Parisian home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—hoping it would confer some modicum of power in the same fashion.
For all their money and privilege, fate had other plans for Dodi and Diana. They died together, the right side of Diana’s body heavily injured because she was turned to the side in her seat—looking, then, it must have been, at Dodi. It’s touching, so much so that I can’t stop thinking about that autopsy fact.
It’s been 25 years since I stood in my parents’ living room in the middle of the night, a young teenager riveted to the coverage of the accident beaming into our home from Paris. I understand so much more about the story now, as an adult, but feel even farther away from whatever the capital-T “Truth” is, mainly because I know that nothing, not one thing, is simple in this life.
There was something there between the two, but it may not have been the kind of love that would have resulted in a marriage or a happily-ever-whatever. Life is more complicated than that, more inscrutable than the offensively simple poem + diamonds = love evidence we’re supposed to rely on as interpreters of the couple’s history. Even a poem written on a silver plaque can’t magically conjure an endless love between two people when it simply isn’t there.