“Pope Joan” is a dramatic monologue spoken by the title character: a woman said to have disguised herself as a man and risen to become Pope around the year 850. (While there’s no historical evidence to suggest that this is a true story, many later medieval Christians accepted the legend of Pope Joan as fact.) Here, Joan tells her story. As the poem begins, she looks back at the early days of her papacy, remembering her days in her lofty post. And lofty it was: in the Middle Ages, the Pope was one of the most powerful people in the world.
Joan remembers the things she had to learn on her way to the top: a combination of religious ritual and politicking. She needed, naturally, to “learn[] to transubstantiate” bread into the “sacred host”: in other words, to perform the ritual of the Mass in which, as Catholic tradition holds, blessed bread transforms into the body of Christ. This is perhaps the most holy and important ritual in Catholicism; here, Joan passes over it rather quickly, as if waving it aside.
She also recalls “sw[inging] the burning frankincense” (that is, swinging a censer—an incense-burner—filled with frankincense, a fragrant resin) until “blue-green snakes of smoke” gathered around her feet. That faintly sinister metaphor hints that Joan might not have the highest opinion of this ritual, either. In the context of a Christian church, a snake feels like an especially loaded creature to bring up, since the story of the Garden of Eden holds that a malevolent snake tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and bring about the fall of humanity!
Finally, Joan remembers being carried through “fervent crowds” on a “papal chair” (that is, a raised chair carried by four bearers so the Pope can be held up above a crowd), “blessing and blessing the air” as thousands of eager worshipers reached up to ask for her prayers. Being Pope, then, isn’t just about conducting religious rituals, but about being the public face of Catholicism, a figurehead.
All of this heady ritual and adulation, though, isn’t what really matters to Joan. What’s important to her, readers gather, will be what happened “after” she was Pope. For “After” is the first word of the poem; these first lines, Joan hints, are only preliminaries to the real drama.
Joan will tell her irreverent story in free verse, without a regular meter or rhyme scheme. (There are touches of rhyme here, though, like the chime between “chair” and “air” in lines 8-9, which helps to give Joan's voice a cheeky, playful tone.) Readers who know a little bit about Christian tradition might be amused by the way Duffy chooses to arrange the poem’s lines. Grouped into threes, they mirror the Trinity, the three-part Christian godhead composed of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.