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Elizabethan

By Linda Pastan b. 1932 Linda Pastan

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow
—Queen Elizabeth I

Her sex sent her mother

to the tower,

made her father profligate

with arrogant desires,

but she was made of flint

and backbone.

Think of a young girl

in a blue velvet bodice,

a white collar and lace,

the very prototype

of virginal.

Think of a woman, her court

enlivened by suitors and lovers

in doublets, in brocaded cloaks,

despite suspicions of their motives

staining the sheets,

the way cups of spicy,

flowery mead were sipped

despite the possibility

of poison.

Even the crown of the sun

must go down each night.

Could she have stood at the prow

of a ship in that great Armada she ordered,

instead of at a window, waiting

for urgent results?

Could she have guessed that the words

of a man she inspired, carved

into the marble of ages,

had a muscular beauty

more than equal

to her own worldly triumphs?

Daughter, Queen, Ruler

of roiling seas, of meandering

rivers and meadows,

of armies of soldiers, their swords

and armor glittering

like planets to her sun.

Namesake to an age.

And Poet?

When she turned

to the empty parchment

(or once to a windowpane,

a diamond for quill)

everything

must have gone quiet.

Even a queen is naked

before the naked page, awaiting

not the generous spoils owed to a victor

but the gifts freely given

of a besotted muse.

Linda Pastan, “Elizabethan” from Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Copyright © 2012 by Linda Pastan. Reprinted by permission of Jean V. Naggar Agency, Inc..

Source: Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2012)

Biography

Poet Linda Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to . . .

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