The Triumph of Death

By Rosanna Warren b. 1953 Rosanna Warren

To Mary Sidney

In your lace ruff you resemble a giant

snowflake or a spider web

pearled with dew. What poets you catch

in your symmetries, at your long table at Wilton

what wits (Spenser, Fulke-

Greville, Drayton) pitch into the roasted

piglet, stewed apples, carp.

If you rowzed God up, He

knocked you back on your heels, Lady—

“O God, why hast thou thus

Repulst, and scattred us?”—Through the high

windows at Wilton seethe

rumors of battle, Philip’s pussing thigh,

death in the Lowlands. Mother Wrong,

Daughter Strife stalk the cities; still

you keep house with grammar, you salt the psalms

for long preserving. “As smoke in wind,

as wax at fire doth waste”

the unjust dissolve. Your stanzas

stay, still sting the tongue.

Dawn finds you kneeling on stone, calling

again the bleak God you believe

will answer you.

You mix medicines, you write

in invisible ink. But Time

trumps Fame which undoes Death

which masters Chastity and Love—which leaves

Eternity, your Master wrote, master of all.

And like your lace, your lines

shine, not pale, “but whitely,

and more whitely pure

than snow on windless hill that flaking falls,

as one whom labour did to rest allure.”

Translate us too, rough line by line,

into your crystalline

severe design.

Rosanna Warren, “The Triumph of Death” from Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Copyright © 2012 by Rosanna Warren. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

Biography

Rosanna Warren (1953--) was born in Fairfield, Connecticut to a pair of writers: Robert Penn Warren, a major poet and novelist, and Eleanor Clark, a prize-winning author of criticism, fiction, and travel books. A professor of comparative literature at Boston University, editor, and literary translator, she has published four books of poetry. Her work, which ranges between the rhapsodic and cerebral, shows a deep and abiding . . .

Continue reading this biography