The Triumph of Death

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.