Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO HER SACRED MAJESTY, THE QUEEN MOTHER, ON DEATH OF MARY, by JOHN WILMOT


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO HER SACRED MAJESTY, THE QUEEN MOTHER, ON DEATH OF MARY, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Respite, great queen, your just and hasty fears
Last Line: And dereliction adds unto remove.
Alternate Author Name(s): Rochester, 2d Earl Of
Subject(s): Death - Children; Henrietta Maria, Queen Of England; Death - Babies


Respite, great Queen, your just and hasty fears:
There's no infection lodges in our tears.
Though our unhappy air be armed with death,
Yet sighs have an untainted, guiltless breath.
O stay awhile, and teach your equal skill
To understand and to support our ill.
You that in mighty wrongs an age have spent,
And seem to have outlived ev'n banishment;
Whom traitorous mischief sought its earliest prey
When unto sacred blood it made its way,
And thereby did its black design impart
To take his head, that wounded first his heart;
You that unmoved great Charles his ruin stood,
When that three nations sunk beneath the load;
Then a young daughter lost, yet balsam found
To stanch that new and freshly bleeding wound,
And after this, with fixed and steady eyes,
Beheld your noble Gloucester's obsequies,
And then sustained the royal princess' fall:
You only can lament her funeral.
But you will hence remove, and leave behind
Our sad complaints, lost in the empty wind --
Those winds that bid you stay, and loudly roar
Destruction, and drive back unto the shore.
Shipwreck to safety, and the envy fly
Of sharing in this scene of tragedy,
Whilst sickness, from whose rage you post away,
Relents, and only now contrives your stay.
The lately fatal and infectious ill
Courts the fair princess, and forgets to kill.
In vain on fevers curses we dispense,
And vent our passions' angry eloquence.
In vain we blast the ministers of fate,
And the forlorn physicians imprecate;
Say they to death new poisons add, and fire;
Murder securely for reward and hire;
Art's basilisks, that kill whome'er they see,
And truly write bills of mortality;
Who, lest the bleeding corpse should them betray,
First drain those vital speaking streams away.
And will you by your flight take part with these?
Become yourself a third and new disease?
If they have caused our loss, then so have you,
Who take yourself and the fair princess too.
For we, deprived, an equal damage have
When France doth ravish hence, as when the grave,
But that your choice th' unkindness doth improve
And dereliction adds unto remove.





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