Queen Christine
Founder of Delaware State. Fontainebleau, 1657
Father, is he dead? Then I'll confess me:
His period is my pause where Aftertime
Will lay my book down and consider me.
You shall be my posterity and judge!
I had no child but Sweden and foreswore it;
Homeless by choice, I chose a homeless staff
From generosity; the man just slain
Monaldeschi, was nothing but a servant.
Marquis I made him like the Marquis Ancre,
King Louis' father slew. Italian like
He mixed in my concerns, my lonely state
Unpitying, set his wits to work to spoil
My independence; forged his comrade's hand
And traded in my livery like a traitor.
His plot he brought me: 'twas assassination;
Thinking a Queen ten years o'er Sweden's council
Could be so shallow. " Let me execute him! "
The jockey swore. The table's turned: he's dead.
His lesson is not lost on Latindom.
Let women twit! Christine was crowned a King.
Defence I scorn, whose court, like old King Lear's,
Is where I visit. Am I yet a nun?
Vasa's resentment certain as his justice
Wakes in his grandson's child. Father and son
I executed, ere I abdicated,
For prodding my resignment ere its time.
Absolute Queen I pass from throne to Pope,
No subject anywhere, my rent crown lands,
My confidence State secrets; treason, death!
She who of late by armies executed,
Visited kings with thunders, dyeing rivers
Blood red, was gloriously commended;
Heretic then she was, but worth conversion.
This day I sentenced one — but one — all shrived,
Who articled with me, and mutinied.
What did my Judas sell? That's perished with him:
I trapped him ere he bit. Was he my lover?
Cowards will say so for two hundred years.
Eve had it said of her, all nature's mother.
Listen, thou priest! 'Twas Knowledge bit us both.
Knowledge has bit thy church. At Westphalia
I forced to peace the Thirty Years of war,
And Toleration was my crown. Therefore
I took the cross in Lenity's crusade,
To minimize the consequence of creeds,
Nor ever have I Sweden asked to follow.
I went to Rome to help the milder dawn,
When warring sects shall merge their strength for earth,
And fill the moats of feudal States with Heaven —
Sunlight's illusion on the cold-throned Alps,
Mass's illusion in smug churchmen's hearts,
Women's illusion in their sex-sick heads —
Heaven, not hell, makes earth yawn wide from man,
And draws its small portcullises of churches
Upward or down like selfish castellans.
My filial shame was Christ's triumphant day:
A white-horsed Amazon, the penitent
Rode like Alaric or the Vandal king
Through Rome: Herodias with her father's head.
Then French and Spanish parties played for me,
Like Pilate's Roman dicers. Up I gat
With my small suite and sought politest France.
Italians ruled it; Mazarin, step-monarch,
His nieces, queens. Ladies wore warriors' crowns.
None felt my sarcasm when the magdalen,
Ninon de l'Enclos, mistress of an abbe,
I singled out and wrote around her slime:
" Frondeurs unsinning! sling the first stone here! "
The woman is a plant, her flower early,
Her reproduction her biography.
My mother pined and died for her Gustavus;
His only child I was, to wear his sword;
His sister had a son who wooed me hard;
I felt the Vasa jealousy of partners
And fed my brain and let my bosom starve.
My mind had no companionships in Sweden:
I sent abroad for scholars. Soon contempt
Of amorous thought withered my wedding wreath.
Our Lutherans were lusty, women forward;
Magnus, my fancy, wedded Charles's sister;
I promised Charles my crown without my hand
And formed the Order of the Amaranth,
The monks and nuns of Learning; one stood fast.
My frame grew steel, my mind became all man:
Monaldeschi trifled with an Amazon.
But I have proved the sexes have reversion —
And from Minerva's brain Mars can be born:
The King I chose has rounded Sweden's bounds
And beaten Poland. Scania is a fief
Of the Roman empire and Christina ends
Semiramis, like Margaret of the North.
The Woman left in me was my Conversion:
I tired of sermons but to woo my soul
Was an amour, sweet, timorous, and sighful,
Like the annunciation of the Virgin.
Spain, Portugal, the Pope, sent purseuivants
Who talked in liquid tongues, which I had learned
Without a master, of supernal love.
Long I coquetted with those Jesuits,
Resisted, threw them off, returned and yielded,
And never told the soft solicitation:
One woman kept a secret; it was pure.
To learn our fate we seek the fortune teller
Who promises it all: Rome outbid Luther.
We know not much; on them who swear they know
We lay our doubts: Rome has one Swede; she, Rome.
Rome's civil law and Koster's printed Bible,
Fermented in rude States; the age is loosed:
High intellects are readjusting knowledge.
The Northern Schools Kepler and Tycho Brahe
Have graduated to revise the lights
And Earth's circumferential to her Sun.
Rome has reformed; Christine reform to Rome,
To be Hypatia to the fading Gods.
The year my father fell in Lutzen fight
Old Galileu did adjure the truth
In Rome. No more will Rome science suppress.
Intolerance will take its stand in France
And from this old chateau, who knows, but Louis
Will shame his grandsire Henry more than I
Gustave Adolphus? Priest-kings are the worst.
I will against intolerance be Protestant
In Rome itself. The earth awakes from sleep
By revolution. France may turn too swift.
Who's yonder? Henriette of England comes;
Cromwell supplies the head of her and Charles.
Von Wallenstein took counsel of the stars
But fell like Monaldeschi, Captain-slashed.
The forest here has a Black Huntsman in it,
King Henry's apparition ere he died;
There will I ride alone, who ne'er saw ghost.
How indolently safe to trust one's priest?
Nature! I sighed thee that I had no babe!
There was one, Little Sweden, that I swaddled
In the new world; its mart was named for me.
The Dutch have taken it and changed the name;
In neither Sweden have I left a chick.
Error preserves us often, like misfortune.
The wayward child is still the best beloved.
I took my crown off for sweet independence.
Fashion I like not; business wore me out.
I will be humble when I live in Rome.
Meantime these French who bought my father's death
Shall keep me for two years at their expense!
I will resume my study — true devotion;
My books — the holy graves of saints; myself —
Portent of learning in the female plant.
As Mazarin collects his books for France,
I will become Rome's vestal bibliophile.
Cumaean sibyl for new oracles
The riddle of the woman who shall bruise
The serpent's head, bear children and be ruled
By her desire of husband, therein lies.
As in the Sibyl's books Christ was acrostic.
The negative of man is his child-bearer.
The serpent's head is this small female head.
Which coils on man's and has no separate growth;
The quickening contact mounts not to her reason.
Diana's priestesses had each one breast;
One was too many for symmetric art
And Sappho's lyre was lovesick. Woman grew
Half on, with single breast, and Greece was dam
To the strong brood of woman-minded thoughts,
In the harmonious temples of her head;
That, draggled through the Arab caliph's lusts,
Glanced off from Spain and lodged in Italy,
And on the barren rock of Peter grew
The lillied Renaissance. Still negative
Is woman, led by France and fashion down
Below the stature of her column's head:
Man grows a tree and woman grows a vine
And chokes the tree of Knowledge. Earth's o'er-brooded!
All faiths that are have superstitious ends,
Earth has no end in its continual sphere
Material truths one day will be a faith,
When woman comprehends and holds the ground
That man has won. The vast negation waits.
When I was at Nykoping, Oxenstiern —
A greater mind than Richelieu's, but in Sweden —
Gave me a dog called Fides, saying " Chris.,
Thou learn's too much from books; learn from this setter! "
We had an echo on the water there;
My dog's bark barked at him and the first night
He barked all night at Echo. The next night
Fides kept all awake. My aunt cried " Kill him! "
" 'Tis his devotion, " said my uncle John,
" He worships at the unaccountable. "
How ghostly seem we to ourselves in mirrors
At dusk, as they reflect our coming shade!
In dusk I ferried Fides tow'rd his Echo.
I spoke myself one name for the last time;
" Magnus. "
Art listening, priest?
(He is asleep.
The death he has seen done this hour prostrates him.)
The rest I'll tell to Echo, whispering here,
In the long halls where Henry kissed Diana
In Rondelet's fireplace, where kiss quenched flame.
In her Initial, Henry is the cipher.
She subdued him when Dauphin, nineteen years
Her junior. But she married at thirteen;
Widowed at thirty-two: it is my age!
She was re-born and turned a man in love.
Once in an age old woman has her reighn.
(Would I had tilted with Montgomery!)
The renaissance at Fountainebleau was Love.
Mary of Scots was here a bride and Philip
Of Spain did wed his murdered son's affianced;
Francis was satyr to his market girls;
Navarre in love-war met his Ravaillac.
Kings get no more than peasants from the sex!
The furious love scenes painted by Italians
Are just effaced by Anne of Austria,
Lest Mazarin admire them more than her.
In this chateau, where art was stripped to Isis
A hundred years ago, they stand me off,
Who am an honest monk, a maiden queen.
When brother Guises in some such chateau
Were foully stabbed, the Valois line expired!
My traitor wore a corselet like a woman,
His sentence paralyzed his lizard tongue.
I'll whisper to this sleeping priest my secret —
God's drowsy ear, the old maid's deaf confessor.
'Twas play for Poland, which the Jesuits
Have made another Spain, and smothered knowledge,
Has been the silent secret of my soul!
Sweden is flanked by Denmark, our oppressor;
Poland and Russia are conjoined with it.
Jagellon's line concluded with a woman
Who wed my father's uncle, John of Vasa;
Sweden and Poland were their son's demesnes —
Sigismund. He would force the Poles' religion
Upon our Lutherans, who did depose him.
The Dissidents he persecutes in Poland,
Its Huguenots, who do solicit me
To be their Henry of Navarre and join
Against the Russians our united powers,
Else Russia will devour both Swedes and Poles.
I must be Catholic if Queen in Poland!
I set my cousin Charles upon my throne,
He in my secrets as my ardent lover,
To shatter Denmark and King Sigismund,
And stepped me down, a wondrous Catholic.
Learning had taught me silliness of churches:
Religions are the national costumes,
More silken Southward and more woollen North.
I could afford to humor them I vanquished,
They were not subtle to discern my play.
Like Fides, Echo from the farther side
Returned to this, as I to it went nearer
(The dog did reason it when he was hoarse).
Who shall chase Echoes from opposing shores?
What of Christine is altered by exchanging
The creed of Odin for the creed of Venus?
The toasted babes in Thirty Years of war
Called on the motherhood in my dry milk
To taste the sacrament that I had humbled,
As Jesus dipped with John. Not by the Cross
But by the Dove was writ the sign of Conquer!
Poland, Bohemia, Sweden, Hungary,
Beneath a woman's love, would wall the Tartar
And Bear, out of Midgarden's paradise;
I wished to be the tolerant queen of Poland!
Lest this might be, the Jesuits mine equerry
Hired — Monaldeschi — to snook over me.
I caught him with my letters, trapped him here,
And sent his ghost to Rome to give me awe!
Rome will sit squat. Her morals are Conversion.
Public Opinion, ever absolute,
In midnight tryanny as in the day,
Now has Christine beneath its microscope:
Poland, I fear, is frozen from my love!
The woman's reign in Eden was not long;
The curse of children was her balance wheel.
Sweden is lost to me; Poland affrighted;
Rome is uneasy with its roving convert:
I have no other home. Father, awake!
Absolve Rome's daughter from her passing sin!
Father, is he dead? Then I'll confess me:
His period is my pause where Aftertime
Will lay my book down and consider me.
You shall be my posterity and judge!
I had no child but Sweden and foreswore it;
Homeless by choice, I chose a homeless staff
From generosity; the man just slain
Monaldeschi, was nothing but a servant.
Marquis I made him like the Marquis Ancre,
King Louis' father slew. Italian like
He mixed in my concerns, my lonely state
Unpitying, set his wits to work to spoil
My independence; forged his comrade's hand
And traded in my livery like a traitor.
His plot he brought me: 'twas assassination;
Thinking a Queen ten years o'er Sweden's council
Could be so shallow. " Let me execute him! "
The jockey swore. The table's turned: he's dead.
His lesson is not lost on Latindom.
Let women twit! Christine was crowned a King.
Defence I scorn, whose court, like old King Lear's,
Is where I visit. Am I yet a nun?
Vasa's resentment certain as his justice
Wakes in his grandson's child. Father and son
I executed, ere I abdicated,
For prodding my resignment ere its time.
Absolute Queen I pass from throne to Pope,
No subject anywhere, my rent crown lands,
My confidence State secrets; treason, death!
She who of late by armies executed,
Visited kings with thunders, dyeing rivers
Blood red, was gloriously commended;
Heretic then she was, but worth conversion.
This day I sentenced one — but one — all shrived,
Who articled with me, and mutinied.
What did my Judas sell? That's perished with him:
I trapped him ere he bit. Was he my lover?
Cowards will say so for two hundred years.
Eve had it said of her, all nature's mother.
Listen, thou priest! 'Twas Knowledge bit us both.
Knowledge has bit thy church. At Westphalia
I forced to peace the Thirty Years of war,
And Toleration was my crown. Therefore
I took the cross in Lenity's crusade,
To minimize the consequence of creeds,
Nor ever have I Sweden asked to follow.
I went to Rome to help the milder dawn,
When warring sects shall merge their strength for earth,
And fill the moats of feudal States with Heaven —
Sunlight's illusion on the cold-throned Alps,
Mass's illusion in smug churchmen's hearts,
Women's illusion in their sex-sick heads —
Heaven, not hell, makes earth yawn wide from man,
And draws its small portcullises of churches
Upward or down like selfish castellans.
My filial shame was Christ's triumphant day:
A white-horsed Amazon, the penitent
Rode like Alaric or the Vandal king
Through Rome: Herodias with her father's head.
Then French and Spanish parties played for me,
Like Pilate's Roman dicers. Up I gat
With my small suite and sought politest France.
Italians ruled it; Mazarin, step-monarch,
His nieces, queens. Ladies wore warriors' crowns.
None felt my sarcasm when the magdalen,
Ninon de l'Enclos, mistress of an abbe,
I singled out and wrote around her slime:
" Frondeurs unsinning! sling the first stone here! "
The woman is a plant, her flower early,
Her reproduction her biography.
My mother pined and died for her Gustavus;
His only child I was, to wear his sword;
His sister had a son who wooed me hard;
I felt the Vasa jealousy of partners
And fed my brain and let my bosom starve.
My mind had no companionships in Sweden:
I sent abroad for scholars. Soon contempt
Of amorous thought withered my wedding wreath.
Our Lutherans were lusty, women forward;
Magnus, my fancy, wedded Charles's sister;
I promised Charles my crown without my hand
And formed the Order of the Amaranth,
The monks and nuns of Learning; one stood fast.
My frame grew steel, my mind became all man:
Monaldeschi trifled with an Amazon.
But I have proved the sexes have reversion —
And from Minerva's brain Mars can be born:
The King I chose has rounded Sweden's bounds
And beaten Poland. Scania is a fief
Of the Roman empire and Christina ends
Semiramis, like Margaret of the North.
The Woman left in me was my Conversion:
I tired of sermons but to woo my soul
Was an amour, sweet, timorous, and sighful,
Like the annunciation of the Virgin.
Spain, Portugal, the Pope, sent purseuivants
Who talked in liquid tongues, which I had learned
Without a master, of supernal love.
Long I coquetted with those Jesuits,
Resisted, threw them off, returned and yielded,
And never told the soft solicitation:
One woman kept a secret; it was pure.
To learn our fate we seek the fortune teller
Who promises it all: Rome outbid Luther.
We know not much; on them who swear they know
We lay our doubts: Rome has one Swede; she, Rome.
Rome's civil law and Koster's printed Bible,
Fermented in rude States; the age is loosed:
High intellects are readjusting knowledge.
The Northern Schools Kepler and Tycho Brahe
Have graduated to revise the lights
And Earth's circumferential to her Sun.
Rome has reformed; Christine reform to Rome,
To be Hypatia to the fading Gods.
The year my father fell in Lutzen fight
Old Galileu did adjure the truth
In Rome. No more will Rome science suppress.
Intolerance will take its stand in France
And from this old chateau, who knows, but Louis
Will shame his grandsire Henry more than I
Gustave Adolphus? Priest-kings are the worst.
I will against intolerance be Protestant
In Rome itself. The earth awakes from sleep
By revolution. France may turn too swift.
Who's yonder? Henriette of England comes;
Cromwell supplies the head of her and Charles.
Von Wallenstein took counsel of the stars
But fell like Monaldeschi, Captain-slashed.
The forest here has a Black Huntsman in it,
King Henry's apparition ere he died;
There will I ride alone, who ne'er saw ghost.
How indolently safe to trust one's priest?
Nature! I sighed thee that I had no babe!
There was one, Little Sweden, that I swaddled
In the new world; its mart was named for me.
The Dutch have taken it and changed the name;
In neither Sweden have I left a chick.
Error preserves us often, like misfortune.
The wayward child is still the best beloved.
I took my crown off for sweet independence.
Fashion I like not; business wore me out.
I will be humble when I live in Rome.
Meantime these French who bought my father's death
Shall keep me for two years at their expense!
I will resume my study — true devotion;
My books — the holy graves of saints; myself —
Portent of learning in the female plant.
As Mazarin collects his books for France,
I will become Rome's vestal bibliophile.
Cumaean sibyl for new oracles
The riddle of the woman who shall bruise
The serpent's head, bear children and be ruled
By her desire of husband, therein lies.
As in the Sibyl's books Christ was acrostic.
The negative of man is his child-bearer.
The serpent's head is this small female head.
Which coils on man's and has no separate growth;
The quickening contact mounts not to her reason.
Diana's priestesses had each one breast;
One was too many for symmetric art
And Sappho's lyre was lovesick. Woman grew
Half on, with single breast, and Greece was dam
To the strong brood of woman-minded thoughts,
In the harmonious temples of her head;
That, draggled through the Arab caliph's lusts,
Glanced off from Spain and lodged in Italy,
And on the barren rock of Peter grew
The lillied Renaissance. Still negative
Is woman, led by France and fashion down
Below the stature of her column's head:
Man grows a tree and woman grows a vine
And chokes the tree of Knowledge. Earth's o'er-brooded!
All faiths that are have superstitious ends,
Earth has no end in its continual sphere
Material truths one day will be a faith,
When woman comprehends and holds the ground
That man has won. The vast negation waits.
When I was at Nykoping, Oxenstiern —
A greater mind than Richelieu's, but in Sweden —
Gave me a dog called Fides, saying " Chris.,
Thou learn's too much from books; learn from this setter! "
We had an echo on the water there;
My dog's bark barked at him and the first night
He barked all night at Echo. The next night
Fides kept all awake. My aunt cried " Kill him! "
" 'Tis his devotion, " said my uncle John,
" He worships at the unaccountable. "
How ghostly seem we to ourselves in mirrors
At dusk, as they reflect our coming shade!
In dusk I ferried Fides tow'rd his Echo.
I spoke myself one name for the last time;
" Magnus. "
Art listening, priest?
(He is asleep.
The death he has seen done this hour prostrates him.)
The rest I'll tell to Echo, whispering here,
In the long halls where Henry kissed Diana
In Rondelet's fireplace, where kiss quenched flame.
In her Initial, Henry is the cipher.
She subdued him when Dauphin, nineteen years
Her junior. But she married at thirteen;
Widowed at thirty-two: it is my age!
She was re-born and turned a man in love.
Once in an age old woman has her reighn.
(Would I had tilted with Montgomery!)
The renaissance at Fountainebleau was Love.
Mary of Scots was here a bride and Philip
Of Spain did wed his murdered son's affianced;
Francis was satyr to his market girls;
Navarre in love-war met his Ravaillac.
Kings get no more than peasants from the sex!
The furious love scenes painted by Italians
Are just effaced by Anne of Austria,
Lest Mazarin admire them more than her.
In this chateau, where art was stripped to Isis
A hundred years ago, they stand me off,
Who am an honest monk, a maiden queen.
When brother Guises in some such chateau
Were foully stabbed, the Valois line expired!
My traitor wore a corselet like a woman,
His sentence paralyzed his lizard tongue.
I'll whisper to this sleeping priest my secret —
God's drowsy ear, the old maid's deaf confessor.
'Twas play for Poland, which the Jesuits
Have made another Spain, and smothered knowledge,
Has been the silent secret of my soul!
Sweden is flanked by Denmark, our oppressor;
Poland and Russia are conjoined with it.
Jagellon's line concluded with a woman
Who wed my father's uncle, John of Vasa;
Sweden and Poland were their son's demesnes —
Sigismund. He would force the Poles' religion
Upon our Lutherans, who did depose him.
The Dissidents he persecutes in Poland,
Its Huguenots, who do solicit me
To be their Henry of Navarre and join
Against the Russians our united powers,
Else Russia will devour both Swedes and Poles.
I must be Catholic if Queen in Poland!
I set my cousin Charles upon my throne,
He in my secrets as my ardent lover,
To shatter Denmark and King Sigismund,
And stepped me down, a wondrous Catholic.
Learning had taught me silliness of churches:
Religions are the national costumes,
More silken Southward and more woollen North.
I could afford to humor them I vanquished,
They were not subtle to discern my play.
Like Fides, Echo from the farther side
Returned to this, as I to it went nearer
(The dog did reason it when he was hoarse).
Who shall chase Echoes from opposing shores?
What of Christine is altered by exchanging
The creed of Odin for the creed of Venus?
The toasted babes in Thirty Years of war
Called on the motherhood in my dry milk
To taste the sacrament that I had humbled,
As Jesus dipped with John. Not by the Cross
But by the Dove was writ the sign of Conquer!
Poland, Bohemia, Sweden, Hungary,
Beneath a woman's love, would wall the Tartar
And Bear, out of Midgarden's paradise;
I wished to be the tolerant queen of Poland!
Lest this might be, the Jesuits mine equerry
Hired — Monaldeschi — to snook over me.
I caught him with my letters, trapped him here,
And sent his ghost to Rome to give me awe!
Rome will sit squat. Her morals are Conversion.
Public Opinion, ever absolute,
In midnight tryanny as in the day,
Now has Christine beneath its microscope:
Poland, I fear, is frozen from my love!
The woman's reign in Eden was not long;
The curse of children was her balance wheel.
Sweden is lost to me; Poland affrighted;
Rome is uneasy with its roving convert:
I have no other home. Father, awake!
Absolve Rome's daughter from her passing sin!
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