Incident in a Rose Garden | Historical Context
The time period of “Incident in a Rose Garden” isn’t explicit, though its themes, structure, and diction suggest the Middle Ages. Justice’s poem evokes the idea of danse macabre, or the dance of death, a notion that grew out of Western Europe’s response to the bubonic plague, which killed millions of people beginning in the fourteenth century. In paintings and poems, the allegorical concept of danse macabre depicted a procession of people from all walks of life, both living and dead. One of the earliest representations of the dance of death is in a series of paintings...
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