SOURCE: "Divine and Royal Art: History as Hand-Formed Artwork in Dryden's Threnodia Augustalis (1685)," in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 25, No. 4, Fall 1989, pp. 398-424.

In the following brief excerpt, Gardiner reflects on the "political context" of Threnodia Augustalis, observing that Dryden constructs the poem to reassure the English public that far from being sinister, the transfer of power from the dying Charles II to his brother James was both legitimate and divine.

Although many poets wrote elegies on the occasion of Charles II's death and a number of them added congratulatory poems to the new king, none managed to mourn Charles and welcome James in such a seamless design as John Dryden did in Threnodia Augustalis. In this poem Dryden meditates on the nature of history, showing it as an artwork wrought both by a wise king and by Providence….

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Dryden began writing his elegy in February 1685, when the...