ABSTRACT
A meditation on the fleeting nature of all worldly things, on the death of Rome in ancient Britain, the poem The Ruines of Time culminates as a funeral monument to Philip Sidney. Sidney's death clinches the series of ruins such that the antiquities of Rome become the antiquities of Britain, and the death that enables the creation of the new poetry. This poem also functions as Edmund Spenser's own funeral monument, what he will leave in memory of himself and his contribution to new life of English poetry, a life that is built on ruins and death. Spenser opens the poem in unmistakable allusion to Joachim Du Bellay's Songe, transporting the ruins of Rome to Britain. Spenser's poem announces that modern Britain must recognize that it is built on this ruin and that it is effectively itself already a ruin, a vanity that will also flit and fall away and here is where work of the modern poet becomes important.
