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 (1424-1425) formerly in the Cimetière des Innocents, a cemetery in Paris that was moved in the eighteenth century. These paintings depict a procession of living people from the church and state being led to their graves by corpses and skeletons. The living are arranged according to their...