The Circle [3]

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

In the third of four poems by the same name, Pulter cites the earth’s eternal circling as a model for those who resist death. Such resistance is castigated as “impatiency”; since the word derives from the Latin passio, or suffering, refusing death is refusing suffering, and thus it is a kind of impatience (or anti-patience). In another condensed formulation that may at first be hard to parse, Pulter advises attention to things that “revolve,” which seem at first—not least through internal rhyme—to contrast with the addressee, who must “dissolve.” But the phrase “it is no more” signals not that a person’s dissolution or death is their destruction (that they are no more); rather, it suggests that death is nothing but another revolution, a mere turn of the circle. The same issue is summed up in Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night47: “revolution / Is the preserving of the universe / From dissolution.” Pulter’s turn to her most usual poetic form, the couplet, is delayed in Poem 25 by an initial triplet; by prolonging the first rhyme, it seems to command the extraordinary patience that the poem recommends.

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To be unwilling or afraid to die
In the whole world’s society
Is a sign of huge impatiency.
That many things revolve1
, thou may’st explore2
;
And when thou dost dissolve3
, it is no more.
For so this earthly transitory4
 mound
In an eternal motion still runs round.