The Marmottane
(Emblem 24)

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

Rodents are not the most obvious emblem of married love; one type of rat, however, did exhibit equity between the sexes, as Pulter learned when she read her Pliny, a classical natural historian whose account of the exotic Rat of Pontus she draws on here. The poem offers a heartfelt but still humorous challenge to the ne’er-do-well husbands targeted by its final line, since the gap invoked between rattish harmony and human discord must invite embarrassed laughter: if rats can manage, why can’t we? But the cozy harvest-home portrait of the animals’ den finds no parallel symbiosis in the human realm, where the choice made by “most” husbands is between roaming public houses of ill-repute (leaving a pleasureless, care-filled domesticity to their wives) and infesting private homes with their tyranny. As well as contrasting the human and non-human—not to our advantage—the poem quietly critiques the greater pleasures of the hard-working rural rats with “wealthy” couples who fail to appropriately enjoy their wealth, including each other.

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The marmottane’s1
 for unity’s renowned,
And for conjugal love they may be crowned.
That you may see no wisdom they do lack:
They lie alternately upon their back;
T’other2
 with grass and herbs doth load him well;
Then by the tail she draws him to their cell.
There, neat and warm, they join to build their nest,
In which, all winter, they do sit and feast
With corn and fruits by them laid up in store,
For till next summer comes they’ll need no more.
Surely they live, by far, more happy lives
Than many wealthy husbands and their wives!
Some noble minds there be, I know, will share
Their pleasure with their wives, as well as care;
But most to taverns—or to worse—will roam,
Or else they’ll always tyrannize3
 at home.
If you should ask me which of these is worse,
Trust me, I know not: either is a curse.
If such do read these lines, to them I say:
The Rat of Pontus’s lovinger4
 than they.