This poem draws on several key biblical uses of the “face”: in the Psalms, David wishes God’s face to be turned towards him (Psalm 27:9), in Genesis, the Holy Spirit moves upon the “face” of the seas as the world is created (Genesis 1:2), and that verb is picked up in lines 6-7 here. John Donne also played with similar imagery in “Good Friday 1613 Riding Westward,” though in his poem it is the believer who turns away his face from God (because travelling west on Easter day, and also because of his humility), until the poem’s final lines. As in The Hope [Poem 65], here Pulter embraces the idea of physical disintegration, suggesting that death of the body is rebirth of the soul. Pulter also incorporates the process of writing into the poem itself. In the second stanza the speaker writes her own “story” while also creating a devotional poem of praise: “I will hallelujahs sing.” The humility of Pulter’s account of her own writing echoes George Herbert’s. Her phrase “my eternal God and King” has biblical origins which Herbert also invokes when he defends plainness, albeit ingeniously, in “Jordan (1)”: Shepherds are honest people; let them sing;
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for prime;
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, my God, my King.
We might see the same mixture of humility and assertion in Pulter’s poem. When she modestly comments “here I pass my story,” pass means “tell” or “relate” but it could also mean “surpass,” suggesting that Pulter’s speaker lives through (and beyond) her words.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall