This is the first poem in Pulter’s emblem series titled “The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”. Comprised of fifty-three emblems, this poetic project constitutes a unique contribution to the tradition of English emblem poems, as Pulter revises the traditional tripartite format of the emblem, consisting of inscriptio (a motto), pictura (visual image), and subscriptio (a short epigrammatic verse). Pulter removes the visual image (pictura) to form what are known as “naked” emblems, in doing so placing the emphasis on the visual qualities of her writing (Alice Eardley, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda / Lady Hester Pulter [Toronto; Iter and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014], 28). By utilising the didactic affordances of the emblem genre, Pulter continues to address the personal and political concerns of her earlier occasional and devotional lyrics, attending to her experiences as a woman, mother, and royalist during the 1650s, in which the poems are believed to have been written.
Pulter begins her emblem collection here by asserting a political persona in contrast with the biblical Nimrod, the infamous conspirator behind the construction of the Tower of Babel. Nimrod’s ambitious project resulted in the division of language, God’s punishment for the vain aspirations which possessed Nimrod to seek beyond the “supercelestial bowers” of Heaven (line 8). Likening this to the gigantomachy (struggle between the gods and giants) detailed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the earthly giants similarly sought a heavenly position, Pulter compares the ambition of the giants and Nimrod. She invokes the suggestion of Ovid’s English translator, George Sandys, that in each story, their ambition results merely in confusion, “one [being] confounded with lighting, and the other by the confusion of languages” (George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Englished [New York: Garland, 1976], 27).
Pulter’s first emblem embodies the strongly visual evocations of “naked” emblems, while its account of vain impious ambition suggests the politicised role the collection will proceed to take in its criticism of the current political landscape in England, as the “usurping Nimrods” (line 18) here pertain to the republican parliamentarians (Eardley 28). Pulter elicits an image of humble godly steps to contrast with the Tower of Babel’s “huge fabric” (line 2), imparting to her readers that, by following in God’s footsteps – namely the steps of virtue that are then presented in Pulter’s second emblem – one can be “preserve[d]” from this ambitious folly (lines 2, 21). This message, confirmed in the final two couplets via Pulter’s own turn inward to a meditational prayer, encompasses the direction her following fifty-two emblems will take, as Pulter explores her own relationship to God in relation to the political and personal contexts emerging out of the Civil War. Thus, this emblem establishes her poetic devotion as a political response to the events of the 1650s, as she establishes a moral superiority throughout the collection as a model for her readers to follow.
— Millie Godfery and Sarah C. E. Ross