At the heart of Poem 55 lies the chief mystery of Pulter’s lyrics: why was she “confined to this sad grove” (A Solitary Complaint [Poem 54], l.1) and perhaps unable to attend church for some period of time? The surrounding poems provide no clues. In Poem 54, Pulter refers to her confinement in terms so general that they may be meant to describe nothing less than the state of corporeal existence. Poem 56, a dialogue between two of Pulter’s daughters, mentions her only in the final line, where we hear that “she’s alone” (A Dialogue Between Two Sisters, Virgins Bewailing Their Solitary Life [Poem 56], l.54). Poem 57 teases the reader before declining to solve the mystery. After comparing her solitary confinement to the freedom and fellowship enjoyed by numerous animals, Pulter lists things that are not responsible for her confinement, then censors herself in a way that suggests some shame would follow if she revealed her secret: “But ’tis, O my sad soul—I’ll say no more. / To God alone my suff’rings I’ll deplore” (Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57], ll.99-100). The poem prepares for a revelation that never comes. Although we can’t be certain that it addresses the same biographical situation as these poems, Poem 55 suggests a possible explanation: Pulter may have faced corrective discipline from her local church. In early modern England, a national system of church courts still oversaw and regulated many aspects of daily life, punishing such transgressions as heresy, blasphemy, defamation, drunkenness, and sexual immorality. Those found guilty faced penalties ranging from admonition and penance to suspension (which prevented offenders from attending church) and excommunication (which meant separation from Christian society). Between 1646 and 1660, however, the church courts were formally abrogated, leaving individual churches to manage their own discipline. As Bernard Capp notes, exclusion from the sacraments “was now the strongest disciplinary sanction the clergy possessed, and many were determined to use it to best advantage” (England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660 [Oxford University Press, 2012], 124). Given her royalism and possible Laudian sympathies, Pulter may have clashed with the minister of her parish church, Thomas Gardiner, a Presbyterian, and that disagreement may have led Gardiner to censure her (on Pulter and Laudianism, see Elizabeth Clarke, “Women in Church and in Devotional Spaces,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers [Cambridge University Press, 2009], 115; and Alice Eardley, Introduction, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda [Iter and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014], 13-21).
Poem 55 offers evidence that Pulter was excluded from the sacraments and possibly prevented from attending church. She begins by asking if she must “ever” be “interdicted,” which in an ecclesiastical context usually means to be excluded from the services of the church. The second stanza suggests that the interdiction applies in particular to the sacraments: the “sacred pledges” of line 4 likely denote the Eucharistic bread and wine, and “ordinances” in line 6 refers to religious observances and ceremonies, including the sacraments. Stanza four’s contrast between the speaker and birds that move freely inside the church suggests that church attendance, too, may have been forbidden Pulter. But the poem leaves the mystery largely intact, raising more questions than it answers. Because there is no antecedent for “thus” (l.1), the poem’s opening lacks specificity (compare the similar first line of Poem 57, “Why must I thus forever be confined”). Who has interdicted her, how, and for how long? The interrogative mood continues in the second stanza, where the speaker seems to cast about for an explanation. Pulter’s poem here resembles one of its possible sources, Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of Psalm 84, which asks: “Ah! Why should I / From altars thine excluded lie?” (The Sidney Psalter, ed. Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, and Noel J. Kinnamon [Oxford University Press, 2009], 163). We never learn why.
The poem’s relative opacity about these matters leaves open an alternative possibility: Pulter, at odds with the style of worship being practiced in her parish church, may have chosen not to attend its services. In this case “interdicted” would refer not to an action taken against Pulter but to the general state of affairs in which her preferred liturgy, based on the Book of Common Prayer, had been abolished. “[T]hy sacred pledges” and “thine ordinances” would then refer to aspects of true worship believed by Pulter to be temporarily absent. Pulter wrote the poem at a time when many held strong feelings about what constituted a true church, denying legitimacy to churches they felt lacked the essential components of “thy blessed Word” truly preached and the sacraments properly administered. Pulter may have believed that, for her to be restored to “thy Church,” her church would have to restore Word and Sacrament in the forms she believed necessary.
Either way, probing the poem’s mysteries reveals a submerged tension between God and the church, an institution with the potential either to connect her to or to separate her from God. Throughout the poem, Pulter carefully avoids attributing agency to the church authorities who may have censured her, and she repeatedly bypasses their authority in order to address God directly. The second and third lines pointedly state that she will complain “to thee and only thee,” which invites us to ask to whom else she might complain. One obvious answer is the church, so the line carries a hint of defiance, a hint that is amplified if the questions of the second stanza are rhetorical. Whether we so hear them or not, the agency of the interdict has moved entirely to God by line 6, where “thus” is repeated, now firmly tied to God’s action of restraining his ordinances. Pulter continues to foreground God’s agency in the third stanza, where she implores his mercy to restore her to the church, and in the fifth stanza, where she prays his spirit to sustain her soul. But the agency of the church continues to haunt the poem as an unstated presence. Who or what keeps Pulter from what she loves in line 12? How will she “reattain” the “comforts” of the church in line 14? Why did she “part with them” (l.15) in the first place? By whom or what has her soul been “captivated” (l.16)?
The subtle tension between the church’s agency and authority and God’s again plays itself out in the poem’s second half at the affective level. The separation from the church that the speaker laments is amatory: “I—ay me!—am kept from what I love” (l.12). To be deprived of what she loves is to be deprived of its “comforts,” and the loss makes her “sad” (ll.13-14). Her loss of the church’s comforts is related to her loss of God, who is of course included in “what I love,” but it is not identical to it. In fact, the poet hasn’t entirely lost God, who appears in the poem as a spirit, as a saviour, and as a gracious judge who hears complaints and grants mercy—in other words, all three persons of the Trinity are present in the poem, and all appear to be present to Pulter. So why is a church’s interdict so concerning? Here the poem implicitly asks about the church’s role in mediating access to the divine—one of the central questions posed by the Protestant Reformation. Can God be known outside the church? Is loving the church the same as loving God?
As if to address such questions, the last two stanzas establish a hierarchy of comforts that places God emphatically both before and above the church. They do so in a way common in Pulter’s poems, through chronology. Three times are imagined and sequenced through a repeated temporal construction. The first time is now—the time of writing—when God’s spirit sustains the poet. This time will last “Until” (l.14) she reattains the comforts of the church. This second time (“Then” in line 15) will last “Until” (l.16) she is finally freed by death, which will initiate a third time—eternity (“Then” in line 17)—when she will sing God’s praises. Line 17’s distant echo of Line 1’s “ever” marks the superiority of this eternal time to the temporary phase of interdiction, and answers the first line’s question—in the negative. Finally, Pulter’s indication that even a soul in church remains “captivated” asserts emphatically that, whatever comforts the church may offer, they are inferior to those that will be revealed after death.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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