This is one of several poems in Pulter’s manuscript articulating her soul’s desire
for divine love, and looking beyond the “sad shades” of earthly life to the promise
of its continuation “above”. For a close comparison, see see "Must I Thus Ever Interdicted
Be" (Poem 55), and see also ʺDear God, from Thy High Throne Look Down" (Poem 63).
These devotional lyrics are personal colloquies with God, and they are simple and
delicately rendered, of a kind likely to be broadly influenced by the plain style
of George Herbert. Herbert’s The Temple (1633) was widely read and widely imitated by women writers of devotional verse in the seventeenth
century. See extracts from Helen Wilcox, “Entering The Temple”, in Curations.
The Herbertian qualities of the poem are evident in its combination of apparent simplicity
with actual intricacy. It follows a consistent three-line stanza form with a shortened,
dimeter, third line, creating an emphasis that serves well the final “My God and king”.
These dimeter lines rhyme in pairs across stanzas. Pulter uses the same form (with
the slight variation of dimeter lines rhyming in threes across stanzas) in ʺDear God,
from Thy High Throne Look Down" (Poem 63); and a similar form is used in “Made When
My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low” (Poem 66). In the case of the lyric to hand, the consistent
rhyme and meter give a sense of the poem as a song, approximating the “celestial lays”
to which the speaker looks forward. These celestial songs are literally “unknown”
to her, and so the songs she sings on earth can only ever be poor approximations;
however, Pulter’s sense of continuity between her own devotional lyrics and these
heavenly lays is intimated in her poem “This Was Written in 1648”: “I’ll such lays
here begin, shall end above” (Poem 45, line 68).
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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