Editorial note
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety
of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding
basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation
highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word
forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar
when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in”
to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries,
the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate
engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings
in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure
material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When
we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”);
other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard
for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.
Headnote
It is a mistake to want to know your fate, Pulter argues here. Once you do, you’ll
want to change it, and you can’t; a destiny foreknown is not forestalled. Her first
exhibit is a fellow poet, whose attempt to outwit the prediction that he’d die from
something falling from above only brings about such a death: he goes to an open field,
where a plummeting turtle smashes in his skull. This seemingly unexpected death was,
of course, expected, indeed predicted—as are all deaths, or as they should be, this
memento mori poem reminds us: while each of us will die, we cannot and should not inquire about
the details, Pulter opines. Yet she herself is awfully tempted, if we can judge by
how urgently (in the poem’s late-breaking, self-reflective turn) she implores that
she should “never know [her] destiny,” and “not here anticipate [her] grave.” To do
so, she frets, is to be buried alive: a paradoxical state reflecting a certain ambivalence,
in this poem as in others, toward life and death on (and in) earth, and perhaps what
follows too. Her projected solution is devotion to God’s purpose, which might reframe
consciousness of mortality.
Line number 1
Gloss note
Prolific Greek playwright who was told by an oracle that he would die by something
from the heavens. According to legend, this prophecy was realized when he was killed
by a turtle shell dropped by an eagle.
Line number 4
Gloss note
glittering head. Aeschylus is bald (and thus a target for the eagle).
Line number 5
Gloss note
Aeschylus is devoted to “Erycine,” a name for Venus, the goddess of love, derived
from her temple on Mount Eryx. In humoral medicine, it was thought that “one major
way to induce coldness, and thus baldness, was too much sexual activity” (Anu Korhonen, “Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern
England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 [2010], pp. 371-91 at p. 380).
Line number 6
Gloss note
It is a pity
Line number 6
Gloss note
scarred, branded, or disgraced. Baldness is here construed as a stigma.
Line number 8
Gloss note
shell
Line number 15
Gloss note
See 2 Kings: 20:1-6, which tells of how Hezekiah wept and prayed when the prophet
Isaiah told him of Hezekiah’s impending death; in response, God extended his life
by fifteen years.
Line number 17
Gloss note
Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel. She was a worshipper of Baal caught
in religious wars; Elijah’s prophecy, that dogs would eat her corpse, came true.
Line number 19
Gloss note
Domitian was a Roman emperor who failed to disprove one of Ascletarion’s prophecies.
He also tried unsuccessfully to evade a soothsayer’s prediction of his own death.
Line number 21
Gloss note
A soothsayer foretold the death of Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who was stabbed to
death on the “Ides” (or fifteenth day) of March.
Line number 24
Gloss note
As Agrippina had been foretold by an astrologer, Roman emperor Nero killed his mother
and passionately viewed (“dissected”) each part of her corpse.
Line number 28
Gloss note
the material from which life derives to and to which it will return; see Genesis 3:19:
“for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Line number 28
Gloss note
soft feathers
Line number 33
Gloss note
The speaker reads her own anticipation of the grave (see the previous line), through
worrying or wondering about her fate, as a form of living death.
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