Somnus, Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind?

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Somnus, Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind?

Poem #120

Original Source

Hester Pulter, Poems breathed forth by the nobel Hadassas, University of Leeds Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32

Versions

  • Facsimile of manuscript: Photographs provided by University of Leeds, Brotherton Collection

  • Transcription of manuscript: By Leah Knight and Wendy Wall.
  • Elemental edition: By Leah Knight and Wendy Wall.
  • Amplified edition: By Megan Heffernan.

How to cite these versions

Conventions for these editions

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making

  • Created by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
  • Encoded by Katherine Poland, Matthew Taylor, Elizabeth Chou, and Emily Andrey, Northwestern University
  • Website designed by Sergei Kalugin, Northwestern University
  • IT project consultation by Josh Honn, Northwestern University
  • Project sponsored by Northwestern University, Brock University, and University of Leeds
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X (Close panel)Notes: Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Line number 1

 Physical note

on loose sheet, in folder associated with manuscript; hand appears same as in “The Weepeinge Wishe”
Line number 6

 Physical note

single letter, possibly “d,” blotted on bottom half
Line number 8

 Physical note

blotted only on top half
Line number 10

 Physical note

directly over “did”
Line number 12

 Physical note

second “o” blotted on right half
Line number 14

 Physical note

“+” in left margin
Line number 16

 Physical note

directly over “change”
Line number 17

 Physical note

blot immediately after may obscure final “s”
Line number 18

 Physical note

“bad” may have read “bid” originally, or reverse; “blu” appears written over “buw”
Line number 20

 Physical note

“ſea \” written directly atop “great”
Line number 21

 Physical note

“t” appears to correct earlier “o”
Line number 25

 Physical note

final part of “h” appears added to earlier “l,” crowded between surrounding letters
Line number 25

 Physical note

“a” appears to correct earlier “ei”
Line number 30

 Physical note

twice struck-through
Line number 33

 Physical note

diagonally struck-through text, possibly “ff[?]”
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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Transcription
[Untitled]
Somnus, Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind?
Somnus Why Art Thou Still To Me Unkind
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still To Me Unkind” is unfinished and contains revisions, likely in Pulter’s hand, I have opted to include scored out and corrected words. To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Does an alternative to my punctuation open up different interpretive possibilities? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This fragment of a poem, in what is probably Pulter’s hand, appears on a loose sheet in a folder associated with the bound volume in which her other poems are found. Although a complete copy might someday be found, Pulter appears not to have finished this experimental dream vision about a relatively recent event: the 1667 battle, known as the Raid on the Medway, which ended in the destruction by the Dutch navy of the fort and shipyard at Sheerness, on England’s east coast. Part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, this was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by the British navy, which saw many warships destroyed or captured and the hasty arrangement by Charles II of an unfavorable treaty. The few extant verses of what promises an epic treatment of these events are framed by the speaker’s recurrent nightmare visions which mingle her distress with an incongruous perception of Sheerness remaining “unconquered” despite the “purple gore” that sprinkles the sea. The speaker’s horrified amazement joins that of the powerful and resplendent water gods and goddesses, mustering (too late, it must be said) as British reinforcements under Saturn’s command. Neptune, Triton, Nereus, Doris: the speaker, perched on a rock above the fray, witnesses a catalogue of mythic powerhouses whom she has imaginatively installed into current political events. What dreamy counterfactual scenario might have ensued, if the poem continued past its opening catalogue and into the martial action one might expect to follow? We will only know if the poem’s continuation one day comes to light.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Written on a loose sheet of paper, probably in Pulter’s own hand, these 41 lines recast recent politics as classical mythology.
Gloss Note
On Hester Pulter’s hand, see Alice Eardley’s conclusion in Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 2014), 182, note 838.
1 Possibly an unfinished narrative or epic, the poem refers to a battle in the second Anglo-Dutch war that took place in 1667 in the town of Sheerness, on the Isle of Stepney in Kent. Dutch forces captured the town, destroying fortifications, then sailed up the river Medway and part way up the Thames estuary to burn several British ships. The embarrassing defeat for the British is depicted somewhat ambiguously in “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind.” Narrated by an insomniac, the poem recounts a scene in which the sleepless speaker perches on a rock above Sheerness, where she witnesses the tears of the inconsolable Thames. Even though the town has been the site of one notable loss in battle, it remains “unconquered” in the war. “Unconquered Sheere” may mean something like “brave” or “valiant” Sheerness, whatever losses the town has suffered, or it may be one of the rough patches that would have been revised if this work had been completed.
While “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” remains unfinished, the opening recalls Pulter’s tactics elsewhere. Like The Pismire [Poem 35] and This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John [Poem 45], this poem begins with a personal distress that first manifests as bodily suffering, then goes on to liberate the speaker’s mind to wander freely in contemplation of the scene that confronts her. “Somnus” provides two seemingly related ways to understand the experience of the watchful insomniac: first, through contemporary political turmoil, and, second, through the mythological motifs that might ultimately transform or lend a cosmic significance to the British defeat. The powers of classical deities are relocated to the English coast as the “trembling bosom” of the sea summons the nautical forces of mythology: sea gods, goddesses, minor nymphs, and even helpful dolphins answer the trumpet call and begin to flow toward Sheerness. Neptune “gazes” upon the same “bloody billows” as the speaker, and we are left to suspect that it is partly her own distress that conjures this epic force.
We can’t know whether Pulter is marshaling the gods to mount a counterattack against the Dutch or to join a mourning procession, but the existing portion of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” suggests that she may have been exploring a reading based on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Early in Book 3, Britomart sits on a rocky shore, watching “a while the surges hore, / That gainst the craggy clifts did loudly rore.”
Gloss Note
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Toshiyuki Suzuki, and Hiroshi Yamashita, 2nd edition, Longman Annotated Poets (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3.4.7.5-6.
2 An emblem of chastity, Britomart externalizes her erotic suffering in an extended complaint about the “Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,” and it is possible that this scene of reading the seascape offered Pulter an allegorical text through which she could write her own political distress (3.4.8.1). The geography specific to the Sheerness battle also appears at the end of Book 4 of The Faerie Queene, when the narrative thread begun in Britomart’s reading of the sea is brought to a partial resolution by the marriage of the Medway and Thames rivers. Spenser depicts a host of sea gods flowing in to celebrate:
It fortun’d then, a solemne feast was there
To all the Sea-gods and their fruitfull seede,
In honour of the spousalls, which then were
Betwixt the Medway and the Thames agreed. (4.11.8.1-4)
What follows is an epic catalog of the aquatic deities who travel across the globe, from “great Neptune with his threeforkt mace, / That rules the Seas, and makes them rise or fall” to the lesser local nymphs and even the mighty rivers of the Nile and the Amazon (4.11.11.1-2). Like Pulter’s unfinished poem, Spenser’s celebration of England’s fertile estuary overflows its boundaries and remains open-ended. Book 4, Canto 12 of The Faerie Queene opens with Spenser responding to the aquatic marriage festivities with a lament for the futility of his own poetic labor: “O what an endlesse worke haue I in hand, / To count the seas abundant progeny” (4.12.1.1-2).
Whether Pulter was equally stymied by the scope of her task is impossible to say, because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” is interrupted well before we learn what the gods had planned at the site of Sheerness’s carnage. This truncated scene invites us to place Pulter’s poetic fragment alongside the work of poets including Spenser and Chaucer whose ambitious plans never achieved fruition. While this Amplified Edition attends to the unfinished state of the poem by preserving revisions that offer evidence of Pulter’s writing practice, it resists offering speculations or conclusions about where those revisions might be heading. In this sense, the trailing off of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” functions, as Catherine Nicholson observes of Spenser’s unfinished Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, “almost as a gloss on the strange unraveling of the work to which they belong.”
Gloss Note
Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and The Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 244.
3
My edition of the poem attempts to record what remains on the page in order to give a sense of one moment in an active process of poetic composition. In words that were scored out and replaced, we can watch Pulter experiment with word choice and verb tense as she transformed this contemporary episode in international politics into an allegorical and classicizing dream narrative. She twice included marginal markers signaling the entrance of named sea deities, as she does with flowers in her The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. The final lines of the fragment are rougher, making the relation between clauses particularly mobile, and it is difficult to determine definitively how to punctuate the passages about Doris and her rich jewels. Perhaps the best way to end this edition is with a question: in this unfinished poem, should the last line be closed with a full stop—a final period—or should it remain without any punctuation as a sign of the instant in which Pulter lifted her pen and left her work open for us to receive?


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
Physical Note
on loose sheet, in folder associated with manuscript; hand appears same as in “The Weepeinge Wishe”
ſomnus why art thou ſtill to mee unkinde?
Gloss Note
Roman god of sleep
Somnus, why art thou still to me unkind?
Gloss Note
the god of sleep.
Somnus why art thou still to me unkind?
2
Why doe all els ſuch comfort finde
Why do all else such comfort find
Why do all else such comfort find
3
In thy imbrace? but I and only I
In thy embrace? But I, and only I,
In thy embrace? But I and only I
4
Allternately (aye mee) doe live and die
Alternately (ay me) do
Gloss Note
wake and sleep; sleep was commonly referred to as the image of death; for instance, John Donne calls rest and sleep Death’s “pictures” (“Death Be Not Proud,” l. 5).
live and die.
Critical Note
alternating between sleep and waking; a description of how agonizing fitful sleep can be. The speaker’s stagnant suffering is expressed sonically in the repetition of “I and only I” and then, half a line later, “ay me.” The original spelling, “aye mee,” is ambiguous. “Aye” might mean “yes,” or it might be a cry of pain now colloquially spelled “ay.”
Alternately (ay me) do live and die?
5
Thy fellow Morphius too doth ſhew his ſpite
Thy fellow
Gloss Note
son of Somnus and Roman god of dreams
Morpheus too doth show his spite
Thy fellow
Gloss Note
the god of dreams, companion of Somnus
Morpheus too doth show his spite,
6
When from his Horney gate
Physical Note
single letter, possibly “d,” blotted on bottom half
[?] hee doth affright
When from his
Gloss Note
The gates of horn and ivory is a literary image (originally from The Odyssey) distinguishing two kinds of dreams: those passing through the gate of horn are true, while those passing through the gate of ivory are deceptive. Many writers used the term “horny gate” to describe Morpheus’s dream invasions. See, for instance, Du Bartas His Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Josuah Sylvester (London, 1641), p. 249.
horny gate he doth affright
When from his
Gloss Note
classical allusion to the gates of horn, through which only true dreams may pass; false dreams were said to pass instead through the gates of ivory.
horny d gate he doth affright
7
My troubled ſoul, as hee did t’hother night
My troubled soul, as he did th’other night.
My troubled soul, as he did
Gloss Note
the other
t’other night.
8
Oh
Physical Note
blotted only on top half
y my ſad hart would itt might prove a dream
O my sad heart, would it might prove a dream!
Oh y my sad heart, would it might prove a dream:
9
In that uncounquerd sheere wher Thameses ſtreame
In that
Gloss Note
At Sheerness (on England’s eastern coast) the river Medway (mentioned in the next line) joins with the estuary of the Thames river; it is presumably called “unconquered” here in relation to the 1667 Dutch attack there in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, despite the fact that both contemporary and later accounts consider the battle there to have been a resounding defeat of the English navy.
unconquered Sheer, when Thames’s stream
In that
Gloss Note
Sheerness, a town on the Isle of Stepney in northeast Kent where the English navy was defeated in June 1667 during an attack in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The counterfactual “unconquered” description offers a few possible readings. Pulter may have been stopped mid-revision or she may have been thinking of the town as itself unconquered even if the navy suffered a defeat.
unconquered Sheere where Thames’s stream,
10
Joyened with faire Medwaye did,
Physical Note
directly over “did”
doth their tribute paye
Joined with fair Medway doth their
Gloss Note
an offering paid as a duty, here also alluding to the the fact that a “tributary” is a stream flowing into a river
tribute pay,
Joined with fair
Gloss Note
The river Medway meets the Thames at Sheerness, where Dutch fleets sailed up both rivers, attacked land fortifications, and captured several English ships.
Medwaydid doth their tribute pay.
11
Thar on a lofty rock mee thought I laye
There on a lofty rock me thought I lay;
There on a lofty rock me thought I lay,
12
Then on the tremblinge
Physical Note
second “o” blotted on right half
booſome of the deepe
Then, on the trembling bosom of the deep,
Then on the trembling boosom of the deepe
13
Huge floods of tears poore Thames did weepe
Huge floods of tears poor Thames did weep
Huge floods of tears poor Thames did weep
+
14
Physical Note
“+” in left margin
To ſee the ſea ſprinc’led with purple gore
Physical Note
A mark (“+”) appears in the left margin, as though to signal an insertion of a phrase which is not present in the manuscript.
To see the sea sprinkled with purple gore.
Gloss Note
The + in the margin is perhaps a sign of Pulter’s plans for revision.
To see the sea
Gloss Note
The Thames, the river that runs through the heart of London and out to the base of the North Sea, weeps to see the sea covered with the blood of slaughtered English sailors.
sprinkled with purple gore;
15
The ſad Nereades did much deplore
The sad
Gloss Note
in Greek legend, the fifty daughters of Doris and Nereus; sea nymphs
Nereides did much
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
The sad
Gloss Note
beautiful sea nymphs; daughters of Nereus and Doris
Nereids did much deplore
16
This change,
Physical Note
directly over “change”
omen great Neptune was amazed
This omen. Great
Gloss Note
Roman god of water and the sea
Neptune was amazed
This change omen; great
Gloss Note
chief sea god, the Roman counterpart of Poseidon
Neptune was amazed
17
As hee upon those blooddy
Physical Note
blot immediately after may obscure final “s”
billow gaz’d
As he upon those bloody billows gazed;
As he upon those bloody billows gazed,
18
Then instantly hee
Physical Note
“bad” may have read “bid” originally, or reverse; “blu” appears written over “buw”
bad blu Triton ſound
Then, instantly he bid blue
Gloss Note
son of Neptune, represented as a fish with a human head, who makes the ocean roar by blowing through his shell
Triton sound
Then instantly he bade blue
Gloss Note
Greek sea god known as the herald of the sea, the son of Poseidon
Triton sound
19
His wrethed Trumpe t’was hard the Oceane rownd
His wreathéd
Gloss Note
trumpet
trump—’twas heard the ocean round—
His
Gloss Note
Triton uses a conch shell as a trumpet to broadcast Neptune’s message.
wreathéd trump; t’was heard the ocean round,
20
To ſummun each
Physical Note
“ſea \” written directly atop “great”
greatſea \ God, and Godes faire
To summon each sea god and goddess fair,
To summon each great sea god and goddess fair,
21
That
Physical Note
“t” appears to correct earlier “o”
to our narrough ſeas they should repaire
That to our narrow seas they should
Gloss Note
return
repair.
That to our narrow seas they should
Gloss Note
Neptune is calling all the gods to the seas surrounding England.
repair.
22
Then did they come from every ſea and strand
Then did they come from every sea and
Gloss Note
shore, coast
strand
Then did they come from every sea and strand
23
To heer their kinge ſaturnius dread command
To hear their king
Gloss Note
Latin for Saturn, the Roman god associated by the Romans with the Greek god Kronos, the father of the first-generation Olympians
Saturnus’s dread command.
To hear their king
Gloss Note
chief Roman god and father to Neptune and the other Roman gods
Saturnus’s dread command.
24
ſome did bestride Philanthropes broad backe
Some did bestride
Gloss Note
The name (etymologically, “lover of humanity”) refers in classical literature to the dolphin; it is based on the animal’s alleged friendliness to people, which in some cases included allowing people to ride (“bestride”) them.
Philanthrope’s broad back;
Some did bestride
Gloss Note
A reference to the dolphin, described etymologically as the “lover of humans,” appears in classical anecdotes about the singer Arion, who was robbed and left to drown in the sea, but saved by a dolphin—or sometimes a school of dolphins—that carried him back to shore.
Philanthrope’s broad back.
25
The
Physical Note
final part of “h” appears added to earlier “l,” crowded between surrounding letters
Nimphes in Perley ſhells, not one
Physical Note
“a” appears to correct earlier “ei”
thar lacks
The
Gloss Note
semi-divine spirits in the form of maidens inhabiting the sea, rivers, mountains, woods, trees; often portrayed in poetry as attendants on a god
nymphs in pearly shells, not one there lacks
The nymphs in pearly shells, not one there lacks
26
Of all great Oceanus watry traine
Of all great
Gloss Note
in Greek mythology, the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth); the personification of the great river believed to encircle the world
Oceanus’s wat’ry
Gloss Note
a body of attendants or followers
train,
Of all great
Gloss Note
the numerous river gods and sea nymphs who were the children of Oceanus, the river that circled the world.
Oceanus’s watery train,
27
But floteinge came upon the frothey maine
But floating came upon the frothy
Gloss Note
open sea
main.
But floating came upon the frothy main,
Nereus 1
Nereus 1
[...]reus 1
28
Emperiall Nereus frist did lead the waye
Imperial
Gloss Note
an old sea god, father of the Nereides
Nereus first did lead the way,
Gloss Note
[...]reus 1 is partly visible in the margin of the digital image, presumably marking the entrance of Nereus, father of the Nereids.
Imperial Nereus first did lead the way,
29
Who o’ur the tumed waves bares cheeffest ſwaye
Who o’er the
Gloss Note
swelling; puffed with wind
tumid waves bears chiefest sway;
Who o’er the tumid waves bears chiefest sway,
30
Rich
Physical Note
twice struck-through
purple orient gemms his purple robe adorninge
Rich
Gloss Note
possibly, pearls, especially those from near India; alternatively, any jewel from or associated with the Orient, the part of the globe east of Europe; “orient” could refer to a bright red color (like sunrise in the east), to the color or lustre of the best pearls (understood to come from the East), or to anything brilliant or resplendent.
orient gems his purple robe adorning,
Rich purple orient gems his purple robe adorning,
31
Which cast a luster like the blusheinge morninge
Which cast a luster like the blushing morning.
Which cast a luster like the
Gloss Note
Nereus wears an imperial purple robe decked with gems that shines like the dawn.
blushing morning.
32
This glistringe Charott drawn with Cro pranceinge fishe
This
Gloss Note
for “glistering,” meaning sparkling or glittering
glist’ring chariot drawn with prancing fish,
This
Gloss Note
glistering, an archaic form of glittering
glist’ring chariot drawn with prancing fish,
33
Which would have ſatisfied prowed
Physical Note
diagonally struck-through text, possibly “ff[?]”
[?] Phaetons wishe
Which would have satisfied proud
Gloss Note
Phaeton was the rash son of Helios, the Greek sun god, who, when riding his father’s chariot, lost control of it and almost destroyed the world by fire (had Zeus not killed Phaeton and restored order).
Phaeton’s wish.
Which would have satisfied proud
Gloss Note
the sun god, who rode a gleaming chariot across the sky
Phaeton’s wish.
Doris 2
Doris 2
Doris 2
34
Just by his ſide faire fruetfull Doris came
Just by his side, fair fruitful
Gloss Note
a sea goddess, wife of Nereus and mother of the Nereides
Doris came,
Gloss Note
Doris 2 is visible in the margin, marking the entrance of Doris, wife of Nereus and mother of the numerous Nereids.
Just by his side fair fruitful Doris came,
35
Whos numeros iſsew doth inlarge her fame
Whose numerous
Gloss Note
offspring
issue doth enlarge her fame;
Whose numerous issue doth enlarge her fame;
36
Riche Orient Perls her ſnowey neck did grace
Rich orient pearls her snowy neck did grace;
Rich orient pearls her snowy neck did grace;
37
Her ſparklinge Crowne gave luster to her face
Her sparkling crown gave luster to her face;
Her sparkling crown gave luster to her face;
38
Between her brests a rich Carbuncle ſhone
Between her breasts a rich
Gloss Note
a large precious stone of a red or fiery color; a mythical jewel reputed to emit light in darkness
carbuncle shone;
Between her breasts a rich
Gloss Note
precious red gemstone
carbuncle shone.
39
The univerce afforded not a ſtone
The universe afforded not a stone
The universe afforded not a stone
40
That equal’d itt for ſplendentie of light
That equalled it for
Gloss Note
splendor, brilliance
splendency of light.
That equaled it for
Gloss Note
Pulter’s idiosyncratic form of “splendency,” or splendor
splendentie of light;
41
Itt rul’d the rest as Cinthia doth the night
It ruled the rest as
Gloss Note
the personification of the moon
Cynthia doth the
Gloss Note
The poem breaks off here and is unfinished.
night
It ruled the rest as
Gloss Note
goddess of the moon
Cynthia doth the night
X (Close panel)Notes: Elemental Edition

 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

This fragment of a poem, in what is probably Pulter’s hand, appears on a loose sheet in a folder associated with the bound volume in which her other poems are found. Although a complete copy might someday be found, Pulter appears not to have finished this experimental dream vision about a relatively recent event: the 1667 battle, known as the Raid on the Medway, which ended in the destruction by the Dutch navy of the fort and shipyard at Sheerness, on England’s east coast. Part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, this was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by the British navy, which saw many warships destroyed or captured and the hasty arrangement by Charles II of an unfavorable treaty. The few extant verses of what promises an epic treatment of these events are framed by the speaker’s recurrent nightmare visions which mingle her distress with an incongruous perception of Sheerness remaining “unconquered” despite the “purple gore” that sprinkles the sea. The speaker’s horrified amazement joins that of the powerful and resplendent water gods and goddesses, mustering (too late, it must be said) as British reinforcements under Saturn’s command. Neptune, Triton, Nereus, Doris: the speaker, perched on a rock above the fray, witnesses a catalogue of mythic powerhouses whom she has imaginatively installed into current political events. What dreamy counterfactual scenario might have ensued, if the poem continued past its opening catalogue and into the martial action one might expect to follow? We will only know if the poem’s continuation one day comes to light.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Roman god of sleep
Line number 4

 Gloss note

wake and sleep; sleep was commonly referred to as the image of death; for instance, John Donne calls rest and sleep Death’s “pictures” (“Death Be Not Proud,” l. 5).
Line number 5

 Gloss note

son of Somnus and Roman god of dreams
Line number 6

 Gloss note

The gates of horn and ivory is a literary image (originally from The Odyssey) distinguishing two kinds of dreams: those passing through the gate of horn are true, while those passing through the gate of ivory are deceptive. Many writers used the term “horny gate” to describe Morpheus’s dream invasions. See, for instance, Du Bartas His Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Josuah Sylvester (London, 1641), p. 249.
Line number 9

 Gloss note

At Sheerness (on England’s eastern coast) the river Medway (mentioned in the next line) joins with the estuary of the Thames river; it is presumably called “unconquered” here in relation to the 1667 Dutch attack there in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, despite the fact that both contemporary and later accounts consider the battle there to have been a resounding defeat of the English navy.
Line number 10

 Gloss note

an offering paid as a duty, here also alluding to the the fact that a “tributary” is a stream flowing into a river
Line number 14

 Physical note

A mark (“+”) appears in the left margin, as though to signal an insertion of a phrase which is not present in the manuscript.
Line number 15

 Gloss note

in Greek legend, the fifty daughters of Doris and Nereus; sea nymphs
Line number 15

 Gloss note

lament
Line number 16

 Gloss note

Roman god of water and the sea
Line number 18

 Gloss note

son of Neptune, represented as a fish with a human head, who makes the ocean roar by blowing through his shell
Line number 19

 Gloss note

trumpet
Line number 21

 Gloss note

return
Line number 22

 Gloss note

shore, coast
Line number 23

 Gloss note

Latin for Saturn, the Roman god associated by the Romans with the Greek god Kronos, the father of the first-generation Olympians
Line number 24

 Gloss note

The name (etymologically, “lover of humanity”) refers in classical literature to the dolphin; it is based on the animal’s alleged friendliness to people, which in some cases included allowing people to ride (“bestride”) them.
Line number 25

 Gloss note

semi-divine spirits in the form of maidens inhabiting the sea, rivers, mountains, woods, trees; often portrayed in poetry as attendants on a god
Line number 26

 Gloss note

in Greek mythology, the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth); the personification of the great river believed to encircle the world
Line number 26

 Gloss note

a body of attendants or followers
Line number 27

 Gloss note

open sea
Line number 28

 Gloss note

an old sea god, father of the Nereides
Line number 29

 Gloss note

swelling; puffed with wind
Line number 30

 Gloss note

possibly, pearls, especially those from near India; alternatively, any jewel from or associated with the Orient, the part of the globe east of Europe; “orient” could refer to a bright red color (like sunrise in the east), to the color or lustre of the best pearls (understood to come from the East), or to anything brilliant or resplendent.
Line number 32

 Gloss note

for “glistering,” meaning sparkling or glittering
Line number 33

 Gloss note

Phaeton was the rash son of Helios, the Greek sun god, who, when riding his father’s chariot, lost control of it and almost destroyed the world by fire (had Zeus not killed Phaeton and restored order).
Line number 34

 Gloss note

a sea goddess, wife of Nereus and mother of the Nereides
Line number 35

 Gloss note

offspring
Line number 38

 Gloss note

a large precious stone of a red or fiery color; a mythical jewel reputed to emit light in darkness
Line number 40

 Gloss note

splendor, brilliance
Line number 41

 Gloss note

the personification of the moon
Line number 41

 Gloss note

The poem breaks off here and is unfinished.
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
X (Close panel)Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition
[Untitled]
Somnus, Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind?
Somnus Why Art Thou Still To Me Unkind
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still To Me Unkind” is unfinished and contains revisions, likely in Pulter’s hand, I have opted to include scored out and corrected words. To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Does an alternative to my punctuation open up different interpretive possibilities? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This fragment of a poem, in what is probably Pulter’s hand, appears on a loose sheet in a folder associated with the bound volume in which her other poems are found. Although a complete copy might someday be found, Pulter appears not to have finished this experimental dream vision about a relatively recent event: the 1667 battle, known as the Raid on the Medway, which ended in the destruction by the Dutch navy of the fort and shipyard at Sheerness, on England’s east coast. Part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, this was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by the British navy, which saw many warships destroyed or captured and the hasty arrangement by Charles II of an unfavorable treaty. The few extant verses of what promises an epic treatment of these events are framed by the speaker’s recurrent nightmare visions which mingle her distress with an incongruous perception of Sheerness remaining “unconquered” despite the “purple gore” that sprinkles the sea. The speaker’s horrified amazement joins that of the powerful and resplendent water gods and goddesses, mustering (too late, it must be said) as British reinforcements under Saturn’s command. Neptune, Triton, Nereus, Doris: the speaker, perched on a rock above the fray, witnesses a catalogue of mythic powerhouses whom she has imaginatively installed into current political events. What dreamy counterfactual scenario might have ensued, if the poem continued past its opening catalogue and into the martial action one might expect to follow? We will only know if the poem’s continuation one day comes to light.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Written on a loose sheet of paper, probably in Pulter’s own hand, these 41 lines recast recent politics as classical mythology.
Gloss Note
On Hester Pulter’s hand, see Alice Eardley’s conclusion in Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 2014), 182, note 838.
1 Possibly an unfinished narrative or epic, the poem refers to a battle in the second Anglo-Dutch war that took place in 1667 in the town of Sheerness, on the Isle of Stepney in Kent. Dutch forces captured the town, destroying fortifications, then sailed up the river Medway and part way up the Thames estuary to burn several British ships. The embarrassing defeat for the British is depicted somewhat ambiguously in “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind.” Narrated by an insomniac, the poem recounts a scene in which the sleepless speaker perches on a rock above Sheerness, where she witnesses the tears of the inconsolable Thames. Even though the town has been the site of one notable loss in battle, it remains “unconquered” in the war. “Unconquered Sheere” may mean something like “brave” or “valiant” Sheerness, whatever losses the town has suffered, or it may be one of the rough patches that would have been revised if this work had been completed.
While “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” remains unfinished, the opening recalls Pulter’s tactics elsewhere. Like The Pismire [Poem 35] and This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John [Poem 45], this poem begins with a personal distress that first manifests as bodily suffering, then goes on to liberate the speaker’s mind to wander freely in contemplation of the scene that confronts her. “Somnus” provides two seemingly related ways to understand the experience of the watchful insomniac: first, through contemporary political turmoil, and, second, through the mythological motifs that might ultimately transform or lend a cosmic significance to the British defeat. The powers of classical deities are relocated to the English coast as the “trembling bosom” of the sea summons the nautical forces of mythology: sea gods, goddesses, minor nymphs, and even helpful dolphins answer the trumpet call and begin to flow toward Sheerness. Neptune “gazes” upon the same “bloody billows” as the speaker, and we are left to suspect that it is partly her own distress that conjures this epic force.
We can’t know whether Pulter is marshaling the gods to mount a counterattack against the Dutch or to join a mourning procession, but the existing portion of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” suggests that she may have been exploring a reading based on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Early in Book 3, Britomart sits on a rocky shore, watching “a while the surges hore, / That gainst the craggy clifts did loudly rore.”
Gloss Note
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Toshiyuki Suzuki, and Hiroshi Yamashita, 2nd edition, Longman Annotated Poets (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3.4.7.5-6.
2 An emblem of chastity, Britomart externalizes her erotic suffering in an extended complaint about the “Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,” and it is possible that this scene of reading the seascape offered Pulter an allegorical text through which she could write her own political distress (3.4.8.1). The geography specific to the Sheerness battle also appears at the end of Book 4 of The Faerie Queene, when the narrative thread begun in Britomart’s reading of the sea is brought to a partial resolution by the marriage of the Medway and Thames rivers. Spenser depicts a host of sea gods flowing in to celebrate:
It fortun’d then, a solemne feast was there
To all the Sea-gods and their fruitfull seede,
In honour of the spousalls, which then were
Betwixt the Medway and the Thames agreed. (4.11.8.1-4)
What follows is an epic catalog of the aquatic deities who travel across the globe, from “great Neptune with his threeforkt mace, / That rules the Seas, and makes them rise or fall” to the lesser local nymphs and even the mighty rivers of the Nile and the Amazon (4.11.11.1-2). Like Pulter’s unfinished poem, Spenser’s celebration of England’s fertile estuary overflows its boundaries and remains open-ended. Book 4, Canto 12 of The Faerie Queene opens with Spenser responding to the aquatic marriage festivities with a lament for the futility of his own poetic labor: “O what an endlesse worke haue I in hand, / To count the seas abundant progeny” (4.12.1.1-2).
Whether Pulter was equally stymied by the scope of her task is impossible to say, because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” is interrupted well before we learn what the gods had planned at the site of Sheerness’s carnage. This truncated scene invites us to place Pulter’s poetic fragment alongside the work of poets including Spenser and Chaucer whose ambitious plans never achieved fruition. While this Amplified Edition attends to the unfinished state of the poem by preserving revisions that offer evidence of Pulter’s writing practice, it resists offering speculations or conclusions about where those revisions might be heading. In this sense, the trailing off of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” functions, as Catherine Nicholson observes of Spenser’s unfinished Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, “almost as a gloss on the strange unraveling of the work to which they belong.”
Gloss Note
Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and The Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 244.
3
My edition of the poem attempts to record what remains on the page in order to give a sense of one moment in an active process of poetic composition. In words that were scored out and replaced, we can watch Pulter experiment with word choice and verb tense as she transformed this contemporary episode in international politics into an allegorical and classicizing dream narrative. She twice included marginal markers signaling the entrance of named sea deities, as she does with flowers in her The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. The final lines of the fragment are rougher, making the relation between clauses particularly mobile, and it is difficult to determine definitively how to punctuate the passages about Doris and her rich jewels. Perhaps the best way to end this edition is with a question: in this unfinished poem, should the last line be closed with a full stop—a final period—or should it remain without any punctuation as a sign of the instant in which Pulter lifted her pen and left her work open for us to receive?


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
Physical Note
on loose sheet, in folder associated with manuscript; hand appears same as in “The Weepeinge Wishe”
ſomnus why art thou ſtill to mee unkinde?
Gloss Note
Roman god of sleep
Somnus, why art thou still to me unkind?
Gloss Note
the god of sleep.
Somnus why art thou still to me unkind?
2
Why doe all els ſuch comfort finde
Why do all else such comfort find
Why do all else such comfort find
3
In thy imbrace? but I and only I
In thy embrace? But I, and only I,
In thy embrace? But I and only I
4
Allternately (aye mee) doe live and die
Alternately (ay me) do
Gloss Note
wake and sleep; sleep was commonly referred to as the image of death; for instance, John Donne calls rest and sleep Death’s “pictures” (“Death Be Not Proud,” l. 5).
live and die.
Critical Note
alternating between sleep and waking; a description of how agonizing fitful sleep can be. The speaker’s stagnant suffering is expressed sonically in the repetition of “I and only I” and then, half a line later, “ay me.” The original spelling, “aye mee,” is ambiguous. “Aye” might mean “yes,” or it might be a cry of pain now colloquially spelled “ay.”
Alternately (ay me) do live and die?
5
Thy fellow Morphius too doth ſhew his ſpite
Thy fellow
Gloss Note
son of Somnus and Roman god of dreams
Morpheus too doth show his spite
Thy fellow
Gloss Note
the god of dreams, companion of Somnus
Morpheus too doth show his spite,
6
When from his Horney gate
Physical Note
single letter, possibly “d,” blotted on bottom half
[?] hee doth affright
When from his
Gloss Note
The gates of horn and ivory is a literary image (originally from The Odyssey) distinguishing two kinds of dreams: those passing through the gate of horn are true, while those passing through the gate of ivory are deceptive. Many writers used the term “horny gate” to describe Morpheus’s dream invasions. See, for instance, Du Bartas His Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Josuah Sylvester (London, 1641), p. 249.
horny gate he doth affright
When from his
Gloss Note
classical allusion to the gates of horn, through which only true dreams may pass; false dreams were said to pass instead through the gates of ivory.
horny d gate he doth affright
7
My troubled ſoul, as hee did t’hother night
My troubled soul, as he did th’other night.
My troubled soul, as he did
Gloss Note
the other
t’other night.
8
Oh
Physical Note
blotted only on top half
y my ſad hart would itt might prove a dream
O my sad heart, would it might prove a dream!
Oh y my sad heart, would it might prove a dream:
9
In that uncounquerd sheere wher Thameses ſtreame
In that
Gloss Note
At Sheerness (on England’s eastern coast) the river Medway (mentioned in the next line) joins with the estuary of the Thames river; it is presumably called “unconquered” here in relation to the 1667 Dutch attack there in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, despite the fact that both contemporary and later accounts consider the battle there to have been a resounding defeat of the English navy.
unconquered Sheer, when Thames’s stream
In that
Gloss Note
Sheerness, a town on the Isle of Stepney in northeast Kent where the English navy was defeated in June 1667 during an attack in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The counterfactual “unconquered” description offers a few possible readings. Pulter may have been stopped mid-revision or she may have been thinking of the town as itself unconquered even if the navy suffered a defeat.
unconquered Sheere where Thames’s stream,
10
Joyened with faire Medwaye did,
Physical Note
directly over “did”
doth their tribute paye
Joined with fair Medway doth their
Gloss Note
an offering paid as a duty, here also alluding to the the fact that a “tributary” is a stream flowing into a river
tribute pay,
Joined with fair
Gloss Note
The river Medway meets the Thames at Sheerness, where Dutch fleets sailed up both rivers, attacked land fortifications, and captured several English ships.
Medwaydid doth their tribute pay.
11
Thar on a lofty rock mee thought I laye
There on a lofty rock me thought I lay;
There on a lofty rock me thought I lay,
12
Then on the tremblinge
Physical Note
second “o” blotted on right half
booſome of the deepe
Then, on the trembling bosom of the deep,
Then on the trembling boosom of the deepe
13
Huge floods of tears poore Thames did weepe
Huge floods of tears poor Thames did weep
Huge floods of tears poor Thames did weep
+
14
Physical Note
“+” in left margin
To ſee the ſea ſprinc’led with purple gore
Physical Note
A mark (“+”) appears in the left margin, as though to signal an insertion of a phrase which is not present in the manuscript.
To see the sea sprinkled with purple gore.
Gloss Note
The + in the margin is perhaps a sign of Pulter’s plans for revision.
To see the sea
Gloss Note
The Thames, the river that runs through the heart of London and out to the base of the North Sea, weeps to see the sea covered with the blood of slaughtered English sailors.
sprinkled with purple gore;
15
The ſad Nereades did much deplore
The sad
Gloss Note
in Greek legend, the fifty daughters of Doris and Nereus; sea nymphs
Nereides did much
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
The sad
Gloss Note
beautiful sea nymphs; daughters of Nereus and Doris
Nereids did much deplore
16
This change,
Physical Note
directly over “change”
omen great Neptune was amazed
This omen. Great
Gloss Note
Roman god of water and the sea
Neptune was amazed
This change omen; great
Gloss Note
chief sea god, the Roman counterpart of Poseidon
Neptune was amazed
17
As hee upon those blooddy
Physical Note
blot immediately after may obscure final “s”
billow gaz’d
As he upon those bloody billows gazed;
As he upon those bloody billows gazed,
18
Then instantly hee
Physical Note
“bad” may have read “bid” originally, or reverse; “blu” appears written over “buw”
bad blu Triton ſound
Then, instantly he bid blue
Gloss Note
son of Neptune, represented as a fish with a human head, who makes the ocean roar by blowing through his shell
Triton sound
Then instantly he bade blue
Gloss Note
Greek sea god known as the herald of the sea, the son of Poseidon
Triton sound
19
His wrethed Trumpe t’was hard the Oceane rownd
His wreathéd
Gloss Note
trumpet
trump—’twas heard the ocean round—
His
Gloss Note
Triton uses a conch shell as a trumpet to broadcast Neptune’s message.
wreathéd trump; t’was heard the ocean round,
20
To ſummun each
Physical Note
“ſea \” written directly atop “great”
greatſea \ God, and Godes faire
To summon each sea god and goddess fair,
To summon each great sea god and goddess fair,
21
That
Physical Note
“t” appears to correct earlier “o”
to our narrough ſeas they should repaire
That to our narrow seas they should
Gloss Note
return
repair.
That to our narrow seas they should
Gloss Note
Neptune is calling all the gods to the seas surrounding England.
repair.
22
Then did they come from every ſea and strand
Then did they come from every sea and
Gloss Note
shore, coast
strand
Then did they come from every sea and strand
23
To heer their kinge ſaturnius dread command
To hear their king
Gloss Note
Latin for Saturn, the Roman god associated by the Romans with the Greek god Kronos, the father of the first-generation Olympians
Saturnus’s dread command.
To hear their king
Gloss Note
chief Roman god and father to Neptune and the other Roman gods
Saturnus’s dread command.
24
ſome did bestride Philanthropes broad backe
Some did bestride
Gloss Note
The name (etymologically, “lover of humanity”) refers in classical literature to the dolphin; it is based on the animal’s alleged friendliness to people, which in some cases included allowing people to ride (“bestride”) them.
Philanthrope’s broad back;
Some did bestride
Gloss Note
A reference to the dolphin, described etymologically as the “lover of humans,” appears in classical anecdotes about the singer Arion, who was robbed and left to drown in the sea, but saved by a dolphin—or sometimes a school of dolphins—that carried him back to shore.
Philanthrope’s broad back.
25
The
Physical Note
final part of “h” appears added to earlier “l,” crowded between surrounding letters
Nimphes in Perley ſhells, not one
Physical Note
“a” appears to correct earlier “ei”
thar lacks
The
Gloss Note
semi-divine spirits in the form of maidens inhabiting the sea, rivers, mountains, woods, trees; often portrayed in poetry as attendants on a god
nymphs in pearly shells, not one there lacks
The nymphs in pearly shells, not one there lacks
26
Of all great Oceanus watry traine
Of all great
Gloss Note
in Greek mythology, the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth); the personification of the great river believed to encircle the world
Oceanus’s wat’ry
Gloss Note
a body of attendants or followers
train,
Of all great
Gloss Note
the numerous river gods and sea nymphs who were the children of Oceanus, the river that circled the world.
Oceanus’s watery train,
27
But floteinge came upon the frothey maine
But floating came upon the frothy
Gloss Note
open sea
main.
But floating came upon the frothy main,
Nereus 1
Nereus 1
[...]reus 1
28
Emperiall Nereus frist did lead the waye
Imperial
Gloss Note
an old sea god, father of the Nereides
Nereus first did lead the way,
Gloss Note
[...]reus 1 is partly visible in the margin of the digital image, presumably marking the entrance of Nereus, father of the Nereids.
Imperial Nereus first did lead the way,
29
Who o’ur the tumed waves bares cheeffest ſwaye
Who o’er the
Gloss Note
swelling; puffed with wind
tumid waves bears chiefest sway;
Who o’er the tumid waves bears chiefest sway,
30
Rich
Physical Note
twice struck-through
purple orient gemms his purple robe adorninge
Rich
Gloss Note
possibly, pearls, especially those from near India; alternatively, any jewel from or associated with the Orient, the part of the globe east of Europe; “orient” could refer to a bright red color (like sunrise in the east), to the color or lustre of the best pearls (understood to come from the East), or to anything brilliant or resplendent.
orient gems his purple robe adorning,
Rich purple orient gems his purple robe adorning,
31
Which cast a luster like the blusheinge morninge
Which cast a luster like the blushing morning.
Which cast a luster like the
Gloss Note
Nereus wears an imperial purple robe decked with gems that shines like the dawn.
blushing morning.
32
This glistringe Charott drawn with Cro pranceinge fishe
This
Gloss Note
for “glistering,” meaning sparkling or glittering
glist’ring chariot drawn with prancing fish,
This
Gloss Note
glistering, an archaic form of glittering
glist’ring chariot drawn with prancing fish,
33
Which would have ſatisfied prowed
Physical Note
diagonally struck-through text, possibly “ff[?]”
[?] Phaetons wishe
Which would have satisfied proud
Gloss Note
Phaeton was the rash son of Helios, the Greek sun god, who, when riding his father’s chariot, lost control of it and almost destroyed the world by fire (had Zeus not killed Phaeton and restored order).
Phaeton’s wish.
Which would have satisfied proud
Gloss Note
the sun god, who rode a gleaming chariot across the sky
Phaeton’s wish.
Doris 2
Doris 2
Doris 2
34
Just by his ſide faire fruetfull Doris came
Just by his side, fair fruitful
Gloss Note
a sea goddess, wife of Nereus and mother of the Nereides
Doris came,
Gloss Note
Doris 2 is visible in the margin, marking the entrance of Doris, wife of Nereus and mother of the numerous Nereids.
Just by his side fair fruitful Doris came,
35
Whos numeros iſsew doth inlarge her fame
Whose numerous
Gloss Note
offspring
issue doth enlarge her fame;
Whose numerous issue doth enlarge her fame;
36
Riche Orient Perls her ſnowey neck did grace
Rich orient pearls her snowy neck did grace;
Rich orient pearls her snowy neck did grace;
37
Her ſparklinge Crowne gave luster to her face
Her sparkling crown gave luster to her face;
Her sparkling crown gave luster to her face;
38
Between her brests a rich Carbuncle ſhone
Between her breasts a rich
Gloss Note
a large precious stone of a red or fiery color; a mythical jewel reputed to emit light in darkness
carbuncle shone;
Between her breasts a rich
Gloss Note
precious red gemstone
carbuncle shone.
39
The univerce afforded not a ſtone
The universe afforded not a stone
The universe afforded not a stone
40
That equal’d itt for ſplendentie of light
That equalled it for
Gloss Note
splendor, brilliance
splendency of light.
That equaled it for
Gloss Note
Pulter’s idiosyncratic form of “splendency,” or splendor
splendentie of light;
41
Itt rul’d the rest as Cinthia doth the night
It ruled the rest as
Gloss Note
the personification of the moon
Cynthia doth the
Gloss Note
The poem breaks off here and is unfinished.
night
It ruled the rest as
Gloss Note
goddess of the moon
Cynthia doth the night
X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition

 Editorial note

Because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still To Me Unkind” is unfinished and contains revisions, likely in Pulter’s hand, I have opted to include scored out and corrected words. To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Does an alternative to my punctuation open up different interpretive possibilities? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?

 Headnote

Written on a loose sheet of paper, probably in Pulter’s own hand, these 41 lines recast recent politics as classical mythology.
Gloss Note
On Hester Pulter’s hand, see Alice Eardley’s conclusion in Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 2014), 182, note 838.
1 Possibly an unfinished narrative or epic, the poem refers to a battle in the second Anglo-Dutch war that took place in 1667 in the town of Sheerness, on the Isle of Stepney in Kent. Dutch forces captured the town, destroying fortifications, then sailed up the river Medway and part way up the Thames estuary to burn several British ships. The embarrassing defeat for the British is depicted somewhat ambiguously in “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind.” Narrated by an insomniac, the poem recounts a scene in which the sleepless speaker perches on a rock above Sheerness, where she witnesses the tears of the inconsolable Thames. Even though the town has been the site of one notable loss in battle, it remains “unconquered” in the war. “Unconquered Sheere” may mean something like “brave” or “valiant” Sheerness, whatever losses the town has suffered, or it may be one of the rough patches that would have been revised if this work had been completed.
While “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” remains unfinished, the opening recalls Pulter’s tactics elsewhere. Like The Pismire [Poem 35] and This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John [Poem 45], this poem begins with a personal distress that first manifests as bodily suffering, then goes on to liberate the speaker’s mind to wander freely in contemplation of the scene that confronts her. “Somnus” provides two seemingly related ways to understand the experience of the watchful insomniac: first, through contemporary political turmoil, and, second, through the mythological motifs that might ultimately transform or lend a cosmic significance to the British defeat. The powers of classical deities are relocated to the English coast as the “trembling bosom” of the sea summons the nautical forces of mythology: sea gods, goddesses, minor nymphs, and even helpful dolphins answer the trumpet call and begin to flow toward Sheerness. Neptune “gazes” upon the same “bloody billows” as the speaker, and we are left to suspect that it is partly her own distress that conjures this epic force.
We can’t know whether Pulter is marshaling the gods to mount a counterattack against the Dutch or to join a mourning procession, but the existing portion of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” suggests that she may have been exploring a reading based on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Early in Book 3, Britomart sits on a rocky shore, watching “a while the surges hore, / That gainst the craggy clifts did loudly rore.”
Gloss Note
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Toshiyuki Suzuki, and Hiroshi Yamashita, 2nd edition, Longman Annotated Poets (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3.4.7.5-6.
2 An emblem of chastity, Britomart externalizes her erotic suffering in an extended complaint about the “Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,” and it is possible that this scene of reading the seascape offered Pulter an allegorical text through which she could write her own political distress (3.4.8.1). The geography specific to the Sheerness battle also appears at the end of Book 4 of The Faerie Queene, when the narrative thread begun in Britomart’s reading of the sea is brought to a partial resolution by the marriage of the Medway and Thames rivers. Spenser depicts a host of sea gods flowing in to celebrate:
It fortun’d then, a solemne feast was there
To all the Sea-gods and their fruitfull seede,
In honour of the spousalls, which then were
Betwixt the Medway and the Thames agreed. (4.11.8.1-4)
What follows is an epic catalog of the aquatic deities who travel across the globe, from “great Neptune with his threeforkt mace, / That rules the Seas, and makes them rise or fall” to the lesser local nymphs and even the mighty rivers of the Nile and the Amazon (4.11.11.1-2). Like Pulter’s unfinished poem, Spenser’s celebration of England’s fertile estuary overflows its boundaries and remains open-ended. Book 4, Canto 12 of The Faerie Queene opens with Spenser responding to the aquatic marriage festivities with a lament for the futility of his own poetic labor: “O what an endlesse worke haue I in hand, / To count the seas abundant progeny” (4.12.1.1-2).
Whether Pulter was equally stymied by the scope of her task is impossible to say, because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” is interrupted well before we learn what the gods had planned at the site of Sheerness’s carnage. This truncated scene invites us to place Pulter’s poetic fragment alongside the work of poets including Spenser and Chaucer whose ambitious plans never achieved fruition. While this Amplified Edition attends to the unfinished state of the poem by preserving revisions that offer evidence of Pulter’s writing practice, it resists offering speculations or conclusions about where those revisions might be heading. In this sense, the trailing off of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” functions, as Catherine Nicholson observes of Spenser’s unfinished Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, “almost as a gloss on the strange unraveling of the work to which they belong.”
Gloss Note
Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and The Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 244.
3
My edition of the poem attempts to record what remains on the page in order to give a sense of one moment in an active process of poetic composition. In words that were scored out and replaced, we can watch Pulter experiment with word choice and verb tense as she transformed this contemporary episode in international politics into an allegorical and classicizing dream narrative. She twice included marginal markers signaling the entrance of named sea deities, as she does with flowers in her The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. The final lines of the fragment are rougher, making the relation between clauses particularly mobile, and it is difficult to determine definitively how to punctuate the passages about Doris and her rich jewels. Perhaps the best way to end this edition is with a question: in this unfinished poem, should the last line be closed with a full stop—a final period—or should it remain without any punctuation as a sign of the instant in which Pulter lifted her pen and left her work open for us to receive?
Line number 1

 Gloss note

the god of sleep.
Line number 4

 Critical note

alternating between sleep and waking; a description of how agonizing fitful sleep can be. The speaker’s stagnant suffering is expressed sonically in the repetition of “I and only I” and then, half a line later, “ay me.” The original spelling, “aye mee,” is ambiguous. “Aye” might mean “yes,” or it might be a cry of pain now colloquially spelled “ay.”
Line number 5

 Gloss note

the god of dreams, companion of Somnus
Line number 6

 Gloss note

classical allusion to the gates of horn, through which only true dreams may pass; false dreams were said to pass instead through the gates of ivory.
Line number 7

 Gloss note

the other
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Sheerness, a town on the Isle of Stepney in northeast Kent where the English navy was defeated in June 1667 during an attack in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The counterfactual “unconquered” description offers a few possible readings. Pulter may have been stopped mid-revision or she may have been thinking of the town as itself unconquered even if the navy suffered a defeat.
Line number 10

 Gloss note

The river Medway meets the Thames at Sheerness, where Dutch fleets sailed up both rivers, attacked land fortifications, and captured several English ships.
Line number 14

 Gloss note

The + in the margin is perhaps a sign of Pulter’s plans for revision.
Line number 14

 Gloss note

The Thames, the river that runs through the heart of London and out to the base of the North Sea, weeps to see the sea covered with the blood of slaughtered English sailors.
Line number 15

 Gloss note

beautiful sea nymphs; daughters of Nereus and Doris
Line number 16

 Gloss note

chief sea god, the Roman counterpart of Poseidon
Line number 18

 Gloss note

Greek sea god known as the herald of the sea, the son of Poseidon
Line number 19

 Gloss note

Triton uses a conch shell as a trumpet to broadcast Neptune’s message.
Line number 21

 Gloss note

Neptune is calling all the gods to the seas surrounding England.
Line number 23

 Gloss note

chief Roman god and father to Neptune and the other Roman gods
Line number 24

 Gloss note

A reference to the dolphin, described etymologically as the “lover of humans,” appears in classical anecdotes about the singer Arion, who was robbed and left to drown in the sea, but saved by a dolphin—or sometimes a school of dolphins—that carried him back to shore.
Line number 26

 Gloss note

the numerous river gods and sea nymphs who were the children of Oceanus, the river that circled the world.
Line number 28

 Gloss note

[...]reus 1 is partly visible in the margin of the digital image, presumably marking the entrance of Nereus, father of the Nereids.
Line number 31

 Gloss note

Nereus wears an imperial purple robe decked with gems that shines like the dawn.
Line number 32

 Gloss note

glistering, an archaic form of glittering
Line number 33

 Gloss note

the sun god, who rode a gleaming chariot across the sky
Line number 34

 Gloss note

Doris 2 is visible in the margin, marking the entrance of Doris, wife of Nereus and mother of the numerous Nereids.
Line number 38

 Gloss note

precious red gemstone
Line number 40

 Gloss note

Pulter’s idiosyncratic form of “splendency,” or splendor
Line number 41

 Gloss note

goddess of the moon
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
X (Close panel)Amplified Edition
Amplified Edition
[Untitled]
Somnus, Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind?
Somnus Why Art Thou Still To Me Unkind
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Megan Heffernan
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.

— Megan Heffernan
Because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still To Me Unkind” is unfinished and contains revisions, likely in Pulter’s hand, I have opted to include scored out and corrected words. To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Does an alternative to my punctuation open up different interpretive possibilities? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?

— Megan Heffernan
This fragment of a poem, in what is probably Pulter’s hand, appears on a loose sheet in a folder associated with the bound volume in which her other poems are found. Although a complete copy might someday be found, Pulter appears not to have finished this experimental dream vision about a relatively recent event: the 1667 battle, known as the Raid on the Medway, which ended in the destruction by the Dutch navy of the fort and shipyard at Sheerness, on England’s east coast. Part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, this was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by the British navy, which saw many warships destroyed or captured and the hasty arrangement by Charles II of an unfavorable treaty. The few extant verses of what promises an epic treatment of these events are framed by the speaker’s recurrent nightmare visions which mingle her distress with an incongruous perception of Sheerness remaining “unconquered” despite the “purple gore” that sprinkles the sea. The speaker’s horrified amazement joins that of the powerful and resplendent water gods and goddesses, mustering (too late, it must be said) as British reinforcements under Saturn’s command. Neptune, Triton, Nereus, Doris: the speaker, perched on a rock above the fray, witnesses a catalogue of mythic powerhouses whom she has imaginatively installed into current political events. What dreamy counterfactual scenario might have ensued, if the poem continued past its opening catalogue and into the martial action one might expect to follow? We will only know if the poem’s continuation one day comes to light.

— Megan Heffernan
Written on a loose sheet of paper, probably in Pulter’s own hand, these 41 lines recast recent politics as classical mythology.
Gloss Note
On Hester Pulter’s hand, see Alice Eardley’s conclusion in Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 2014), 182, note 838.
1 Possibly an unfinished narrative or epic, the poem refers to a battle in the second Anglo-Dutch war that took place in 1667 in the town of Sheerness, on the Isle of Stepney in Kent. Dutch forces captured the town, destroying fortifications, then sailed up the river Medway and part way up the Thames estuary to burn several British ships. The embarrassing defeat for the British is depicted somewhat ambiguously in “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind.” Narrated by an insomniac, the poem recounts a scene in which the sleepless speaker perches on a rock above Sheerness, where she witnesses the tears of the inconsolable Thames. Even though the town has been the site of one notable loss in battle, it remains “unconquered” in the war. “Unconquered Sheere” may mean something like “brave” or “valiant” Sheerness, whatever losses the town has suffered, or it may be one of the rough patches that would have been revised if this work had been completed.
While “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” remains unfinished, the opening recalls Pulter’s tactics elsewhere. Like The Pismire [Poem 35] and This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John [Poem 45], this poem begins with a personal distress that first manifests as bodily suffering, then goes on to liberate the speaker’s mind to wander freely in contemplation of the scene that confronts her. “Somnus” provides two seemingly related ways to understand the experience of the watchful insomniac: first, through contemporary political turmoil, and, second, through the mythological motifs that might ultimately transform or lend a cosmic significance to the British defeat. The powers of classical deities are relocated to the English coast as the “trembling bosom” of the sea summons the nautical forces of mythology: sea gods, goddesses, minor nymphs, and even helpful dolphins answer the trumpet call and begin to flow toward Sheerness. Neptune “gazes” upon the same “bloody billows” as the speaker, and we are left to suspect that it is partly her own distress that conjures this epic force.
We can’t know whether Pulter is marshaling the gods to mount a counterattack against the Dutch or to join a mourning procession, but the existing portion of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” suggests that she may have been exploring a reading based on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Early in Book 3, Britomart sits on a rocky shore, watching “a while the surges hore, / That gainst the craggy clifts did loudly rore.”
Gloss Note
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Toshiyuki Suzuki, and Hiroshi Yamashita, 2nd edition, Longman Annotated Poets (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3.4.7.5-6.
2 An emblem of chastity, Britomart externalizes her erotic suffering in an extended complaint about the “Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,” and it is possible that this scene of reading the seascape offered Pulter an allegorical text through which she could write her own political distress (3.4.8.1). The geography specific to the Sheerness battle also appears at the end of Book 4 of The Faerie Queene, when the narrative thread begun in Britomart’s reading of the sea is brought to a partial resolution by the marriage of the Medway and Thames rivers. Spenser depicts a host of sea gods flowing in to celebrate:
It fortun’d then, a solemne feast was there
To all the Sea-gods and their fruitfull seede,
In honour of the spousalls, which then were
Betwixt the Medway and the Thames agreed. (4.11.8.1-4)
What follows is an epic catalog of the aquatic deities who travel across the globe, from “great Neptune with his threeforkt mace, / That rules the Seas, and makes them rise or fall” to the lesser local nymphs and even the mighty rivers of the Nile and the Amazon (4.11.11.1-2). Like Pulter’s unfinished poem, Spenser’s celebration of England’s fertile estuary overflows its boundaries and remains open-ended. Book 4, Canto 12 of The Faerie Queene opens with Spenser responding to the aquatic marriage festivities with a lament for the futility of his own poetic labor: “O what an endlesse worke haue I in hand, / To count the seas abundant progeny” (4.12.1.1-2).
Whether Pulter was equally stymied by the scope of her task is impossible to say, because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” is interrupted well before we learn what the gods had planned at the site of Sheerness’s carnage. This truncated scene invites us to place Pulter’s poetic fragment alongside the work of poets including Spenser and Chaucer whose ambitious plans never achieved fruition. While this Amplified Edition attends to the unfinished state of the poem by preserving revisions that offer evidence of Pulter’s writing practice, it resists offering speculations or conclusions about where those revisions might be heading. In this sense, the trailing off of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” functions, as Catherine Nicholson observes of Spenser’s unfinished Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, “almost as a gloss on the strange unraveling of the work to which they belong.”
Gloss Note
Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and The Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 244.
3
My edition of the poem attempts to record what remains on the page in order to give a sense of one moment in an active process of poetic composition. In words that were scored out and replaced, we can watch Pulter experiment with word choice and verb tense as she transformed this contemporary episode in international politics into an allegorical and classicizing dream narrative. She twice included marginal markers signaling the entrance of named sea deities, as she does with flowers in her The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. The final lines of the fragment are rougher, making the relation between clauses particularly mobile, and it is difficult to determine definitively how to punctuate the passages about Doris and her rich jewels. Perhaps the best way to end this edition is with a question: in this unfinished poem, should the last line be closed with a full stop—a final period—or should it remain without any punctuation as a sign of the instant in which Pulter lifted her pen and left her work open for us to receive?


— Megan Heffernan
1
Physical Note
on loose sheet, in folder associated with manuscript; hand appears same as in “The Weepeinge Wishe”
ſomnus why art thou ſtill to mee unkinde?
Gloss Note
Roman god of sleep
Somnus, why art thou still to me unkind?
Gloss Note
the god of sleep.
Somnus why art thou still to me unkind?
2
Why doe all els ſuch comfort finde
Why do all else such comfort find
Why do all else such comfort find
3
In thy imbrace? but I and only I
In thy embrace? But I, and only I,
In thy embrace? But I and only I
4
Allternately (aye mee) doe live and die
Alternately (ay me) do
Gloss Note
wake and sleep; sleep was commonly referred to as the image of death; for instance, John Donne calls rest and sleep Death’s “pictures” (“Death Be Not Proud,” l. 5).
live and die.
Critical Note
alternating between sleep and waking; a description of how agonizing fitful sleep can be. The speaker’s stagnant suffering is expressed sonically in the repetition of “I and only I” and then, half a line later, “ay me.” The original spelling, “aye mee,” is ambiguous. “Aye” might mean “yes,” or it might be a cry of pain now colloquially spelled “ay.”
Alternately (ay me) do live and die?
5
Thy fellow Morphius too doth ſhew his ſpite
Thy fellow
Gloss Note
son of Somnus and Roman god of dreams
Morpheus too doth show his spite
Thy fellow
Gloss Note
the god of dreams, companion of Somnus
Morpheus too doth show his spite,
6
When from his Horney gate
Physical Note
single letter, possibly “d,” blotted on bottom half
[?] hee doth affright
When from his
Gloss Note
The gates of horn and ivory is a literary image (originally from The Odyssey) distinguishing two kinds of dreams: those passing through the gate of horn are true, while those passing through the gate of ivory are deceptive. Many writers used the term “horny gate” to describe Morpheus’s dream invasions. See, for instance, Du Bartas His Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Josuah Sylvester (London, 1641), p. 249.
horny gate he doth affright
When from his
Gloss Note
classical allusion to the gates of horn, through which only true dreams may pass; false dreams were said to pass instead through the gates of ivory.
horny d gate he doth affright
7
My troubled ſoul, as hee did t’hother night
My troubled soul, as he did th’other night.
My troubled soul, as he did
Gloss Note
the other
t’other night.
8
Oh
Physical Note
blotted only on top half
y my ſad hart would itt might prove a dream
O my sad heart, would it might prove a dream!
Oh y my sad heart, would it might prove a dream:
9
In that uncounquerd sheere wher Thameses ſtreame
In that
Gloss Note
At Sheerness (on England’s eastern coast) the river Medway (mentioned in the next line) joins with the estuary of the Thames river; it is presumably called “unconquered” here in relation to the 1667 Dutch attack there in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, despite the fact that both contemporary and later accounts consider the battle there to have been a resounding defeat of the English navy.
unconquered Sheer, when Thames’s stream
In that
Gloss Note
Sheerness, a town on the Isle of Stepney in northeast Kent where the English navy was defeated in June 1667 during an attack in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The counterfactual “unconquered” description offers a few possible readings. Pulter may have been stopped mid-revision or she may have been thinking of the town as itself unconquered even if the navy suffered a defeat.
unconquered Sheere where Thames’s stream,
10
Joyened with faire Medwaye did,
Physical Note
directly over “did”
doth their tribute paye
Joined with fair Medway doth their
Gloss Note
an offering paid as a duty, here also alluding to the the fact that a “tributary” is a stream flowing into a river
tribute pay,
Joined with fair
Gloss Note
The river Medway meets the Thames at Sheerness, where Dutch fleets sailed up both rivers, attacked land fortifications, and captured several English ships.
Medwaydid doth their tribute pay.
11
Thar on a lofty rock mee thought I laye
There on a lofty rock me thought I lay;
There on a lofty rock me thought I lay,
12
Then on the tremblinge
Physical Note
second “o” blotted on right half
booſome of the deepe
Then, on the trembling bosom of the deep,
Then on the trembling boosom of the deepe
13
Huge floods of tears poore Thames did weepe
Huge floods of tears poor Thames did weep
Huge floods of tears poor Thames did weep
+
14
Physical Note
“+” in left margin
To ſee the ſea ſprinc’led with purple gore
Physical Note
A mark (“+”) appears in the left margin, as though to signal an insertion of a phrase which is not present in the manuscript.
To see the sea sprinkled with purple gore.
Gloss Note
The + in the margin is perhaps a sign of Pulter’s plans for revision.
To see the sea
Gloss Note
The Thames, the river that runs through the heart of London and out to the base of the North Sea, weeps to see the sea covered with the blood of slaughtered English sailors.
sprinkled with purple gore;
15
The ſad Nereades did much deplore
The sad
Gloss Note
in Greek legend, the fifty daughters of Doris and Nereus; sea nymphs
Nereides did much
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
The sad
Gloss Note
beautiful sea nymphs; daughters of Nereus and Doris
Nereids did much deplore
16
This change,
Physical Note
directly over “change”
omen great Neptune was amazed
This omen. Great
Gloss Note
Roman god of water and the sea
Neptune was amazed
This change omen; great
Gloss Note
chief sea god, the Roman counterpart of Poseidon
Neptune was amazed
17
As hee upon those blooddy
Physical Note
blot immediately after may obscure final “s”
billow gaz’d
As he upon those bloody billows gazed;
As he upon those bloody billows gazed,
18
Then instantly hee
Physical Note
“bad” may have read “bid” originally, or reverse; “blu” appears written over “buw”
bad blu Triton ſound
Then, instantly he bid blue
Gloss Note
son of Neptune, represented as a fish with a human head, who makes the ocean roar by blowing through his shell
Triton sound
Then instantly he bade blue
Gloss Note
Greek sea god known as the herald of the sea, the son of Poseidon
Triton sound
19
His wrethed Trumpe t’was hard the Oceane rownd
His wreathéd
Gloss Note
trumpet
trump—’twas heard the ocean round—
His
Gloss Note
Triton uses a conch shell as a trumpet to broadcast Neptune’s message.
wreathéd trump; t’was heard the ocean round,
20
To ſummun each
Physical Note
“ſea \” written directly atop “great”
greatſea \ God, and Godes faire
To summon each sea god and goddess fair,
To summon each great sea god and goddess fair,
21
That
Physical Note
“t” appears to correct earlier “o”
to our narrough ſeas they should repaire
That to our narrow seas they should
Gloss Note
return
repair.
That to our narrow seas they should
Gloss Note
Neptune is calling all the gods to the seas surrounding England.
repair.
22
Then did they come from every ſea and strand
Then did they come from every sea and
Gloss Note
shore, coast
strand
Then did they come from every sea and strand
23
To heer their kinge ſaturnius dread command
To hear their king
Gloss Note
Latin for Saturn, the Roman god associated by the Romans with the Greek god Kronos, the father of the first-generation Olympians
Saturnus’s dread command.
To hear their king
Gloss Note
chief Roman god and father to Neptune and the other Roman gods
Saturnus’s dread command.
24
ſome did bestride Philanthropes broad backe
Some did bestride
Gloss Note
The name (etymologically, “lover of humanity”) refers in classical literature to the dolphin; it is based on the animal’s alleged friendliness to people, which in some cases included allowing people to ride (“bestride”) them.
Philanthrope’s broad back;
Some did bestride
Gloss Note
A reference to the dolphin, described etymologically as the “lover of humans,” appears in classical anecdotes about the singer Arion, who was robbed and left to drown in the sea, but saved by a dolphin—or sometimes a school of dolphins—that carried him back to shore.
Philanthrope’s broad back.
25
The
Physical Note
final part of “h” appears added to earlier “l,” crowded between surrounding letters
Nimphes in Perley ſhells, not one
Physical Note
“a” appears to correct earlier “ei”
thar lacks
The
Gloss Note
semi-divine spirits in the form of maidens inhabiting the sea, rivers, mountains, woods, trees; often portrayed in poetry as attendants on a god
nymphs in pearly shells, not one there lacks
The nymphs in pearly shells, not one there lacks
26
Of all great Oceanus watry traine
Of all great
Gloss Note
in Greek mythology, the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth); the personification of the great river believed to encircle the world
Oceanus’s wat’ry
Gloss Note
a body of attendants or followers
train,
Of all great
Gloss Note
the numerous river gods and sea nymphs who were the children of Oceanus, the river that circled the world.
Oceanus’s watery train,
27
But floteinge came upon the frothey maine
But floating came upon the frothy
Gloss Note
open sea
main.
But floating came upon the frothy main,
Nereus 1
Nereus 1
[...]reus 1
28
Emperiall Nereus frist did lead the waye
Imperial
Gloss Note
an old sea god, father of the Nereides
Nereus first did lead the way,
Gloss Note
[...]reus 1 is partly visible in the margin of the digital image, presumably marking the entrance of Nereus, father of the Nereids.
Imperial Nereus first did lead the way,
29
Who o’ur the tumed waves bares cheeffest ſwaye
Who o’er the
Gloss Note
swelling; puffed with wind
tumid waves bears chiefest sway;
Who o’er the tumid waves bears chiefest sway,
30
Rich
Physical Note
twice struck-through
purple orient gemms his purple robe adorninge
Rich
Gloss Note
possibly, pearls, especially those from near India; alternatively, any jewel from or associated with the Orient, the part of the globe east of Europe; “orient” could refer to a bright red color (like sunrise in the east), to the color or lustre of the best pearls (understood to come from the East), or to anything brilliant or resplendent.
orient gems his purple robe adorning,
Rich purple orient gems his purple robe adorning,
31
Which cast a luster like the blusheinge morninge
Which cast a luster like the blushing morning.
Which cast a luster like the
Gloss Note
Nereus wears an imperial purple robe decked with gems that shines like the dawn.
blushing morning.
32
This glistringe Charott drawn with Cro pranceinge fishe
This
Gloss Note
for “glistering,” meaning sparkling or glittering
glist’ring chariot drawn with prancing fish,
This
Gloss Note
glistering, an archaic form of glittering
glist’ring chariot drawn with prancing fish,
33
Which would have ſatisfied prowed
Physical Note
diagonally struck-through text, possibly “ff[?]”
[?] Phaetons wishe
Which would have satisfied proud
Gloss Note
Phaeton was the rash son of Helios, the Greek sun god, who, when riding his father’s chariot, lost control of it and almost destroyed the world by fire (had Zeus not killed Phaeton and restored order).
Phaeton’s wish.
Which would have satisfied proud
Gloss Note
the sun god, who rode a gleaming chariot across the sky
Phaeton’s wish.
Doris 2
Doris 2
Doris 2
34
Just by his ſide faire fruetfull Doris came
Just by his side, fair fruitful
Gloss Note
a sea goddess, wife of Nereus and mother of the Nereides
Doris came,
Gloss Note
Doris 2 is visible in the margin, marking the entrance of Doris, wife of Nereus and mother of the numerous Nereids.
Just by his side fair fruitful Doris came,
35
Whos numeros iſsew doth inlarge her fame
Whose numerous
Gloss Note
offspring
issue doth enlarge her fame;
Whose numerous issue doth enlarge her fame;
36
Riche Orient Perls her ſnowey neck did grace
Rich orient pearls her snowy neck did grace;
Rich orient pearls her snowy neck did grace;
37
Her ſparklinge Crowne gave luster to her face
Her sparkling crown gave luster to her face;
Her sparkling crown gave luster to her face;
38
Between her brests a rich Carbuncle ſhone
Between her breasts a rich
Gloss Note
a large precious stone of a red or fiery color; a mythical jewel reputed to emit light in darkness
carbuncle shone;
Between her breasts a rich
Gloss Note
precious red gemstone
carbuncle shone.
39
The univerce afforded not a ſtone
The universe afforded not a stone
The universe afforded not a stone
40
That equal’d itt for ſplendentie of light
That equalled it for
Gloss Note
splendor, brilliance
splendency of light.
That equaled it for
Gloss Note
Pulter’s idiosyncratic form of “splendency,” or splendor
splendentie of light;
41
Itt rul’d the rest as Cinthia doth the night
It ruled the rest as
Gloss Note
the personification of the moon
Cynthia doth the
Gloss Note
The poem breaks off here and is unfinished.
night
It ruled the rest as
Gloss Note
goddess of the moon
Cynthia doth the night
X (Close panel) All Notes
Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Elemental Edition

 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.
Amplified Edition

 Editorial note

Because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still To Me Unkind” is unfinished and contains revisions, likely in Pulter’s hand, I have opted to include scored out and corrected words. To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Does an alternative to my punctuation open up different interpretive possibilities? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?
Elemental Edition

 Headnote

This fragment of a poem, in what is probably Pulter’s hand, appears on a loose sheet in a folder associated with the bound volume in which her other poems are found. Although a complete copy might someday be found, Pulter appears not to have finished this experimental dream vision about a relatively recent event: the 1667 battle, known as the Raid on the Medway, which ended in the destruction by the Dutch navy of the fort and shipyard at Sheerness, on England’s east coast. Part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, this was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by the British navy, which saw many warships destroyed or captured and the hasty arrangement by Charles II of an unfavorable treaty. The few extant verses of what promises an epic treatment of these events are framed by the speaker’s recurrent nightmare visions which mingle her distress with an incongruous perception of Sheerness remaining “unconquered” despite the “purple gore” that sprinkles the sea. The speaker’s horrified amazement joins that of the powerful and resplendent water gods and goddesses, mustering (too late, it must be said) as British reinforcements under Saturn’s command. Neptune, Triton, Nereus, Doris: the speaker, perched on a rock above the fray, witnesses a catalogue of mythic powerhouses whom she has imaginatively installed into current political events. What dreamy counterfactual scenario might have ensued, if the poem continued past its opening catalogue and into the martial action one might expect to follow? We will only know if the poem’s continuation one day comes to light.
Amplified Edition

 Headnote

Written on a loose sheet of paper, probably in Pulter’s own hand, these 41 lines recast recent politics as classical mythology.
Gloss Note
On Hester Pulter’s hand, see Alice Eardley’s conclusion in Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 2014), 182, note 838.
1 Possibly an unfinished narrative or epic, the poem refers to a battle in the second Anglo-Dutch war that took place in 1667 in the town of Sheerness, on the Isle of Stepney in Kent. Dutch forces captured the town, destroying fortifications, then sailed up the river Medway and part way up the Thames estuary to burn several British ships. The embarrassing defeat for the British is depicted somewhat ambiguously in “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind.” Narrated by an insomniac, the poem recounts a scene in which the sleepless speaker perches on a rock above Sheerness, where she witnesses the tears of the inconsolable Thames. Even though the town has been the site of one notable loss in battle, it remains “unconquered” in the war. “Unconquered Sheere” may mean something like “brave” or “valiant” Sheerness, whatever losses the town has suffered, or it may be one of the rough patches that would have been revised if this work had been completed.
While “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” remains unfinished, the opening recalls Pulter’s tactics elsewhere. Like The Pismire [Poem 35] and This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John [Poem 45], this poem begins with a personal distress that first manifests as bodily suffering, then goes on to liberate the speaker’s mind to wander freely in contemplation of the scene that confronts her. “Somnus” provides two seemingly related ways to understand the experience of the watchful insomniac: first, through contemporary political turmoil, and, second, through the mythological motifs that might ultimately transform or lend a cosmic significance to the British defeat. The powers of classical deities are relocated to the English coast as the “trembling bosom” of the sea summons the nautical forces of mythology: sea gods, goddesses, minor nymphs, and even helpful dolphins answer the trumpet call and begin to flow toward Sheerness. Neptune “gazes” upon the same “bloody billows” as the speaker, and we are left to suspect that it is partly her own distress that conjures this epic force.
We can’t know whether Pulter is marshaling the gods to mount a counterattack against the Dutch or to join a mourning procession, but the existing portion of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” suggests that she may have been exploring a reading based on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Early in Book 3, Britomart sits on a rocky shore, watching “a while the surges hore, / That gainst the craggy clifts did loudly rore.”
Gloss Note
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Toshiyuki Suzuki, and Hiroshi Yamashita, 2nd edition, Longman Annotated Poets (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3.4.7.5-6.
2 An emblem of chastity, Britomart externalizes her erotic suffering in an extended complaint about the “Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,” and it is possible that this scene of reading the seascape offered Pulter an allegorical text through which she could write her own political distress (3.4.8.1). The geography specific to the Sheerness battle also appears at the end of Book 4 of The Faerie Queene, when the narrative thread begun in Britomart’s reading of the sea is brought to a partial resolution by the marriage of the Medway and Thames rivers. Spenser depicts a host of sea gods flowing in to celebrate:
It fortun’d then, a solemne feast was there
To all the Sea-gods and their fruitfull seede,
In honour of the spousalls, which then were
Betwixt the Medway and the Thames agreed. (4.11.8.1-4)
What follows is an epic catalog of the aquatic deities who travel across the globe, from “great Neptune with his threeforkt mace, / That rules the Seas, and makes them rise or fall” to the lesser local nymphs and even the mighty rivers of the Nile and the Amazon (4.11.11.1-2). Like Pulter’s unfinished poem, Spenser’s celebration of England’s fertile estuary overflows its boundaries and remains open-ended. Book 4, Canto 12 of The Faerie Queene opens with Spenser responding to the aquatic marriage festivities with a lament for the futility of his own poetic labor: “O what an endlesse worke haue I in hand, / To count the seas abundant progeny” (4.12.1.1-2).
Whether Pulter was equally stymied by the scope of her task is impossible to say, because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” is interrupted well before we learn what the gods had planned at the site of Sheerness’s carnage. This truncated scene invites us to place Pulter’s poetic fragment alongside the work of poets including Spenser and Chaucer whose ambitious plans never achieved fruition. While this Amplified Edition attends to the unfinished state of the poem by preserving revisions that offer evidence of Pulter’s writing practice, it resists offering speculations or conclusions about where those revisions might be heading. In this sense, the trailing off of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” functions, as Catherine Nicholson observes of Spenser’s unfinished Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, “almost as a gloss on the strange unraveling of the work to which they belong.”
Gloss Note
Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and The Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 244.
3
My edition of the poem attempts to record what remains on the page in order to give a sense of one moment in an active process of poetic composition. In words that were scored out and replaced, we can watch Pulter experiment with word choice and verb tense as she transformed this contemporary episode in international politics into an allegorical and classicizing dream narrative. She twice included marginal markers signaling the entrance of named sea deities, as she does with flowers in her The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. The final lines of the fragment are rougher, making the relation between clauses particularly mobile, and it is difficult to determine definitively how to punctuate the passages about Doris and her rich jewels. Perhaps the best way to end this edition is with a question: in this unfinished poem, should the last line be closed with a full stop—a final period—or should it remain without any punctuation as a sign of the instant in which Pulter lifted her pen and left her work open for us to receive?
Transcription
Line number 1

 Physical note

on loose sheet, in folder associated with manuscript; hand appears same as in “The Weepeinge Wishe”
Elemental Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Roman god of sleep
Amplified Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

the god of sleep.
Elemental Edition
Line number 4

 Gloss note

wake and sleep; sleep was commonly referred to as the image of death; for instance, John Donne calls rest and sleep Death’s “pictures” (“Death Be Not Proud,” l. 5).
Amplified Edition
Line number 4

 Critical note

alternating between sleep and waking; a description of how agonizing fitful sleep can be. The speaker’s stagnant suffering is expressed sonically in the repetition of “I and only I” and then, half a line later, “ay me.” The original spelling, “aye mee,” is ambiguous. “Aye” might mean “yes,” or it might be a cry of pain now colloquially spelled “ay.”
Elemental Edition
Line number 5

 Gloss note

son of Somnus and Roman god of dreams
Amplified Edition
Line number 5

 Gloss note

the god of dreams, companion of Somnus
Transcription
Line number 6

 Physical note

single letter, possibly “d,” blotted on bottom half
Elemental Edition
Line number 6

 Gloss note

The gates of horn and ivory is a literary image (originally from The Odyssey) distinguishing two kinds of dreams: those passing through the gate of horn are true, while those passing through the gate of ivory are deceptive. Many writers used the term “horny gate” to describe Morpheus’s dream invasions. See, for instance, Du Bartas His Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Josuah Sylvester (London, 1641), p. 249.
Amplified Edition
Line number 6

 Gloss note

classical allusion to the gates of horn, through which only true dreams may pass; false dreams were said to pass instead through the gates of ivory.
Amplified Edition
Line number 7

 Gloss note

the other
Transcription
Line number 8

 Physical note

blotted only on top half
Elemental Edition
Line number 9

 Gloss note

At Sheerness (on England’s eastern coast) the river Medway (mentioned in the next line) joins with the estuary of the Thames river; it is presumably called “unconquered” here in relation to the 1667 Dutch attack there in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, despite the fact that both contemporary and later accounts consider the battle there to have been a resounding defeat of the English navy.
Amplified Edition
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Sheerness, a town on the Isle of Stepney in northeast Kent where the English navy was defeated in June 1667 during an attack in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The counterfactual “unconquered” description offers a few possible readings. Pulter may have been stopped mid-revision or she may have been thinking of the town as itself unconquered even if the navy suffered a defeat.
Transcription
Line number 10

 Physical note

directly over “did”
Elemental Edition
Line number 10

 Gloss note

an offering paid as a duty, here also alluding to the the fact that a “tributary” is a stream flowing into a river
Amplified Edition
Line number 10

 Gloss note

The river Medway meets the Thames at Sheerness, where Dutch fleets sailed up both rivers, attacked land fortifications, and captured several English ships.
Transcription
Line number 12

 Physical note

second “o” blotted on right half
Transcription
Line number 14

 Physical note

“+” in left margin
Elemental Edition
Line number 14

 Physical note

A mark (“+”) appears in the left margin, as though to signal an insertion of a phrase which is not present in the manuscript.
Amplified Edition
Line number 14

 Gloss note

The + in the margin is perhaps a sign of Pulter’s plans for revision.
Amplified Edition
Line number 14

 Gloss note

The Thames, the river that runs through the heart of London and out to the base of the North Sea, weeps to see the sea covered with the blood of slaughtered English sailors.
Elemental Edition
Line number 15

 Gloss note

in Greek legend, the fifty daughters of Doris and Nereus; sea nymphs
Elemental Edition
Line number 15

 Gloss note

lament
Amplified Edition
Line number 15

 Gloss note

beautiful sea nymphs; daughters of Nereus and Doris
Transcription
Line number 16

 Physical note

directly over “change”
Elemental Edition
Line number 16

 Gloss note

Roman god of water and the sea
Amplified Edition
Line number 16

 Gloss note

chief sea god, the Roman counterpart of Poseidon
Transcription
Line number 17

 Physical note

blot immediately after may obscure final “s”
Transcription
Line number 18

 Physical note

“bad” may have read “bid” originally, or reverse; “blu” appears written over “buw”
Elemental Edition
Line number 18

 Gloss note

son of Neptune, represented as a fish with a human head, who makes the ocean roar by blowing through his shell
Amplified Edition
Line number 18

 Gloss note

Greek sea god known as the herald of the sea, the son of Poseidon
Elemental Edition
Line number 19

 Gloss note

trumpet
Amplified Edition
Line number 19

 Gloss note

Triton uses a conch shell as a trumpet to broadcast Neptune’s message.
Transcription
Line number 20

 Physical note

“ſea \” written directly atop “great”
Transcription
Line number 21

 Physical note

“t” appears to correct earlier “o”
Elemental Edition
Line number 21

 Gloss note

return
Amplified Edition
Line number 21

 Gloss note

Neptune is calling all the gods to the seas surrounding England.
Elemental Edition
Line number 22

 Gloss note

shore, coast
Elemental Edition
Line number 23

 Gloss note

Latin for Saturn, the Roman god associated by the Romans with the Greek god Kronos, the father of the first-generation Olympians
Amplified Edition
Line number 23

 Gloss note

chief Roman god and father to Neptune and the other Roman gods
Elemental Edition
Line number 24

 Gloss note

The name (etymologically, “lover of humanity”) refers in classical literature to the dolphin; it is based on the animal’s alleged friendliness to people, which in some cases included allowing people to ride (“bestride”) them.
Amplified Edition
Line number 24

 Gloss note

A reference to the dolphin, described etymologically as the “lover of humans,” appears in classical anecdotes about the singer Arion, who was robbed and left to drown in the sea, but saved by a dolphin—or sometimes a school of dolphins—that carried him back to shore.
Transcription
Line number 25

 Physical note

final part of “h” appears added to earlier “l,” crowded between surrounding letters
Transcription
Line number 25

 Physical note

“a” appears to correct earlier “ei”
Elemental Edition
Line number 25

 Gloss note

semi-divine spirits in the form of maidens inhabiting the sea, rivers, mountains, woods, trees; often portrayed in poetry as attendants on a god
Elemental Edition
Line number 26

 Gloss note

in Greek mythology, the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth); the personification of the great river believed to encircle the world
Elemental Edition
Line number 26

 Gloss note

a body of attendants or followers
Amplified Edition
Line number 26

 Gloss note

the numerous river gods and sea nymphs who were the children of Oceanus, the river that circled the world.
Elemental Edition
Line number 27

 Gloss note

open sea
Elemental Edition
Line number 28

 Gloss note

an old sea god, father of the Nereides
Amplified Edition
Line number 28

 Gloss note

[...]reus 1 is partly visible in the margin of the digital image, presumably marking the entrance of Nereus, father of the Nereids.
Elemental Edition
Line number 29

 Gloss note

swelling; puffed with wind
Transcription
Line number 30

 Physical note

twice struck-through
Elemental Edition
Line number 30

 Gloss note

possibly, pearls, especially those from near India; alternatively, any jewel from or associated with the Orient, the part of the globe east of Europe; “orient” could refer to a bright red color (like sunrise in the east), to the color or lustre of the best pearls (understood to come from the East), or to anything brilliant or resplendent.
Amplified Edition
Line number 31

 Gloss note

Nereus wears an imperial purple robe decked with gems that shines like the dawn.
Elemental Edition
Line number 32

 Gloss note

for “glistering,” meaning sparkling or glittering
Amplified Edition
Line number 32

 Gloss note

glistering, an archaic form of glittering
Transcription
Line number 33

 Physical note

diagonally struck-through text, possibly “ff[?]”
Elemental Edition
Line number 33

 Gloss note

Phaeton was the rash son of Helios, the Greek sun god, who, when riding his father’s chariot, lost control of it and almost destroyed the world by fire (had Zeus not killed Phaeton and restored order).
Amplified Edition
Line number 33

 Gloss note

the sun god, who rode a gleaming chariot across the sky
Elemental Edition
Line number 34

 Gloss note

a sea goddess, wife of Nereus and mother of the Nereides
Amplified Edition
Line number 34

 Gloss note

Doris 2 is visible in the margin, marking the entrance of Doris, wife of Nereus and mother of the numerous Nereids.
Elemental Edition
Line number 35

 Gloss note

offspring
Elemental Edition
Line number 38

 Gloss note

a large precious stone of a red or fiery color; a mythical jewel reputed to emit light in darkness
Amplified Edition
Line number 38

 Gloss note

precious red gemstone
Elemental Edition
Line number 40

 Gloss note

splendor, brilliance
Amplified Edition
Line number 40

 Gloss note

Pulter’s idiosyncratic form of “splendency,” or splendor
Elemental Edition
Line number 41

 Gloss note

the personification of the moon
Elemental Edition
Line number 41

 Gloss note

The poem breaks off here and is unfinished.
Amplified Edition
Line number 41

 Gloss note

goddess of the moon
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