In this poem, Pulter articulates a fairly recent scientific argument, that the planets rotate around the sun. This heliocentric world view, propounded by Copernicus and developed by Galileo, had shocked many Christians by decentering the human world. Pulter adopts this avant-garde astronomy, and elegantly harnesses it to a poem that places God—like the sun—firmly at its center. She Christianizes heliocentrism by asserting that the planets rotate around the sun “[a]ccording to the great Creator’s pleasure”. As often in Pulter’s poems, she uses contemporary scientific thought to explore spiritual states and experiences. Here the speaker wishes that the sun would not only be the focal point around which earth and the planets rotate, as it is, but that it would shine constantly on earth, enabling perpetual day and banishing night’s spiritual crises. The sun’s authority in this poem is somewhat monarchical with the opening scene of a “throne[d]” (l. 5) figure receiving planets like dancers performing “according to [his] pleasure”.
As in Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Of Stars’, Pulter’s speaker here reins in cosmological conjecture in order to refocus on God: “Halloo, my thoughts! To native earth descend; / For thy ambition in the dust must end”. Also like Cavendish, though, Pulter enjoys exploring astronomical ideas along the way: her ideas are influenced by Galileo’s Starry Messenger (Sidereus nuncius), published in 1610 and still controversial when she was writing, and Copernicus’s account of the three rotations made by the earth. Without knowing more of Pulter’s education, we do not know whether she was able to read Galileo in Italian or Latin (Sidereus nuncius did not appear in English for over two centuries), or whether she gained her knowledge through English writers such as Henry More, whose Philosophical Poems (1647) explicitly engaged with Galileo’s theories. On Pulter’s familiarity with the “most modern and most coherent cosmological theory of the time” (p. 4), see also Sarah Hutton, ‘Hester Pulter (c. 1596-1678): A Woman Poet and the New Astronomy’, Études Epistèmes,14 (2008): 77-87 and Alice Eardley, ed. Lady Hester Pulter: Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda (Toronto: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014). On “dust”, see Curations for “The Circle [1],” Dust and “The Hope,” Dust. The poem’s structure and syntax are also elliptical. Pulter circles around the central subject—God—in several ways, including her syntax (the action wished-for in the opening lines is not reached until line 7, “Would clasp this globe”), and her focus on His earthly creation (cedar, daisy, elephant, whale), concluding that we can only conceive of God’s glory through the beauty of His creation (ll. 39-40). In this way, her poem enacts the instruction she gives to herself—“To native earth descend”—to explore God through more humble and indirect means.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall