In Emblem 11, Pulter fuses natural history with biblical citation to reinforce her readers’ trust in God. She draws on Pliny’s description of the raven in his Natural History, reintroducing the theme of parental love that we see in other emblems, such as “The Manucodiats” (Emblem 5) [Poem 71] and The Indian Moose (Emblem 7) [Poem 73]. Regarding the raven’s parental attitude as one of neglect and abandonment, Pulter disavows this behaviour. Her analogous treatment of another one of Pliny’s birds, the eagle, which appears in “The Indian Moose”, offers another instance of parental neglect. The focus of Pulter’s attention in this emblem, however, is less on those who are neglectful parents than it is on those who are neglected. The “callow” ravens are left defenceless in their young age, and God becomes their surrogate parent, taking care of them despite the cultural stigma surrounding these carrion-eating birds (line 2). Pulter poses the question: if God can respond so generously to the needs of ravens, “Why should His children then so faint and fear?” (line 6). She could be offering this as a consolation to herself, or to her own children, assuring them that trust in God will protect them even when “thy father and thy mother be / In no capacity to comfort thee” (lines 15-6). Her message is one of faith, emphasising that no matter how dire the circumstances, “sorrow” and “fear” are wasted given that God’s love is the ultimate provision (line 17). In the final couplet, Pulter directs the emblematic message most clearly at herself, countering her own “despair” with the reassurance that, if she has patience, God will respond (line 20). Here, Pulter herself is the young raven in the face of neglect.
In establishing the raven as this emblem’s central image, Pulter draws on multiple depictions of the bird to justify her didactic portrayal of God as a carer for those without parents. Notes in the left-hand margin are keyed to specific words in the poem with a set of markers running “a” to “d”, explicitly indicating Pulter’s sources. These sources, which we detail in the line notes to the poem, include the biblical books of Psalms, Job, and Luke, Robert Sanderson’s Twenty Sermons Formerly Preached, and Pliny’s Natural History. The source notes are in the scribe’s hand, and so form part of the original poem’s presentation in Pulter’s manuscript; however, we have chosen to treat them as marginal notes, rather than an integral part of the poem. This contrasts with the marginal material that accompanies our edition of Come, My Dear Children [Poem 68], which we have treated as essential to the main text. Pulter’s use of marginal annotations here in Emblem 11 could be compared to Lucy Hutchinson’s practice of including scriptural references in the margins of her biblical poem Order and Disorder: see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Lucy Hutchinson, the Bible and Order and Disorder” (The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women 1558-1680 [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], pp. 176-89). — Millie Godfery and Sarah C. E. Ross