Editorial note
My editorial goals are accessibility and attention to the multiplicity of interpretation. By modernizing spelling and punctuation according to American standards and by providing a gloss for archaic words, I make the poem legible for a wide array of readers and students. Some notes are designed to offer contextual information indicating Pulter’s intellectual breadth—for instance, the way that her chosen lexicon blends cosmological, scientific, and religious domains. Other notes seek to illuminate Pulter’s poetic craft by offering commentary on the syntactical and formal features in the text, some of which present knotty puzzles that entangle the reading experience.
Headnote
This first poem in Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassas is the only one written in sixains (ABABCC). The speaker’s use of apostrophe in the first three sections serves to vivify elements of the natural world as interlocutors, and thus introduces a theme that will thread throughout the poems: the animation of the physical world. “The Eclipse”’s interest in blending the discourses of cosmology and salvation is explored in numerous poems. Here the speaker moves from accusations that external objects in the skies block her access to the sun (figuratively God), to complaints about abstract personifications (Death), and finally to recognition that her internal transgressions impede her faith. The final stanza nestles the speaker “in Christ” as the solution to her initial, spatially expressed alienation. When John Donne similarly takes up faith and astronomy in “Good Friday: Riding Westward,” by contrast, he relies on the older Ptolemaic cosmology and the doctrine of correspondences. One popular literary source for information about Copernicanism was Henry More’s 1647 Philosophical Poems, especially “Psychathanasia, or The Second Part of the Song of the Soul.”Line number 6
Gloss note
dissipate, purifyLine number 6
Critical note
Pulter often deploys the alchemical term “rarefy” to describe both material and spiritual transformations. In alchemy, the process of rarefaction involves the purification of a substance by separating the essence from its “gross” elements. This involved condensation (mentioned in the second stanza) or vaporization (and alchemy uses the language of rebirth and renewal shared by Christianity). On Pulter’s use of “rarefy,” see, for instance, The Revolution [Poem 16]; The Circle [2] [Poem 21]; and The Invocation of the Elements [Poem 41]. In “The Eclipse,” the clouds are imagined to cycle from transparency, to vapors, and, perhaps, to rain, inaugurating another cycle. The “variable condition” (l. 5) that the speaker sees as linking her to the physical world makes both subject to decay, but also mobile enough to undergo the “passage through revolution” toward salvation (l. 45). The poem thus trades on language embedded in both alchemy and Christianity.Line number 8
Critical note
“Dissolve” and “dissolution” are terms Pulter often uses to signal the interconnection of disintegrative and reconstructive cycles of formative elements (see, for example, the poems Universal Dissolution [Poem 6] and Immense Fount of Truth [Poem 48]). The rhyme linkage between “dissolve” and “revolve” conflates creative evolution with erosion and death. On this correspondence, see The Revolution [Poem 16]; and My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble [Poem 40], which includes this declaration (ll. 29-32):
Then whether dissolution,
All ends in thy salvation
and Why Are Thou Sad [Poem 47], where the speaker writes of sunrise (ll. 11-12):
Methinks it’s like the revolution
Of life, and death, and life
Line number 9
Gloss note
interventionLine number 10
Gloss note
turn, return, or evolveLine number 10
Critical note
A recurrent trope in the poems, “revolution” not only bespeaks a cycle of creation and destruction, but also connects the motions of mind, planets, elements, and soul (as they evolve, in relation to the body, to an eventual spiritual form). For instance, Immense Fount of Truth [Poem 48] describes the soul’s gradual ascent up the “stairs of revolution.” Pulter composed many of her poems during a time when the term “revolution” would have implicitly referenced the civil war, but she reappropriates the term (in “The Eclipse” and elsewhere) to validate a royalist order in which the sun (figuratively God and the king) orders proper revolution.Line number 11
Gloss note
concentration; becoming more solidLine number 12
Gloss note
satisfactionLine number 12
Critical note
Contentation refers to the state of being satisfied, accepting a situation, or a source of satisfaction or pleasure.Line number 13
Gloss note
sorrowful; heavy; steadfastLine number 15
Critical note
The creation of human form from the earth. Cf. Genesis 2:7: “And the Lord God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”Line number 18
Gloss note
the moonLine number 18
Critical note
In describing a lunar eclipse, in which the shadow of earth obscures the light of the moon, this stanza confirms Pulter’s knowledge of current astronomy and implies a heliocentric universe. For poems that reflect particulars of a Galilean-Copernican cosmology, see The Revolution [Poem 16]; The Center [Poem 30]; The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge [Poem 39]; This Was Written 1648 [Poem 45]; and A Solitary Complaint [Poem 54]. For a less sanguine view of the emerging paradigm of heliocentrism, see Donne, “An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary” in Complaint Poetry.Line number 22
Gloss note
separation into parts or constituent elements; the reduction of any body or mass to elements or atoms; liquefaction; termination of life, deathLine number 23
Gloss note
blazing fireLine number 24
Critical note
In viewing the eclipse only as a material manifestation of her alienation from God, the speaker departs from the conventional early modern view of eclipses as omens of negative events or signs of divine disapproval. For an early modern text mocking people’s fear of eclipses, see “On bugbear Black-Monday, March 29.1652, Or, The London-Fright at the Eclipse proceeding from a Natural Cause” in Black Monday (1652).Line number 25
Gloss note
sphericalLine number 26
Critical note
Emblem 48 refers to Apollo and Diana as the “Delian twins”; throughout the poems, Pulter unusually refers to the male sun God (from Delos) as “Delia,” a name that conventionally identifies the female moon goddess. In distinguishing this solar eclipse from the lunar eclipse of the second section, the poem also displays familiarity with contemporary scientific developments.Line number 27
Critical note
Cf. Amos 8:9: “And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.” Pulter may be alluding to the darkened sky at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, which some interpreted as an eclipse: “And it was about about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened” (Luke 23:44-45).Line number 28
Gloss note
In astrology, the ethereal fluid streaming from the stars or heavens that acted on the character and destiny of people.Line number 28
Critical note
In The Caucasines (Emblem 52) [Poem 117], Pulter uses the metaphor of a solar eclipse to describe ways that a plague-like parliamentary opposition obscured the royal sun.Line number 30
Gloss note
alignment of celestial bodiesLine number 31
Gloss note
the fates of Greek mythLine number 34
Critical note
The word here signifies multiple states of nothingness: an ultimate abyss; the formless void before the creation of the universe; the utmost state of confusion. It also can mean “the natural environment of a person or thing,” as in night’s most basic habitat. For this meaning, see Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “Creatures, whose Chaos is the earth” (II.ii.iii.320). In mythology Chaos was the oldest of the gods, the parent of Erebus (darkness) and Nyx (night), and thus the source for all darkness. This stanza has the moon subject to the Fates, with the result that it will lose its reflected light when the sun dies (with the extinction of the entire physical world).Line number 40
Gloss note
be enclosed; turnLine number 47
Critical note
The lack of punctuation after "excel" allows for an ambiguity that hints at the unknowable nature of the divine: does God excel in his capacity to love or in his infinite power? In either case, God is said to have triumphed over death.Line number 49
Critical note
The manuscript has no number 5 (nor no 6 for the last stanza), but the logic of the double-stanza structure of 1-4 suggests that one should be here, as the speaker turns away from external blockages to the more basic and internal impediments to salvation and finally to the declaration of triumph.Line number 58
Critical note
Cf. Isaiah 40:31: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles.”Line number 61
Critical note
This line reverses the act of eating established in l. 44, where the speaker is perilously consumed in Death’s mouth; here feeding is associated with the Eucharist.Line number 63
Critical note
Lack of punctuation here allows for ambiguity: “And that poor I might live, in death did bleed” suggests that death is the action of Christ; “And that poor I might live in death, did bleed” has the speaker attain life only after her death. In either case, Christ’s death on the cross enables the speaker’s redemption.Line number 64
Critical note
The repetition of “take” brings out multiple meanings of the word: the first use (two lines above) accentuates the act of transferring something into someone’s possession, while the second emphasizes transport of a person.Line number 66
Critical note
See John Donne’s “Death be not Proud,” which suggests that an individual’s resurrection “kills” Death (“Death, thou shalt die”). Sorry, but there are no notes associated with
any currently displayed witness.