Editorial note
My “amplified” editions seek to make the poems as accessible as possible by modernizing spelling and punctuation and providing only brief definitions for words, while discursive notes and the materials I gather for the “curations” section place Pulter’s poems into conversations. As I build the curations for a given poem—provisional and quirky as they are—I keep returning to the poem, re-reading, rethinking, and adding layers to the notes. I hope to show that Pulter was intellectually and politically embedded rather than isolated, taking up issues, genres, and tropes that also interested her contemporaries and that sometimes accrue unpredictable salience in later periods. Rather than focusing only on possible sources or influences, I cast a wide net both within the seventeenth century and outside it, trying to catch cultural materials Pulter might have engaged, some she excludes or ignores, and even some she probably could never have imagined. Curations don’t precede the poems nor are they implied by the poems—as if the poem gathers them to itself (although it can sometimes feel that way) or hales them forth. Instead, as a curator I weave the poem into a web of relations, seeking to open out rather than close down interpretive possibilities. This extends to including extracts that are long enough that readers might find things therein that I do not anticipate. I also look for a multi-vectored traffic among Pulter’s poetry and the other materials. What might the materials I’ve gathered help readers see in the poems—or notice is not there? But also, how do the poems bring fresh perspectives into the conversations into which I draw them? The more one reads the poems as participants in wider ranging conversations, the more fascinatingly twisty Pulter appears. Often, I don’t grasp how she upends or comes at conventions aslant until I have mucked about composting my “curations.”
Headnote
Although Pulter’s manuscript includes this among the poems rather than the emblems, “The Pismire” reflects on its own status as emblem in line 28. Many of Pulter’s emblems announce their subject in the first line, often inviting the reader to “see,” “behold,” “mark,” or “view” what is being described. Here, the speaker does not “look about” until line 17 and finally sees the hill of pismires in line 20. While Pulter’s poem uses the pismire to describe the futility of endless earthly labors, a long tradition beginning with Aesop and Proverbs praises the pismire’s careful planning and hard work. As the texts in “Curations” indicate, the “behavior and habits” of ants were often set out as models for humans. For Thomas Moffett, for instance, the pismire, “this divine little creature,” is superior to humans because cleaner and harder working. It is “an emblem of divine providence, and labor, and of household care.” (See Moffett’s chapter on “the commendation of pismires” in his Theatre of Insects [1634], included in Pismires) The pismire’s tiny size could make it seem insignificant; by the sixteenth century, the word could be used as an insult for “an insignificant person; a person exhibiting behavior or habits usually associated with the ant” OED). The pismire’s very name evokes both urine and mire, or swampy ground in which "a person may be engulfed or become stuck fast." But the ant’s tiny size might also make its tireless industry even more impressive and heighten the contrast to humans. As John Bunyan puts it in a verse for children, “Man’s a fool, / Or silly ants would not be made his guide” (Pismires). Pulter, however, overturns the conventional meaning of the pismire, taking it as a negative rather than positive example. The speaker’s description of his or her mind as “busy” (line 27) links the “I” to the pismire’s proverbial industry and perhaps the slave’s drudgery. For the link between the pismire and the housewife, see the epistle “To the Gentlewoman Reader” in Richard Brathwaite, The English gentlewoman (London, 1631): “She distastes none more than these busy housewives, who are ever running into discourse of others’ families, but forget their own. Neither holds she it sufficient to be only a housekeeper; or snail-like to be still under roof; she partakes therefore of the pismire in providing, of the Sarreptan widow [Kings 17], in disposing, holding ever an absent providence better than an improvident presence.”Line number 9
Critical note
Figuring the earth as a mother is now so conventional that it might not seem to require comment. The figure has Roman roots, including gendering the earth or terra feminine, calling her a mother, and linking her to goddesses, including Ceres. From the start, this figuration works in two ways. First, it emphasizes the earth’s generative and nurturing power, suggesting a relationship of care, love, and perhaps even reciprocity between earth and her human children. Ovid’s Metamorphoses refers to the soil as a generative “mother’s womb” (1.501). Pulter’s contemporaries pick up this usage. See, for example, the passages from Lucy Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius in Mother Earth. Second, this figuration depicts the earth as a treasure trove to be exploited, which is variously promoted or lamented. We see both strands intertwine in Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny emphasizes that “mother” is bestowed on the earth as an honorific, since she receives humans upon birth (but does not generate them), nurtures them, and finally shelters them (II.154). Yet he also points out that humans’ debt to nature does not prevent the matricide of mining the earth for precious stones and metals (II.158). Cavendish and Milton, too, both describe the earth as a womb and disparage mining as, in Milton’s terms, “ransacking” and “rifling” the “bowels of their Mother Earth / For treasures better hid” (Paradise Lost 7, 1. 696-88; see also Cavendish, “Earth’s Complaint” in Mother Earth). Other seventeenth-century uses of this figuration to promote agricultural “improvement” and resource extraction suggest that mother earth is not just humanity’s womb and tomb but also its treasure trove to be mined. For example, Walter Blith, in his influential agricultural treatise The English Improver Improved (1652), describes the earth as “the very womb that bears all, and the mother that must nourish and maintain all” (sig. B2v); but he also describes “the Earth, the true mother, in whose bowels is more wealth than ever will be drawn forth” so as to enjoin his reader to act “as the midwife to deliver the earth of its throws” (Blith sigs. R3v-R4r). The figuration that casts resource extraction as rape and murder of the mother, then, does not necessarily work to prevent it.Line number 10
Critical note
“Mother Earth, / To which I must” seems to imply “to which I must return.” But the appearance of “dust” in the next line also activates the meanings of “must” as a noun meaning mustiness, mold, or even the grape pulp or “must” that through fermentation becomes wine.Line number 11
Critical note
“Dust” is a favorite word for Pulter, drawing on both a scriptural tradition—Genesis describes humans as made from dust and as destined to revert to dust when they die (“for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” [Genesis 3:19])—and an alchemical tradition in which dust, like the atom, is used to describe the fundamental matter of creation. Pulter’s fascination with dust is not unique to her. Her contemporary Lucy Hutchinson, for instance, similarly advises mindfulness of how dust is both “originary” and the body’s inevitable destination (see Order and Disorder [1679], Canto III, 123-6).Line number 13
Gloss note
comfortingLine number 17
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aroundLine number 20
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antsLine number 21
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draggedLine number 21
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inflated/swollenLine number 21
Critical note
The description of the pismires dragging their “issue” around might help to link motherhood to drudgery.Line number 22
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iridescent clothLine number 26
Critical note
While descriptions of bees emphasize how anatomical differences and social hierarchies conjoin to make some queens and others drones, most descriptions of ants do not make such distinctions, valuing ants as a collective rather than a hierarchy. As Thomas Moffett puts it, “pismires are endowed with so much virtue and justice, that they need no king to govern them.” Nor does Moffett mention winged pismires, although he describes their anatomy in detail. Here again, Pulter departs from many other descriptions of the pismire, distinguishing those with glittering wings who play from the wingless workers. When the speaker looks at the anthill, s/he sees a hierarchy. She may also, at least in part, see a beehive, conflating descriptions of ants and bees to depict the pismire as winged and hierarchical.Line number 30
Gloss note
toilLine number 30
Critical note
The verb “moil” corresponds to and reinforces “labor” here, inverting the order of the expression “toil and moil” to describe drudgery, the doubled words evoking the repetitive nature of the labor. But “moil” also echoes another word with which it rhymes, soil, in its meaning “to soil” or defile. Coupled with “up,” moil can also mean dig up, uproot, or grub in the ground and even to “transform into a soft mass,” much as the processes of time and decay transform many things into dust. This one word, then, to which Pulter returns in line 25, captures how laboring on the earth and in the dirt makes one dirty but also how this labor can be both destructive and productive (sometimes at once). The description of the earth as a “dunghill” or pile of refuse seems at first more negative than the description of it as a mother. In Shakespeare, for instance, the dunghill is routinely associated with low birth (“dunghill grooms” in 1 Henry VI and a “base dunghill villain and mechanical” in 2 Henry VI) and the ignominious burial of the lowborn and insubordinate, the rebel Jack Cade (2 Henry VI) and Cornwall’s servant (Lear). But this poem’s description of the pismires’ hard work suggests that the hill must be made and maintained. What’s more, contemporary attempts to revalue wastes as resources led to many proposals to promote dunghills as sources of soil enrichments and saltpeter for gunpowder.Line number 31
Critical note
Alchemists assigned the power to turn stone into gold, prolong life, and cure disease, to an elusive substance—variously called the elixir, the quintessence, or the philosopher’s stone. The earth’s elixir, then, is the earth’s hidden and transformative “soul” or life force. The kings who have it would seem to have a monopoly on the best earth has to offer, the opposite of the “earthly clog” mentioned a few lines later. Yet their achievement is pointless, as in the proverbial expression of being the “cock of the dunghill.” In his Defense of Poesy, for example, Sir Philip Sidney descries the pointless contention between Alexander and Darius, “when they strove who should be cock of this world’s dunghill.” We also see the apparent contrast between elixir and dunghill erode when Adam Moore describes the poor man’s muck hill or dunghill as his “philosopher’s stone” (see Moore, Bread for the Poor, in What is a dunghill?.)Line number 34
Gloss note
rapidly circling and therefore dizzyingLine number 34
Critical note
Pushing a stone mill to grind meal to be made into bread was an exhausting form of labor. As a consequence, the female slave pushing the mill stands as the opposite of the king or ruler. In Exodus, the plague on the first born extends from “the firstborn of Pharaoh that sits upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill” (Exodus 11:5). But the English economy also depended on slave labor by the time Pulter wrote, especially on plantations in Barbados that grew and processed sugar cane (in mills) for the European market. See Richard Ligon’s description of Indian female slaves making bread for planters on Barbados in A Female Slave. Jennifer Morgan argues that more African women than men were made slaves from 1660-1700 (Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004], 58). Thus the reference to a female slave here extends beyond the Old Testament context to include the labor relations on which the English food supply actually depended by the seventeenth century. The unusual level of detail here—that the slave is female, naked, “sunburned” or dark skinned, and her hair both sweaty and knotty—invites the reader to picture this slave’s working body.Line number 36
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From hisLine number 36
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burden/bodyLine number 40
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formless voidLine number 43
Critical note
Although Pulter twice mentions the “glittering” and “shining” wings of those pismires that rise above the earth to play, when the speaker asks for wings, they are not the gossamer wings of the pismire but those of the “unspotted dove.” Sorry, but there are no notes associated with
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