This poem exemplifies Pulter’s strategy of complicating and even undercutting her
own emblematic images. The poem initially analogizes human tyrants to a female spider,
in order remind the reader that even tyrants succumb to death. Yet Pulter undermines
the analogy in the poem’s subsequent lines. First, while the spider is female (perhaps
an echo of classical and renaissance depictions of tyrants as unstable and effeminate),
the only human tyrants she mentions are male.
See Rebecca Bushnell’s discussion of tyranny in Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
1 More significantly, Pulter rejects the spider as a suitable analogy for human tyranny
altogether at line 25, stating that man is far worse than the spider, and it is unfair
to the spider to make the comparison. She even terms humans unique in their cannibalistic
tendencies (seemingly ignoring other examples in her own emblem poems of animals eating
their own kind). In so undercutting the poem’s initial premise, Pulter rejects the
principle of analogy upon which emblem poems are based. Traditionally, readers are
asked to identify with and learn from the emblematic image, based on that image being
an analogue of some aspect of contemporary human life. In this poem, however, Pulter
rejects the spider emblem as inadequate to the task of representing humanity’s tyrannical
tendencies.
Pulter’s reference to “he that hath three Kingdoms in his power,” i.e., the three
kingdoms comprising Great Britain, suggests that events of Pulter’s own time are the
inspiration for this reconfiguration of conventional emblem form. The British reference—likely
referencing Oliver Cromwell—invites contemporary readings in a poem previously reliant
on classical and biblical allusions. It may not be coincidental, therefore, that this
hitherto anomalous contemporary reference immediately precedes the rejection of the
spider analogy. Pulter suggests that where conventional emblem principles may have
been suitable for previous historical contexts, events like the English civil wars
require a reimagining of emblem poems’ formal premises.
Perhaps it should not be surprising, therefore, that the second half of the poem introduces
themes and texts seemingly out of character with the neoclassical bent of the earlier
part of the poem. As Pulter moves from tyranny to cannibalism to praise of vegetarianism,
the distance we have come thematically from the beginning of the poem is indexed by
the difference between her earlier classical allusions and the Hindu Indian traders
of her own time (“now”) lauded at line 34. Pulter likely draws her description of
these “Banians” from Samuel Purchas’ Purchas his Pilgrimage (1626), a beloved work of travel writing which also inspired Pulter’s romance, The Unfortunate Florinda. Pulter lauds these traders so extensively that the speaker literally has to remind
herself to control her sympathies in the succeeding (and final) couplet.
The final couplet thus struggles to instill order on a poem that in many ways embraces
disorder. Biblical allusions in these final lines assert a Christian natural order
of being, with God over man and man over animals, thereby licensing mankind’s killing
of animals for food. Yet this licensing appears weak, even resigning, following the
poem’s earlier promotion of vegetarianism. Moreover, the closing couplet underscores
the distance the poem has traveled from its initial discussion of tyranny. Discussion
of Britain’s own tyrant remains unresolved, along with the personal vitriol evinced
by the speaker herself.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall