This poem, written two years after the death of Pulter’s adult daughter Jane, offers a fascinating perspective on maternal grief. The passage of time and the Christian concepts of heaven and resurrection have done little to assuage the speaker’s pain, and she seeks a more satisfying expression of her grief by experimenting with cultural allusions and by combining conventions of child-loss elegies with those of Petrarchan love poetry. Many seventeenth-century poets writing about the death of a child found solace in Christianity as they reframed grief as divine grace. Many other English poets imitated Petrarch, a fourteenth-century Italian poet whose male speaker expressed unrequited love for a beautiful but inaccessible woman. Pulter’s elegy builds upon both traditions. It describes a mother’s love for her daughter in Petrarchan terms as its speaker refuses to be consoled.
The poem is also noteworthy for revealing a work in progress. Like all of Pulter’s poetry, it survives in a single manuscript. In the manuscript, this poem’s line 44 is crossed out and replaced with nine new lines, and because these changes are written in the same scribal hand as the rest of the manuscript, it is likely that they are authorially sanctioned. I have edited two versions of the poem to enable readers to compare Pulter’s early and revised endings; this version is the early one. The salient differences can be found in the final eight lines here and the final sixteen in “Version B: Pulter’s revised text.” Unlike the revised version, which alludes to Royalist lament, the early version presented here does not connect maternal grief to contemporary politics, and it dwells a little less on Jane’s physical body and the cyclical nature of grief.
To prepare this poem for a wide range of readers, I have modernized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization to conform to standard American usage, as well as expanded all contractions. I have glossed archaic definitions and confusing syntax, identified allusions, and alerted readers when the manuscript’s original spelling is especially worth considering. In my notes, I aim not to direct interpretation in a restrictive way, but to facilitate multiple interpretations of the poem by highlighting its engagement with genre, myth, and religion.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall