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Poem Index
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Notes: Transcription
Editorial note
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of
the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse
as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation,
capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines,
and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and
superscript and subscript representations are retained.
See full
conventions for the transcriptions here.
Line number 5
Physical note
ascender of initial “h” imperfectly erased; “t” written over earlier letter
Line number 7
Physical note
imperfectly erased letter visible beneath “R,” possibly “r”
Line number 18
Physical note
“ll” appears written over “th”
Line number 28
Physical note
in left margin
Line number 28
Physical note
“Shalt” cancelled with multiple horizontal strike-through and scribbles; insertion marks and “a” in different hand from main scribe
Line number 28
Physical note
“Glori” written over other letters, last with descender; “u” originally “y”; “s” also appears added later
Line number 28
Physical note
“t” added later, possibly in different hand from main scribe
Line number 30
Physical note
imperfectly erased descender on “n”
Line number 31
Physical note
“ff” scribbled out; “As” written over earlier “or”
Line number 40
Physical note
crowded between lines above and below
Line number 40
Physical note
“w” written over other letter
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with
any currently displayed witness.
Transcription
Transcription
[Emblem 40]
View But This Tulip(Emblem 40)
(Emblem 40)“View but this tulip”
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of
the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse
as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation,
capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines,
and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and
superscript and subscript representations are retained.
See full
conventions for the transcriptions here. — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers,
which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and
punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might
otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not
modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote
aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by
Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to
allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various
possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure
material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford
Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s
edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The
result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry.
See full conventions
for this edition here. — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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.” — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Can flowers be reincarnated? They can, according to this poem; and through that alleged fact the poet proffers a hopeful emblem of divine power—even though the alchemically-inspired process of resurrecting plants is described here as a labor-intensive “human art.” If mere mortals can raise the dead, the speaker asks, why doubt that God can manage as much after we die? What at first seems a general lesson framed by plural first-person pronouns, however, soon becomes more personal: the speaker shifts from reassuring what sounds like a broad audience, in diction ringing with almost professional confidence, to a much more intimate address which swings disconcertingly between God and her own soul. The speaker’s concluding analogy—if people can revivify flowers, God can revivify people—rings again with confidence, even as the hypothetical it hinges on (“If”) resurrects precisely the grounds of doubt which make such a faith-affirming poem, and others like it in Pulter’s oeuvre, necessary in the first place. — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This poem addresses palingenesis, an alchemical process by which, supposedly, a plant was reduced to ashes and then revived. If humans can accomplish such a thing, the poem asks, then why is it so hard to believe that God can resurrect humans? While it is invaluable to consider the scholarship on Pulter’s relationship to alchemy as a “discourse of change, metamorphosis, and revolution” that “provided the perfect vehicle through which to articulate, examine and understand the experience and ethics of political and religious change” (Jayne Archer, “A ‘Perfect Circle’? Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter,” Literature Compass 2 [2005], pp. 1-14, esp. p. 1), it is also important to see how Pulter sometimes critiques the pretensions of alchemy to control life and death. This poem seems to grant that palingenesis is possible or at least imaginable. The highly technical language claims palingenesis as part of experimental science, suggesting that anyone might reproduce these results with the right equipment and procedures. Indeed, the poem can be read as an experimental brief, detailing the steps (“Then” [line 7] … “Then” [line 9]) and equipment required to achieve this result. But sources through which Pulter might have learned of palingenesis vary in their confidence in the results. Kenelm Digby, for instance, who describes reading about an experiment with exactly these flowers—the rose, tulip and clove gillyflower—confides to his reader that he has tried and failed to replicate the results: “no industry of mine could effect it” (see Digby, Discourse of the Vegetation of Plants, in “Curations”). Palingenesis is always something someone else has accomplished somewhere else. One knows it by report; one accepts it on faith, if at all. The structure of the poem—if you believe this, then why not that?—begins to unravel if we do not accept the opening conceit. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania, 2015), Katherine Eggert argues that learning alchemy sometimes enabled early modern people not to learn other, more challenging disciplines. If alchemy was sometimes a way of disknowing, then what does Pulter use it here not to know? — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
40View but this Tulip, Roſe, or July fflower
View but this tulip, rose, or
Gloss Note
carnation, July flower
gillyflower,
The command or invitation to “view” and the deictic gesture to “this” that we are to view evoke the image that usually accompanied the text in emblem books. The gillyflower or carnation, a flower whose streaking depended on grafting, is the subject of debate in Shakespeare’sThe Winter’s Tale over the ethics of artful interventions in nature.
View but this tulip, rose, or
gillyflower or carnation
july flower
2
And by A ffinit See an Infinite power
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
3
Theſe fflowers into their Chaos were Retir’d
Critical Note
“chaos” here might signal the formless void thought to have existed before the universe; however, it might have been written in error (perhaps from dictation) for “cause,” since Pulter refers to things retiring into their causes in lines 17-8 here and in Universal Dissolution [Poem 6].
These flowers into their chaos were retired
These flowers into their
Critical Note
Chaos is the dark abyss of formless matter that preceded the world’s creation in many accounts; Chaos was also the first and oldest of the Greek gods. George Sandys’s translation of Ovid describes Chaos as “An undigested lump, a barren load / Where jarring seeds of things ill-joined abode” (Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures [London, 1632], sig. A1r). Lucy Hutchinson explains that “The Earth at first was a vast empty place, / A rude congestion without form or grace, / A confused mass of undistinguished seed” (Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], 1.301-303). For Pulter, chaos is the state to which living things devolve when they dissolve into their smallest constituent parts, atoms or indivisibles. Flowers have “their chaos” (line 3); humans have “our cause” (line 18).
chaos were
returned
retired,
4
Till humane Art them Raiſd and Reinſpir’d
Till human art them
Critical Note
“raised,” meaning caused to grow or rise, or restored to life; “reinspired” meaning reanimated, as if through life-giving breath; see Genesis 2:7: “God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; the speaker describes flowers that, having died, are brought back to life through a process known as palingenesis, the (supposed) regeneration of living organisms from ashes or putrefying matter.
raised and reinspired
’Til human art them raised and
Gloss Note
revived
reinspired
5
Physical Note
ascender of initial “h” imperfectly erased; “t” written over earlier letter
Whth beating, Macecrating, ffermentation
Critical Note
alchemical processes; “macerating,” for instance, is softening by steeping in a liquid; for “calcining,” or burning to ash in palingenesis, see Thomas Browne: “A plant or vegetable consumed to ashe, to a contemplative and school philosopher seems utterly destroyed, and the form to have taken his leave for ever: but to a subtle artist the forms are not perished, but withdrawn into their combustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element. This I make good by experience, and can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it to its stalk and leaves again. What the art of man can do in these inferior pieces, what blasphemy is it to imagine the finger of God cannot do in those more perfect and sensible structures?” Religio Medici (London, 1642), p. 91.
With beating, macerating, fermentation,
With beating,
Gloss Note
steeping/marinating
macerating,
Gloss Note
Fermentation here describes a productive form of decay that heats, animates, and transforms.
fermentation,
6
Calcining, Chimically, with Segregation
Calcining, chemically, with segregation;
Gloss Note
Calcining chemically means purifying alchemically through a process of “rapid, intense dry heating in a sealed vessel, reducing the matter” to dust (Archer 5).
Calcining chemically, with
Gloss Note
Segregation describes a process of purifying a substance by separating it into its constituent parts.
segregation.
7
Then least the Ayr theſe Secrets Should
Physical Note
imperfectly erased letter visible beneath “R,” possibly “r”
Reveal
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
Critical Note
Starting in this line, and extending through the next eight, the poem follows the structure of a recipe, with a sequence of imperative directions: shut up, reanimate, cool the glass. “Then” helps to convey a sequence of actions: first do this, then do that. But “then” also appears nine times in the poem, signalling how the recipe’s sequence of directives opens into the “if-then” logic of the whole poem and its attempt to apply the processes of experimental science to proving the resurrection of the flesh. “Then” also conveys the poem’s teleological focus on resurrection—the “then” that will give meaning to all that has come before.
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
8
Shut up the Aſhes under Hermes Seal
Shut up the ashes under
a hermetic seal, tight enough to exclude air; named for the Greek Hermes Trismegistus, identified with the Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as the founder of alchemy
Hermes’s seal;
Shut up the ashes under
Hermes Tresmegistus was the Egyptian originator of alchemy, author of its primary texts, and contemporary and pupil of Moses. To be under his seal is to be shut up airtight. The phrase “hermetically sealed” is still used to describe something that is airtight.
Hermes’s seal.
9
Then with A Candle or A gentle ffire
Then, with a candle or a gentle fire,
Then with a candle or a gentle fire
10
You may Reanimate at your deſire
You may reanimate at your desire
You may reanimate at your desire
11
Theſe Gallant plants, but ^if you cool ye Glaſs
These
Gloss Note
gorgeous, showy
gallant plants; but if you cool the glass,
These
Gloss Note
gorgeous
gallant plants. But, if you cool the glass,
12
To their first principles they’l quickly paſs
To their
Gloss Note
in alchemy, the substances composing all matter: mercury, salt, and sulfur (mentioned in the next line); more generally, origins, constituent parts
first principles they’ll quickly pass:
To their first principles they’ll quickly pass.
13
ffrom Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury they came
From sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
From
Critical Note
Sulfur, salt, and mercury are the three first principles of matter in alchemy, according to the sixteenth-century writer Paracelsus; that is, they are the building blocks of all matter, from which it came and to which it will return when it “dissolves.”
sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
14
When they diſſolv they turn into the Same
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
15
Then Seeing a wretched Mortall hath the power
Then, seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
Then seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
16
To Recreate a verbious of A fflower
To recreate a
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, Hippolytus is unjustly put to death by his father but brought back to life by Asclepius, a god of healing, and renamed Virbius (from vir bis, “a man twice”).
Virbius of a flower,
To
Gloss Note
Asculepius, Apollo’s son, reassembled and resurrected the pieces of Hippolytus, who had been torn to bits by horses; he was then renamed Virbius, or twice-born. See Ovid’s version of his story in Resurrections of the Body in Curations for this poem.
recreate a Virbius of a flower,
17
Why Should wee ffear, though Sadly wee Retire
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
18
Into our Caus our God
Physical Note
“ll” appears written over “th”
will Reinspire
Into our
original, formative elements
cause? Our God will reinspire
Into our cause? Our God will reinspire
19
Our dormant Dust and keep alive the Same
Our
Critical Note
“dust” here is elemental physical matter; see Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return”; it is “dormant” in awaiting resurrection at the Last Judgment.
dormant dust, and keep alive the same
Our dormant dust and keep alive the same
20
With an all Quickning Everlasting fflame
With an
Gloss Note
all-enlivening
all-quick’ning, everlasting flame.
With an all-quickening, everlasting flame.
21
Then though I into Atomes Scattred bee
Then, though I into
Gloss Note
minute and indivisible particles, seen as ultimate components of matter; in a less scientific register, very small amounts of anything
atoms scattered be,
Then though I into atoms scattered be,
22
In Indiviſables I’le trust in thee.
In
Gloss Note
atoms
indivisibles I’ll trust in Thee.
In
Gloss Note
Indivisibles are particles so tiny they cannot be subdivided; they seem to be used almost interchangeably here with atoms and even with ashes.
indivisibles I’ll trust in thee.
23
Then let this Comfort mee in my Sad Story
Then let this comfort me in my sad
Gloss Note
life
story:
Then let this comfort me in my sad story:
24
Dust is but ffour degrees Remov’d from Glory.
Dust is but four degrees removed from glory
Dust is but
Critical Note
This may refer back to the steps of palingenesis—beating, macerating, fermentation and calcining—which move the plant by nature’s paths from dust to glory or reanimation. The lines might also refer to the soul’s process of attaining glory. Richard Sibbes, in The Excellency of the Gospel above the Law (London, 1639), describes the “four degrees of the glory of a Christian” as conversion, growth of grace, enjoying the presence of God in heaven, and, finally, the perfect glory on the day of judgment when body and soul are reunited. Both the discussion of palingenesis and Sibbes’s four degrees of glorification set out recipes for extraordinary transformation.
four degrees removed from glory
by
25
By Natures Paths, but God from Death & Night
By
Critical Note
The speaker suggests heavenly glory follows from the transformation of dust, or our earthly being, along “Nature’s paths,” those derived from the four elements (earth, air, water, fire). In alchemy, fire was understood to have four degrees, the fourth being the hottest; “degree” could also refer in alchemy to successive stages of intensity in the elementary qualities of bodies (heat, cold, moisture, dryness).
Nature’s paths, but God from death and night
By nature’s paths. But God from death and night
26
Can Raise this ffleſh to endleſs life and Light
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
27
Then my impatient Soul Contented bee
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
28
Physical Note
in left margin
ffor Thou
Physical Note
“Shalt” cancelled with multiple horizontal strike-through and scribbles; insertion marks and “a” in different hand from main scribe
Shalt\a \
Physical Note
“Glori” written over other letters, last with descender; “u” originally “y”; “s” also appears added later
Glorious Spring e’re long
Physical Note
“t” added later, possibly in different hand from main scribe
Shallt See
For thou a glorious spring
Gloss Note
before
ere long shalt see.
For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see.
29
After theſe Gloomey Shades of Death and Sorrow
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
30
Thou Shalt
Physical Note
imperfectly erased descender on “n”
injoy an Everlasting Morrow
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
31
Physical Note
“ff” scribbled out; “As” written over earlier “or”
ff As Wheat in new plow’d ffurrows Rotting lies
As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies,
As wheat in new plowed furrows rotting lies,
32
Uncapable of quickning till it dies
Critical Note
The speaker refers to the need for seeds to be buried (and thus “die”) under soil in a furrow or trench in order to return to life (or “quicken”) through growth. See John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Incapable of quick’ning till it dies,
Critical Note
Pulter here seems to refer to John 12.24. But what does it mean to say that wheat does not quicken—show signs of life—until it dies? A contemporary commentary on this biblical verse explains: “A grain of wheat is said to die because the dissolution and change maketh it no longer a grain of wheat, but the seed of many new grains” (Richard Baxter, A paraphrase on the New Testament with notes, doctrinal and practical [London, 1685], “The Gospel According to St. John” (sig. D3v)). See also John Flavel, Husbandry Spiritualized, included in Resurrections of the Body.
Incapable of quickening ’til it dies,
33
Soe into dust this ffleſh of mine must turn
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn,
34
And lie a while forgotten in my Urn
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
35
Yet when the Sea, and Earth, and Hell, Shall give
Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give
Yet when the sea, and earth, and hell, shall give
36
Their Treaſures, up my Body too Shall Live
Their treasures up, my body too shall live:
Their treasures up, my body too shall live—
37
Not like the Reſurrection at Grand Caire
Critical Note
Cairo, possibly identified here with the ancient Egyptian custom of mummifying the dead whole in anticipation of resurrection (one the speaker presumes, in the next line, will be disappointed), or with travellers’ tales, like that of John Greaves, who refers to “the tradition of the rising of dead men’s bones every year in Egypt: a thing superstitiously believed by the Christians.” Pyramidographia, or, A Description of the Pyramids in Egypt (London, 1646), p. 142.
Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire,
Not like the
Critical Note
Eardley identifies a late seventeenth-century account of an annual resurrection in Cairo, Egypt in her invaluable reflections on glossing this poem and Pulter in general. In the passage she cites, this story is recounted as a fraud and no mention is made of the despair following the resurrection. “To these curiosities of Egypt, I might here add that supernatural (but fictitious) prodigy, that’s reported to be yearly seen near to old Caire, viz. the annual resurrection of many dead bones on Holy Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (according to the Old Calendar), which both Turks and Christians in those parts, do firmly believe, and that by the means of some pious frauds, of a few designing santos among them” (Patrick Gordon, Geography Anatomized, or, The Complete Geographical Grammar Being a Short and Exact Analysis of the Whole Body of Modern Geography after a New and Curious Method [London: 1699], p. 296). See Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” SEL 52.1 (Winter 2012): 117-41. Leah Knight has identified a much earlier (and deliciously gruesome) account of this annual resurrection, from Simon Goulart’s Admirable and Memorable Histories (1607), included in Resurrections of the Body. Goulart’s account goes to great lengths to discuss his sources and controversies surrounding this “marvelous apparition.” As detailed as his account is, it does not refer to the despair of those who have been resurrected (for whom he uses the word “resusstitants”). In Herodotus’s account, in Book 2 of the Histories, of the annual rituals celebrating the resurrection of Osiris, he claims, “after the sacrifice [of Osiris], all the men and women lament, in countless numbers; but it is not pious for me to say who it is for whom they lament” (2.61.1).
resurrection at Grand Caire,
38
Where men Revive then straight of Life deſpair
Where men revive, then straight of life despair;
Where men revive then straight of life despair—
39
But with my Soul my ffleſh Shall Reunite
But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite
But with my soul my flesh shall reunite,
40
Physical Note
crowded between lines above and below
And ne’re involve’d bee
Physical Note
“w” written over other letter
with Death and Night
Physical Note
This line was inserted after those above and below, in the same hand but slightly smaller script and darker ink, to form a rhyming triplet.
And ne’er involvéd be with death and night,
Critical Note
This line was inserted in the middle of a couplet in the manuscript, in the same hand but in smaller, darker ink. This addition turns lines 39-41 into a triplet, the only one in a poem made up of rhyming couplets. The added line interrupts the desired consummation towards which the poem builds—the reunion of soul and body—to remind the reader one more time of the death and night from which this reunion will release both soul and body into endless pleasure. The triplet ensures just a bit more time to reflect on this remarkable prospect. The poem does not quite recover from the interruption of its rhyming couplets created by the added line. The last two couplets all end in the same rhyme, doubling down on the emphasis on God’s power over dissolution, and using the first and last rhymes in the quadruplet to link God (the first “thee”) to the reader (the final “thee”). But the “if” clause at the start of the final line threatens to unsettle this insistence: “if” man can raise a flower … but what if he can’t?
And ne’er involved be with death and night,
41
But live in endleſs pleaſure Love & Light
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
42
Then Halelujahs will I Sing to thee
Then
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God
hallelujahs will I sing to Thee,
Then hallelujahs will I sing to thee,
43
My Gracious God to all Eternitie
My gracious God, to all eternity.
My gracious God to all eternity.
44
Then at thy diſſolution patient bee
Then at thy dissolution patient be:
Then at thy dissolution patient be.
45
If Man can Raiſe a fflower God can thee
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.
Notes: Elemental Edition
Editorial note
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers,
which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and
punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might
otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not
modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote
aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by
Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to
allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various
possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure
material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford
Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s
edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The
result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry.
See full conventions
for this edition here.
Headnote
Can flowers be reincarnated? They can, according to this poem; and through that alleged fact the poet proffers a hopeful emblem of divine power—even though the alchemically-inspired process of resurrecting plants is described here as a labor-intensive “human art.” If mere mortals can raise the dead, the speaker asks, why doubt that God can manage as much after we die? What at first seems a general lesson framed by plural first-person pronouns, however, soon becomes more personal: the speaker shifts from reassuring what sounds like a broad audience, in diction ringing with almost professional confidence, to a much more intimate address which swings disconcertingly between God and her own soul. The speaker’s concluding analogy—if people can revivify flowers, God can revivify people—rings again with confidence, even as the hypothetical it hinges on (“If”) resurrects precisely the grounds of doubt which make such a faith-affirming poem, and others like it in Pulter’s oeuvre, necessary in the first place.
Line number 1
Gloss note
carnation, July flower
Line number 3
Critical note
“chaos” here might signal the formless void thought to have existed before the universe; however, it might have been written in error (perhaps from dictation) for “cause,” since Pulter refers to things retiring into their causes in lines 17-8 here and in Universal Dissolution [Poem 6].
Line number 4
Critical note
“raised,” meaning caused to grow or rise, or restored to life; “reinspired” meaning reanimated, as if through life-giving breath; see Genesis 2:7: “God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; the speaker describes flowers that, having died, are brought back to life through a process known as palingenesis, the (supposed) regeneration of living organisms from ashes or putrefying matter.
Line number 5
Critical note
alchemical processes; “macerating,” for instance, is softening by steeping in a liquid; for “calcining,” or burning to ash in palingenesis, see Thomas Browne: “A plant or vegetable consumed to ashe, to a contemplative and school philosopher seems utterly destroyed, and the form to have taken his leave for ever: but to a subtle artist the forms are not perished, but withdrawn into their combustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element. This I make good by experience, and can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it to its stalk and leaves again. What the art of man can do in these inferior pieces, what blasphemy is it to imagine the finger of God cannot do in those more perfect and sensible structures?” Religio Medici (London, 1642), p. 91.
Line number 8
a hermetic seal, tight enough to exclude air; named for the Greek Hermes Trismegistus, identified with the Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as the founder of alchemy
Line number 11
Gloss note
gorgeous, showy
Line number 12
Gloss note
in alchemy, the substances composing all matter: mercury, salt, and sulfur (mentioned in the next line); more generally, origins, constituent parts
Line number 16
Gloss note
In Greek myth, Hippolytus is unjustly put to death by his father but brought back to life by Asclepius, a god of healing, and renamed Virbius (from vir bis, “a man twice”).
Line number 18
original, formative elements
Line number 19
Critical note
“dust” here is elemental physical matter; see Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return”; it is “dormant” in awaiting resurrection at the Last Judgment.
Line number 20
Gloss note
all-enlivening
Line number 21
Gloss note
minute and indivisible particles, seen as ultimate components of matter; in a less scientific register, very small amounts of anything
Line number 22
Gloss note
atoms
Line number 23
Gloss note
life
Line number 25
Critical note
The speaker suggests heavenly glory follows from the transformation of dust, or our earthly being, along “Nature’s paths,” those derived from the four elements (earth, air, water, fire). In alchemy, fire was understood to have four degrees, the fourth being the hottest; “degree” could also refer in alchemy to successive stages of intensity in the elementary qualities of bodies (heat, cold, moisture, dryness).
Line number 28
Gloss note
before
Line number 32
Critical note
The speaker refers to the need for seeds to be buried (and thus “die”) under soil in a furrow or trench in order to return to life (or “quicken”) through growth. See John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Line number 37
Critical note
Cairo, possibly identified here with the ancient Egyptian custom of mummifying the dead whole in anticipation of resurrection (one the speaker presumes, in the next line, will be disappointed), or with travellers’ tales, like that of John Greaves, who refers to “the tradition of the rising of dead men’s bones every year in Egypt: a thing superstitiously believed by the Christians.” Pyramidographia, or, A Description of the Pyramids in Egypt (London, 1646), p. 142.
Line number 40
Physical note
This line was inserted after those above and below, in the same hand but slightly smaller script and darker ink, to form a rhyming triplet.
Line number 42
Gloss note
songs of praise to God
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with
any currently displayed witness.
Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition
[Emblem 40]
View But This Tulip(Emblem 40)
(Emblem 40)“View but this tulip”
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of
the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse
as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation,
capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines,
and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and
superscript and subscript representations are retained.
See full
conventions for the transcriptions here. — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers,
which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and
punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might
otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not
modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote
aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by
Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to
allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various
possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure
material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford
Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s
edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The
result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry.
See full conventions
for this edition here. — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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.” — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Can flowers be reincarnated? They can, according to this poem; and through that alleged fact the poet proffers a hopeful emblem of divine power—even though the alchemically-inspired process of resurrecting plants is described here as a labor-intensive “human art.” If mere mortals can raise the dead, the speaker asks, why doubt that God can manage as much after we die? What at first seems a general lesson framed by plural first-person pronouns, however, soon becomes more personal: the speaker shifts from reassuring what sounds like a broad audience, in diction ringing with almost professional confidence, to a much more intimate address which swings disconcertingly between God and her own soul. The speaker’s concluding analogy—if people can revivify flowers, God can revivify people—rings again with confidence, even as the hypothetical it hinges on (“If”) resurrects precisely the grounds of doubt which make such a faith-affirming poem, and others like it in Pulter’s oeuvre, necessary in the first place. — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This poem addresses palingenesis, an alchemical process by which, supposedly, a plant was reduced to ashes and then revived. If humans can accomplish such a thing, the poem asks, then why is it so hard to believe that God can resurrect humans? While it is invaluable to consider the scholarship on Pulter’s relationship to alchemy as a “discourse of change, metamorphosis, and revolution” that “provided the perfect vehicle through which to articulate, examine and understand the experience and ethics of political and religious change” (Jayne Archer, “A ‘Perfect Circle’? Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter,” Literature Compass 2 [2005], pp. 1-14, esp. p. 1), it is also important to see how Pulter sometimes critiques the pretensions of alchemy to control life and death. This poem seems to grant that palingenesis is possible or at least imaginable. The highly technical language claims palingenesis as part of experimental science, suggesting that anyone might reproduce these results with the right equipment and procedures. Indeed, the poem can be read as an experimental brief, detailing the steps (“Then” [line 7] … “Then” [line 9]) and equipment required to achieve this result. But sources through which Pulter might have learned of palingenesis vary in their confidence in the results. Kenelm Digby, for instance, who describes reading about an experiment with exactly these flowers—the rose, tulip and clove gillyflower—confides to his reader that he has tried and failed to replicate the results: “no industry of mine could effect it” (see Digby, Discourse of the Vegetation of Plants, in “Curations”). Palingenesis is always something someone else has accomplished somewhere else. One knows it by report; one accepts it on faith, if at all. The structure of the poem—if you believe this, then why not that?—begins to unravel if we do not accept the opening conceit. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania, 2015), Katherine Eggert argues that learning alchemy sometimes enabled early modern people not to learn other, more challenging disciplines. If alchemy was sometimes a way of disknowing, then what does Pulter use it here not to know? — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
40View but this Tulip, Roſe, or July fflower
View but this tulip, rose, or
Gloss Note
carnation, July flower
gillyflower,
The command or invitation to “view” and the deictic gesture to “this” that we are to view evoke the image that usually accompanied the text in emblem books. The gillyflower or carnation, a flower whose streaking depended on grafting, is the subject of debate in Shakespeare’sThe Winter’s Tale over the ethics of artful interventions in nature.
View but this tulip, rose, or
gillyflower or carnation
july flower
2
And by A ffinit See an Infinite power
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
3
Theſe fflowers into their Chaos were Retir’d
Critical Note
“chaos” here might signal the formless void thought to have existed before the universe; however, it might have been written in error (perhaps from dictation) for “cause,” since Pulter refers to things retiring into their causes in lines 17-8 here and in Universal Dissolution [Poem 6].
These flowers into their chaos were retired
These flowers into their
Critical Note
Chaos is the dark abyss of formless matter that preceded the world’s creation in many accounts; Chaos was also the first and oldest of the Greek gods. George Sandys’s translation of Ovid describes Chaos as “An undigested lump, a barren load / Where jarring seeds of things ill-joined abode” (Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures [London, 1632], sig. A1r). Lucy Hutchinson explains that “The Earth at first was a vast empty place, / A rude congestion without form or grace, / A confused mass of undistinguished seed” (Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], 1.301-303). For Pulter, chaos is the state to which living things devolve when they dissolve into their smallest constituent parts, atoms or indivisibles. Flowers have “their chaos” (line 3); humans have “our cause” (line 18).
chaos were
returned
retired,
4
Till humane Art them Raiſd and Reinſpir’d
Till human art them
Critical Note
“raised,” meaning caused to grow or rise, or restored to life; “reinspired” meaning reanimated, as if through life-giving breath; see Genesis 2:7: “God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; the speaker describes flowers that, having died, are brought back to life through a process known as palingenesis, the (supposed) regeneration of living organisms from ashes or putrefying matter.
raised and reinspired
’Til human art them raised and
Gloss Note
revived
reinspired
5
Physical Note
ascender of initial “h” imperfectly erased; “t” written over earlier letter
Whth beating, Macecrating, ffermentation
Critical Note
alchemical processes; “macerating,” for instance, is softening by steeping in a liquid; for “calcining,” or burning to ash in palingenesis, see Thomas Browne: “A plant or vegetable consumed to ashe, to a contemplative and school philosopher seems utterly destroyed, and the form to have taken his leave for ever: but to a subtle artist the forms are not perished, but withdrawn into their combustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element. This I make good by experience, and can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it to its stalk and leaves again. What the art of man can do in these inferior pieces, what blasphemy is it to imagine the finger of God cannot do in those more perfect and sensible structures?” Religio Medici (London, 1642), p. 91.
With beating, macerating, fermentation,
With beating,
Gloss Note
steeping/marinating
macerating,
Gloss Note
Fermentation here describes a productive form of decay that heats, animates, and transforms.
fermentation,
6
Calcining, Chimically, with Segregation
Calcining, chemically, with segregation;
Gloss Note
Calcining chemically means purifying alchemically through a process of “rapid, intense dry heating in a sealed vessel, reducing the matter” to dust (Archer 5).
Calcining chemically, with
Gloss Note
Segregation describes a process of purifying a substance by separating it into its constituent parts.
segregation.
7
Then least the Ayr theſe Secrets Should
Physical Note
imperfectly erased letter visible beneath “R,” possibly “r”
Reveal
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
Critical Note
Starting in this line, and extending through the next eight, the poem follows the structure of a recipe, with a sequence of imperative directions: shut up, reanimate, cool the glass. “Then” helps to convey a sequence of actions: first do this, then do that. But “then” also appears nine times in the poem, signalling how the recipe’s sequence of directives opens into the “if-then” logic of the whole poem and its attempt to apply the processes of experimental science to proving the resurrection of the flesh. “Then” also conveys the poem’s teleological focus on resurrection—the “then” that will give meaning to all that has come before.
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
8
Shut up the Aſhes under Hermes Seal
Shut up the ashes under
a hermetic seal, tight enough to exclude air; named for the Greek Hermes Trismegistus, identified with the Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as the founder of alchemy
Hermes’s seal;
Shut up the ashes under
Hermes Tresmegistus was the Egyptian originator of alchemy, author of its primary texts, and contemporary and pupil of Moses. To be under his seal is to be shut up airtight. The phrase “hermetically sealed” is still used to describe something that is airtight.
Hermes’s seal.
9
Then with A Candle or A gentle ffire
Then, with a candle or a gentle fire,
Then with a candle or a gentle fire
10
You may Reanimate at your deſire
You may reanimate at your desire
You may reanimate at your desire
11
Theſe Gallant plants, but ^if you cool ye Glaſs
These
Gloss Note
gorgeous, showy
gallant plants; but if you cool the glass,
These
Gloss Note
gorgeous
gallant plants. But, if you cool the glass,
12
To their first principles they’l quickly paſs
To their
Gloss Note
in alchemy, the substances composing all matter: mercury, salt, and sulfur (mentioned in the next line); more generally, origins, constituent parts
first principles they’ll quickly pass:
To their first principles they’ll quickly pass.
13
ffrom Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury they came
From sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
From
Critical Note
Sulfur, salt, and mercury are the three first principles of matter in alchemy, according to the sixteenth-century writer Paracelsus; that is, they are the building blocks of all matter, from which it came and to which it will return when it “dissolves.”
sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
14
When they diſſolv they turn into the Same
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
15
Then Seeing a wretched Mortall hath the power
Then, seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
Then seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
16
To Recreate a verbious of A fflower
To recreate a
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, Hippolytus is unjustly put to death by his father but brought back to life by Asclepius, a god of healing, and renamed Virbius (from vir bis, “a man twice”).
Virbius of a flower,
To
Gloss Note
Asculepius, Apollo’s son, reassembled and resurrected the pieces of Hippolytus, who had been torn to bits by horses; he was then renamed Virbius, or twice-born. See Ovid’s version of his story in Resurrections of the Body in Curations for this poem.
recreate a Virbius of a flower,
17
Why Should wee ffear, though Sadly wee Retire
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
18
Into our Caus our God
Physical Note
“ll” appears written over “th”
will Reinspire
Into our
original, formative elements
cause? Our God will reinspire
Into our cause? Our God will reinspire
19
Our dormant Dust and keep alive the Same
Our
Critical Note
“dust” here is elemental physical matter; see Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return”; it is “dormant” in awaiting resurrection at the Last Judgment.
dormant dust, and keep alive the same
Our dormant dust and keep alive the same
20
With an all Quickning Everlasting fflame
With an
Gloss Note
all-enlivening
all-quick’ning, everlasting flame.
With an all-quickening, everlasting flame.
21
Then though I into Atomes Scattred bee
Then, though I into
Gloss Note
minute and indivisible particles, seen as ultimate components of matter; in a less scientific register, very small amounts of anything
atoms scattered be,
Then though I into atoms scattered be,
22
In Indiviſables I’le trust in thee.
In
Gloss Note
atoms
indivisibles I’ll trust in Thee.
In
Gloss Note
Indivisibles are particles so tiny they cannot be subdivided; they seem to be used almost interchangeably here with atoms and even with ashes.
indivisibles I’ll trust in thee.
23
Then let this Comfort mee in my Sad Story
Then let this comfort me in my sad
Gloss Note
life
story:
Then let this comfort me in my sad story:
24
Dust is but ffour degrees Remov’d from Glory.
Dust is but four degrees removed from glory
Dust is but
Critical Note
This may refer back to the steps of palingenesis—beating, macerating, fermentation and calcining—which move the plant by nature’s paths from dust to glory or reanimation. The lines might also refer to the soul’s process of attaining glory. Richard Sibbes, in The Excellency of the Gospel above the Law (London, 1639), describes the “four degrees of the glory of a Christian” as conversion, growth of grace, enjoying the presence of God in heaven, and, finally, the perfect glory on the day of judgment when body and soul are reunited. Both the discussion of palingenesis and Sibbes’s four degrees of glorification set out recipes for extraordinary transformation.
four degrees removed from glory
by
25
By Natures Paths, but God from Death & Night
By
Critical Note
The speaker suggests heavenly glory follows from the transformation of dust, or our earthly being, along “Nature’s paths,” those derived from the four elements (earth, air, water, fire). In alchemy, fire was understood to have four degrees, the fourth being the hottest; “degree” could also refer in alchemy to successive stages of intensity in the elementary qualities of bodies (heat, cold, moisture, dryness).
Nature’s paths, but God from death and night
By nature’s paths. But God from death and night
26
Can Raise this ffleſh to endleſs life and Light
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
27
Then my impatient Soul Contented bee
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
28
Physical Note
in left margin
ffor Thou
Physical Note
“Shalt” cancelled with multiple horizontal strike-through and scribbles; insertion marks and “a” in different hand from main scribe
Shalt\a \
Physical Note
“Glori” written over other letters, last with descender; “u” originally “y”; “s” also appears added later
Glorious Spring e’re long
Physical Note
“t” added later, possibly in different hand from main scribe
Shallt See
For thou a glorious spring
Gloss Note
before
ere long shalt see.
For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see.
29
After theſe Gloomey Shades of Death and Sorrow
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
30
Thou Shalt
Physical Note
imperfectly erased descender on “n”
injoy an Everlasting Morrow
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
31
Physical Note
“ff” scribbled out; “As” written over earlier “or”
ff As Wheat in new plow’d ffurrows Rotting lies
As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies,
As wheat in new plowed furrows rotting lies,
32
Uncapable of quickning till it dies
Critical Note
The speaker refers to the need for seeds to be buried (and thus “die”) under soil in a furrow or trench in order to return to life (or “quicken”) through growth. See John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Incapable of quick’ning till it dies,
Critical Note
Pulter here seems to refer to John 12.24. But what does it mean to say that wheat does not quicken—show signs of life—until it dies? A contemporary commentary on this biblical verse explains: “A grain of wheat is said to die because the dissolution and change maketh it no longer a grain of wheat, but the seed of many new grains” (Richard Baxter, A paraphrase on the New Testament with notes, doctrinal and practical [London, 1685], “The Gospel According to St. John” (sig. D3v)). See also John Flavel, Husbandry Spiritualized, included in Resurrections of the Body.
Incapable of quickening ’til it dies,
33
Soe into dust this ffleſh of mine must turn
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn,
34
And lie a while forgotten in my Urn
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
35
Yet when the Sea, and Earth, and Hell, Shall give
Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give
Yet when the sea, and earth, and hell, shall give
36
Their Treaſures, up my Body too Shall Live
Their treasures up, my body too shall live:
Their treasures up, my body too shall live—
37
Not like the Reſurrection at Grand Caire
Critical Note
Cairo, possibly identified here with the ancient Egyptian custom of mummifying the dead whole in anticipation of resurrection (one the speaker presumes, in the next line, will be disappointed), or with travellers’ tales, like that of John Greaves, who refers to “the tradition of the rising of dead men’s bones every year in Egypt: a thing superstitiously believed by the Christians.” Pyramidographia, or, A Description of the Pyramids in Egypt (London, 1646), p. 142.
Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire,
Not like the
Critical Note
Eardley identifies a late seventeenth-century account of an annual resurrection in Cairo, Egypt in her invaluable reflections on glossing this poem and Pulter in general. In the passage she cites, this story is recounted as a fraud and no mention is made of the despair following the resurrection. “To these curiosities of Egypt, I might here add that supernatural (but fictitious) prodigy, that’s reported to be yearly seen near to old Caire, viz. the annual resurrection of many dead bones on Holy Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (according to the Old Calendar), which both Turks and Christians in those parts, do firmly believe, and that by the means of some pious frauds, of a few designing santos among them” (Patrick Gordon, Geography Anatomized, or, The Complete Geographical Grammar Being a Short and Exact Analysis of the Whole Body of Modern Geography after a New and Curious Method [London: 1699], p. 296). See Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” SEL 52.1 (Winter 2012): 117-41. Leah Knight has identified a much earlier (and deliciously gruesome) account of this annual resurrection, from Simon Goulart’s Admirable and Memorable Histories (1607), included in Resurrections of the Body. Goulart’s account goes to great lengths to discuss his sources and controversies surrounding this “marvelous apparition.” As detailed as his account is, it does not refer to the despair of those who have been resurrected (for whom he uses the word “resusstitants”). In Herodotus’s account, in Book 2 of the Histories, of the annual rituals celebrating the resurrection of Osiris, he claims, “after the sacrifice [of Osiris], all the men and women lament, in countless numbers; but it is not pious for me to say who it is for whom they lament” (2.61.1).
resurrection at Grand Caire,
38
Where men Revive then straight of Life deſpair
Where men revive, then straight of life despair;
Where men revive then straight of life despair—
39
But with my Soul my ffleſh Shall Reunite
But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite
But with my soul my flesh shall reunite,
40
Physical Note
crowded between lines above and below
And ne’re involve’d bee
Physical Note
“w” written over other letter
with Death and Night
Physical Note
This line was inserted after those above and below, in the same hand but slightly smaller script and darker ink, to form a rhyming triplet.
And ne’er involvéd be with death and night,
Critical Note
This line was inserted in the middle of a couplet in the manuscript, in the same hand but in smaller, darker ink. This addition turns lines 39-41 into a triplet, the only one in a poem made up of rhyming couplets. The added line interrupts the desired consummation towards which the poem builds—the reunion of soul and body—to remind the reader one more time of the death and night from which this reunion will release both soul and body into endless pleasure. The triplet ensures just a bit more time to reflect on this remarkable prospect. The poem does not quite recover from the interruption of its rhyming couplets created by the added line. The last two couplets all end in the same rhyme, doubling down on the emphasis on God’s power over dissolution, and using the first and last rhymes in the quadruplet to link God (the first “thee”) to the reader (the final “thee”). But the “if” clause at the start of the final line threatens to unsettle this insistence: “if” man can raise a flower … but what if he can’t?
And ne’er involved be with death and night,
41
But live in endleſs pleaſure Love & Light
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
42
Then Halelujahs will I Sing to thee
Then
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God
hallelujahs will I sing to Thee,
Then hallelujahs will I sing to thee,
43
My Gracious God to all Eternitie
My gracious God, to all eternity.
My gracious God to all eternity.
44
Then at thy diſſolution patient bee
Then at thy dissolution patient be:
Then at thy dissolution patient be.
45
If Man can Raiſe a fflower God can thee
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.
Notes: Amplified Edition
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
This poem addresses palingenesis, an alchemical process by which, supposedly, a plant was reduced to ashes and then revived. If humans can accomplish such a thing, the poem asks, then why is it so hard to believe that God can resurrect humans? While it is invaluable to consider the scholarship on Pulter’s relationship to alchemy as a “discourse of change, metamorphosis, and revolution” that “provided the perfect vehicle through which to articulate, examine and understand the experience and ethics of political and religious change” (Jayne Archer, “A ‘Perfect Circle’? Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter,” Literature Compass 2 [2005], pp. 1-14, esp. p. 1), it is also important to see how Pulter sometimes critiques the pretensions of alchemy to control life and death. This poem seems to grant that palingenesis is possible or at least imaginable. The highly technical language claims palingenesis as part of experimental science, suggesting that anyone might reproduce these results with the right equipment and procedures. Indeed, the poem can be read as an experimental brief, detailing the steps (“Then” [line 7] … “Then” [line 9]) and equipment required to achieve this result. But sources through which Pulter might have learned of palingenesis vary in their confidence in the results. Kenelm Digby, for instance, who describes reading about an experiment with exactly these flowers—the rose, tulip and clove gillyflower—confides to his reader that he has tried and failed to replicate the results: “no industry of mine could effect it” (see Digby, Discourse of the Vegetation of Plants, in “Curations”). Palingenesis is always something someone else has accomplished somewhere else. One knows it by report; one accepts it on faith, if at all. The structure of the poem—if you believe this, then why not that?—begins to unravel if we do not accept the opening conceit. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania, 2015), Katherine Eggert argues that learning alchemy sometimes enabled early modern people not to learn other, more challenging disciplines. If alchemy was sometimes a way of disknowing, then what does Pulter use it here not to know?
Line number 1
The command or invitation to “view” and the deictic gesture to “this” that we are to view evoke the image that usually accompanied the text in emblem books. The gillyflower or carnation, a flower whose streaking depended on grafting, is the subject of debate in Shakespeare’sThe Winter’s Tale over the ethics of artful interventions in nature.
Line number 1
gillyflower or carnation
Line number 3
Critical note
Chaos is the dark abyss of formless matter that preceded the world’s creation in many accounts; Chaos was also the first and oldest of the Greek gods. George Sandys’s translation of Ovid describes Chaos as “An undigested lump, a barren load / Where jarring seeds of things ill-joined abode” (Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures [London, 1632], sig. A1r). Lucy Hutchinson explains that “The Earth at first was a vast empty place, / A rude congestion without form or grace, / A confused mass of undistinguished seed” (Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], 1.301-303). For Pulter, chaos is the state to which living things devolve when they dissolve into their smallest constituent parts, atoms or indivisibles. Flowers have “their chaos” (line 3); humans have “our cause” (line 18).
Line number 3
returned
Line number 4
Gloss note
revived
Line number 5
Gloss note
steeping/marinating
Line number 5
Gloss note
Fermentation here describes a productive form of decay that heats, animates, and transforms.
Line number 6
Gloss note
Calcining chemically means purifying alchemically through a process of “rapid, intense dry heating in a sealed vessel, reducing the matter” to dust (Archer 5).
Line number 6
Gloss note
Segregation describes a process of purifying a substance by separating it into its constituent parts.
Line number 7
Critical note
Starting in this line, and extending through the next eight, the poem follows the structure of a recipe, with a sequence of imperative directions: shut up, reanimate, cool the glass. “Then” helps to convey a sequence of actions: first do this, then do that. But “then” also appears nine times in the poem, signalling how the recipe’s sequence of directives opens into the “if-then” logic of the whole poem and its attempt to apply the processes of experimental science to proving the resurrection of the flesh. “Then” also conveys the poem’s teleological focus on resurrection—the “then” that will give meaning to all that has come before.
Line number 8
Hermes Tresmegistus was the Egyptian originator of alchemy, author of its primary texts, and contemporary and pupil of Moses. To be under his seal is to be shut up airtight. The phrase “hermetically sealed” is still used to describe something that is airtight.
Line number 11
Gloss note
gorgeous
Line number 13
Critical note
Sulfur, salt, and mercury are the three first principles of matter in alchemy, according to the sixteenth-century writer Paracelsus; that is, they are the building blocks of all matter, from which it came and to which it will return when it “dissolves.”
Line number 16
Gloss note
Asculepius, Apollo’s son, reassembled and resurrected the pieces of Hippolytus, who had been torn to bits by horses; he was then renamed Virbius, or twice-born. See Ovid’s version of his story in Resurrections of the Body in Curations for this poem.
Line number 22
Gloss note
Indivisibles are particles so tiny they cannot be subdivided; they seem to be used almost interchangeably here with atoms and even with ashes.
Line number 24
Critical note
This may refer back to the steps of palingenesis—beating, macerating, fermentation and calcining—which move the plant by nature’s paths from dust to glory or reanimation. The lines might also refer to the soul’s process of attaining glory. Richard Sibbes, in The Excellency of the Gospel above the Law (London, 1639), describes the “four degrees of the glory of a Christian” as conversion, growth of grace, enjoying the presence of God in heaven, and, finally, the perfect glory on the day of judgment when body and soul are reunited. Both the discussion of palingenesis and Sibbes’s four degrees of glorification set out recipes for extraordinary transformation.
Line number 32
Critical note
Pulter here seems to refer to John 12.24. But what does it mean to say that wheat does not quicken—show signs of life—until it dies? A contemporary commentary on this biblical verse explains: “A grain of wheat is said to die because the dissolution and change maketh it no longer a grain of wheat, but the seed of many new grains” (Richard Baxter, A paraphrase on the New Testament with notes, doctrinal and practical [London, 1685], “The Gospel According to St. John” (sig. D3v)). See also John Flavel, Husbandry Spiritualized, included in Resurrections of the Body.
Line number 37
Critical note
Eardley identifies a late seventeenth-century account of an annual resurrection in Cairo, Egypt in her invaluable reflections on glossing this poem and Pulter in general. In the passage she cites, this story is recounted as a fraud and no mention is made of the despair following the resurrection. “To these curiosities of Egypt, I might here add that supernatural (but fictitious) prodigy, that’s reported to be yearly seen near to old Caire, viz. the annual resurrection of many dead bones on Holy Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (according to the Old Calendar), which both Turks and Christians in those parts, do firmly believe, and that by the means of some pious frauds, of a few designing santos among them” (Patrick Gordon, Geography Anatomized, or, The Complete Geographical Grammar Being a Short and Exact Analysis of the Whole Body of Modern Geography after a New and Curious Method [London: 1699], p. 296). See Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” SEL 52.1 (Winter 2012): 117-41. Leah Knight has identified a much earlier (and deliciously gruesome) account of this annual resurrection, from Simon Goulart’s Admirable and Memorable Histories (1607), included in Resurrections of the Body. Goulart’s account goes to great lengths to discuss his sources and controversies surrounding this “marvelous apparition.” As detailed as his account is, it does not refer to the despair of those who have been resurrected (for whom he uses the word “resusstitants”). In Herodotus’s account, in Book 2 of the Histories, of the annual rituals celebrating the resurrection of Osiris, he claims, “after the sacrifice [of Osiris], all the men and women lament, in countless numbers; but it is not pious for me to say who it is for whom they lament” (2.61.1).
Line number 40
Critical note
This line was inserted in the middle of a couplet in the manuscript, in the same hand but in smaller, darker ink. This addition turns lines 39-41 into a triplet, the only one in a poem made up of rhyming couplets. The added line interrupts the desired consummation towards which the poem builds—the reunion of soul and body—to remind the reader one more time of the death and night from which this reunion will release both soul and body into endless pleasure. The triplet ensures just a bit more time to reflect on this remarkable prospect. The poem does not quite recover from the interruption of its rhyming couplets created by the added line. The last two couplets all end in the same rhyme, doubling down on the emphasis on God’s power over dissolution, and using the first and last rhymes in the quadruplet to link God (the first “thee”) to the reader (the final “thee”). But the “if” clause at the start of the final line threatens to unsettle this insistence: “if” man can raise a flower … but what if he can’t?
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Amplified Edition
Amplified Edition
[Emblem 40]
View But This Tulip(Emblem 40)
(Emblem 40)“View but this tulip”
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of
the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse
as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation,
capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines,
and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and
superscript and subscript representations are retained.
See full
conventions for the transcriptions here. — Frances E. Dolan
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers,
which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and
punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might
otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not
modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote
aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by
Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to
allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various
possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure
material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford
Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s
edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The
result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry.
See full conventions
for this edition here. — Frances E. Dolan
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.” — Frances E. Dolan
Can flowers be reincarnated? They can, according to this poem; and through that alleged fact the poet proffers a hopeful emblem of divine power—even though the alchemically-inspired process of resurrecting plants is described here as a labor-intensive “human art.” If mere mortals can raise the dead, the speaker asks, why doubt that God can manage as much after we die? What at first seems a general lesson framed by plural first-person pronouns, however, soon becomes more personal: the speaker shifts from reassuring what sounds like a broad audience, in diction ringing with almost professional confidence, to a much more intimate address which swings disconcertingly between God and her own soul. The speaker’s concluding analogy—if people can revivify flowers, God can revivify people—rings again with confidence, even as the hypothetical it hinges on (“If”) resurrects precisely the grounds of doubt which make such a faith-affirming poem, and others like it in Pulter’s oeuvre, necessary in the first place. — Frances E. Dolan
This poem addresses palingenesis, an alchemical process by which, supposedly, a plant was reduced to ashes and then revived. If humans can accomplish such a thing, the poem asks, then why is it so hard to believe that God can resurrect humans? While it is invaluable to consider the scholarship on Pulter’s relationship to alchemy as a “discourse of change, metamorphosis, and revolution” that “provided the perfect vehicle through which to articulate, examine and understand the experience and ethics of political and religious change” (Jayne Archer, “A ‘Perfect Circle’? Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter,” Literature Compass 2 [2005], pp. 1-14, esp. p. 1), it is also important to see how Pulter sometimes critiques the pretensions of alchemy to control life and death. This poem seems to grant that palingenesis is possible or at least imaginable. The highly technical language claims palingenesis as part of experimental science, suggesting that anyone might reproduce these results with the right equipment and procedures. Indeed, the poem can be read as an experimental brief, detailing the steps (“Then” [line 7] … “Then” [line 9]) and equipment required to achieve this result. But sources through which Pulter might have learned of palingenesis vary in their confidence in the results. Kenelm Digby, for instance, who describes reading about an experiment with exactly these flowers—the rose, tulip and clove gillyflower—confides to his reader that he has tried and failed to replicate the results: “no industry of mine could effect it” (see Digby, Discourse of the Vegetation of Plants, in “Curations”). Palingenesis is always something someone else has accomplished somewhere else. One knows it by report; one accepts it on faith, if at all. The structure of the poem—if you believe this, then why not that?—begins to unravel if we do not accept the opening conceit. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania, 2015), Katherine Eggert argues that learning alchemy sometimes enabled early modern people not to learn other, more challenging disciplines. If alchemy was sometimes a way of disknowing, then what does Pulter use it here not to know? — Frances E. Dolan
1
40View but this Tulip, Roſe, or July fflower
View but this tulip, rose, or
Gloss Note
carnation, July flower
gillyflower,
The command or invitation to “view” and the deictic gesture to “this” that we are to view evoke the image that usually accompanied the text in emblem books. The gillyflower or carnation, a flower whose streaking depended on grafting, is the subject of debate in Shakespeare’sThe Winter’s Tale over the ethics of artful interventions in nature.
View but this tulip, rose, or
gillyflower or carnation
july flower
2
And by A ffinit See an Infinite power
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
3
Theſe fflowers into their Chaos were Retir’d
Critical Note
“chaos” here might signal the formless void thought to have existed before the universe; however, it might have been written in error (perhaps from dictation) for “cause,” since Pulter refers to things retiring into their causes in lines 17-8 here and in Universal Dissolution [Poem 6].
These flowers into their chaos were retired
These flowers into their
Critical Note
Chaos is the dark abyss of formless matter that preceded the world’s creation in many accounts; Chaos was also the first and oldest of the Greek gods. George Sandys’s translation of Ovid describes Chaos as “An undigested lump, a barren load / Where jarring seeds of things ill-joined abode” (Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures [London, 1632], sig. A1r). Lucy Hutchinson explains that “The Earth at first was a vast empty place, / A rude congestion without form or grace, / A confused mass of undistinguished seed” (Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], 1.301-303). For Pulter, chaos is the state to which living things devolve when they dissolve into their smallest constituent parts, atoms or indivisibles. Flowers have “their chaos” (line 3); humans have “our cause” (line 18).
chaos were
returned
retired,
4
Till humane Art them Raiſd and Reinſpir’d
Till human art them
Critical Note
“raised,” meaning caused to grow or rise, or restored to life; “reinspired” meaning reanimated, as if through life-giving breath; see Genesis 2:7: “God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; the speaker describes flowers that, having died, are brought back to life through a process known as palingenesis, the (supposed) regeneration of living organisms from ashes or putrefying matter.
raised and reinspired
’Til human art them raised and
Gloss Note
revived
reinspired
5
Physical Note
ascender of initial “h” imperfectly erased; “t” written over earlier letter
Whth beating, Macecrating, ffermentation
Critical Note
alchemical processes; “macerating,” for instance, is softening by steeping in a liquid; for “calcining,” or burning to ash in palingenesis, see Thomas Browne: “A plant or vegetable consumed to ashe, to a contemplative and school philosopher seems utterly destroyed, and the form to have taken his leave for ever: but to a subtle artist the forms are not perished, but withdrawn into their combustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element. This I make good by experience, and can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it to its stalk and leaves again. What the art of man can do in these inferior pieces, what blasphemy is it to imagine the finger of God cannot do in those more perfect and sensible structures?” Religio Medici (London, 1642), p. 91.
With beating, macerating, fermentation,
With beating,
Gloss Note
steeping/marinating
macerating,
Gloss Note
Fermentation here describes a productive form of decay that heats, animates, and transforms.
fermentation,
6
Calcining, Chimically, with Segregation
Calcining, chemically, with segregation;
Gloss Note
Calcining chemically means purifying alchemically through a process of “rapid, intense dry heating in a sealed vessel, reducing the matter” to dust (Archer 5).
Calcining chemically, with
Gloss Note
Segregation describes a process of purifying a substance by separating it into its constituent parts.
segregation.
7
Then least the Ayr theſe Secrets Should
Physical Note
imperfectly erased letter visible beneath “R,” possibly “r”
Reveal
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
Critical Note
Starting in this line, and extending through the next eight, the poem follows the structure of a recipe, with a sequence of imperative directions: shut up, reanimate, cool the glass. “Then” helps to convey a sequence of actions: first do this, then do that. But “then” also appears nine times in the poem, signalling how the recipe’s sequence of directives opens into the “if-then” logic of the whole poem and its attempt to apply the processes of experimental science to proving the resurrection of the flesh. “Then” also conveys the poem’s teleological focus on resurrection—the “then” that will give meaning to all that has come before.
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
8
Shut up the Aſhes under Hermes Seal
Shut up the ashes under
a hermetic seal, tight enough to exclude air; named for the Greek Hermes Trismegistus, identified with the Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as the founder of alchemy
Hermes’s seal;
Shut up the ashes under
Hermes Tresmegistus was the Egyptian originator of alchemy, author of its primary texts, and contemporary and pupil of Moses. To be under his seal is to be shut up airtight. The phrase “hermetically sealed” is still used to describe something that is airtight.
Hermes’s seal.
9
Then with A Candle or A gentle ffire
Then, with a candle or a gentle fire,
Then with a candle or a gentle fire
10
You may Reanimate at your deſire
You may reanimate at your desire
You may reanimate at your desire
11
Theſe Gallant plants, but ^if you cool ye Glaſs
These
Gloss Note
gorgeous, showy
gallant plants; but if you cool the glass,
These
Gloss Note
gorgeous
gallant plants. But, if you cool the glass,
12
To their first principles they’l quickly paſs
To their
Gloss Note
in alchemy, the substances composing all matter: mercury, salt, and sulfur (mentioned in the next line); more generally, origins, constituent parts
first principles they’ll quickly pass:
To their first principles they’ll quickly pass.
13
ffrom Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury they came
From sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
From
Critical Note
Sulfur, salt, and mercury are the three first principles of matter in alchemy, according to the sixteenth-century writer Paracelsus; that is, they are the building blocks of all matter, from which it came and to which it will return when it “dissolves.”
sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
14
When they diſſolv they turn into the Same
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
15
Then Seeing a wretched Mortall hath the power
Then, seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
Then seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
16
To Recreate a verbious of A fflower
To recreate a
Gloss Note
In Greek myth, Hippolytus is unjustly put to death by his father but brought back to life by Asclepius, a god of healing, and renamed Virbius (from vir bis, “a man twice”).
Virbius of a flower,
To
Gloss Note
Asculepius, Apollo’s son, reassembled and resurrected the pieces of Hippolytus, who had been torn to bits by horses; he was then renamed Virbius, or twice-born. See Ovid’s version of his story in Resurrections of the Body in Curations for this poem.
recreate a Virbius of a flower,
17
Why Should wee ffear, though Sadly wee Retire
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
18
Into our Caus our God
Physical Note
“ll” appears written over “th”
will Reinspire
Into our
original, formative elements
cause? Our God will reinspire
Into our cause? Our God will reinspire
19
Our dormant Dust and keep alive the Same
Our
Critical Note
“dust” here is elemental physical matter; see Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return”; it is “dormant” in awaiting resurrection at the Last Judgment.
dormant dust, and keep alive the same
Our dormant dust and keep alive the same
20
With an all Quickning Everlasting fflame
With an
Gloss Note
all-enlivening
all-quick’ning, everlasting flame.
With an all-quickening, everlasting flame.
21
Then though I into Atomes Scattred bee
Then, though I into
Gloss Note
minute and indivisible particles, seen as ultimate components of matter; in a less scientific register, very small amounts of anything
atoms scattered be,
Then though I into atoms scattered be,
22
In Indiviſables I’le trust in thee.
In
Gloss Note
atoms
indivisibles I’ll trust in Thee.
In
Gloss Note
Indivisibles are particles so tiny they cannot be subdivided; they seem to be used almost interchangeably here with atoms and even with ashes.
indivisibles I’ll trust in thee.
23
Then let this Comfort mee in my Sad Story
Then let this comfort me in my sad
Gloss Note
life
story:
Then let this comfort me in my sad story:
24
Dust is but ffour degrees Remov’d from Glory.
Dust is but four degrees removed from glory
Dust is but
Critical Note
This may refer back to the steps of palingenesis—beating, macerating, fermentation and calcining—which move the plant by nature’s paths from dust to glory or reanimation. The lines might also refer to the soul’s process of attaining glory. Richard Sibbes, in The Excellency of the Gospel above the Law (London, 1639), describes the “four degrees of the glory of a Christian” as conversion, growth of grace, enjoying the presence of God in heaven, and, finally, the perfect glory on the day of judgment when body and soul are reunited. Both the discussion of palingenesis and Sibbes’s four degrees of glorification set out recipes for extraordinary transformation.
four degrees removed from glory
by
25
By Natures Paths, but God from Death & Night
By
Critical Note
The speaker suggests heavenly glory follows from the transformation of dust, or our earthly being, along “Nature’s paths,” those derived from the four elements (earth, air, water, fire). In alchemy, fire was understood to have four degrees, the fourth being the hottest; “degree” could also refer in alchemy to successive stages of intensity in the elementary qualities of bodies (heat, cold, moisture, dryness).
Nature’s paths, but God from death and night
By nature’s paths. But God from death and night
26
Can Raise this ffleſh to endleſs life and Light
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
27
Then my impatient Soul Contented bee
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
28
Physical Note
in left margin
ffor Thou
Physical Note
“Shalt” cancelled with multiple horizontal strike-through and scribbles; insertion marks and “a” in different hand from main scribe
Shalt\a \
Physical Note
“Glori” written over other letters, last with descender; “u” originally “y”; “s” also appears added later
Glorious Spring e’re long
Physical Note
“t” added later, possibly in different hand from main scribe
Shallt See
For thou a glorious spring
Gloss Note
before
ere long shalt see.
For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see.
29
After theſe Gloomey Shades of Death and Sorrow
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
30
Thou Shalt
Physical Note
imperfectly erased descender on “n”
injoy an Everlasting Morrow
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
31
Physical Note
“ff” scribbled out; “As” written over earlier “or”
ff As Wheat in new plow’d ffurrows Rotting lies
As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies,
As wheat in new plowed furrows rotting lies,
32
Uncapable of quickning till it dies
Critical Note
The speaker refers to the need for seeds to be buried (and thus “die”) under soil in a furrow or trench in order to return to life (or “quicken”) through growth. See John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Incapable of quick’ning till it dies,
Critical Note
Pulter here seems to refer to John 12.24. But what does it mean to say that wheat does not quicken—show signs of life—until it dies? A contemporary commentary on this biblical verse explains: “A grain of wheat is said to die because the dissolution and change maketh it no longer a grain of wheat, but the seed of many new grains” (Richard Baxter, A paraphrase on the New Testament with notes, doctrinal and practical [London, 1685], “The Gospel According to St. John” (sig. D3v)). See also John Flavel, Husbandry Spiritualized, included in Resurrections of the Body.
Incapable of quickening ’til it dies,
33
Soe into dust this ffleſh of mine must turn
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn,
34
And lie a while forgotten in my Urn
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
35
Yet when the Sea, and Earth, and Hell, Shall give
Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give
Yet when the sea, and earth, and hell, shall give
36
Their Treaſures, up my Body too Shall Live
Their treasures up, my body too shall live:
Their treasures up, my body too shall live—
37
Not like the Reſurrection at Grand Caire
Critical Note
Cairo, possibly identified here with the ancient Egyptian custom of mummifying the dead whole in anticipation of resurrection (one the speaker presumes, in the next line, will be disappointed), or with travellers’ tales, like that of John Greaves, who refers to “the tradition of the rising of dead men’s bones every year in Egypt: a thing superstitiously believed by the Christians.” Pyramidographia, or, A Description of the Pyramids in Egypt (London, 1646), p. 142.
Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire,
Not like the
Critical Note
Eardley identifies a late seventeenth-century account of an annual resurrection in Cairo, Egypt in her invaluable reflections on glossing this poem and Pulter in general. In the passage she cites, this story is recounted as a fraud and no mention is made of the despair following the resurrection. “To these curiosities of Egypt, I might here add that supernatural (but fictitious) prodigy, that’s reported to be yearly seen near to old Caire, viz. the annual resurrection of many dead bones on Holy Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (according to the Old Calendar), which both Turks and Christians in those parts, do firmly believe, and that by the means of some pious frauds, of a few designing santos among them” (Patrick Gordon, Geography Anatomized, or, The Complete Geographical Grammar Being a Short and Exact Analysis of the Whole Body of Modern Geography after a New and Curious Method [London: 1699], p. 296). See Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” SEL 52.1 (Winter 2012): 117-41. Leah Knight has identified a much earlier (and deliciously gruesome) account of this annual resurrection, from Simon Goulart’s Admirable and Memorable Histories (1607), included in Resurrections of the Body. Goulart’s account goes to great lengths to discuss his sources and controversies surrounding this “marvelous apparition.” As detailed as his account is, it does not refer to the despair of those who have been resurrected (for whom he uses the word “resusstitants”). In Herodotus’s account, in Book 2 of the Histories, of the annual rituals celebrating the resurrection of Osiris, he claims, “after the sacrifice [of Osiris], all the men and women lament, in countless numbers; but it is not pious for me to say who it is for whom they lament” (2.61.1).
resurrection at Grand Caire,
38
Where men Revive then straight of Life deſpair
Where men revive, then straight of life despair;
Where men revive then straight of life despair—
39
But with my Soul my ffleſh Shall Reunite
But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite
But with my soul my flesh shall reunite,
40
Physical Note
crowded between lines above and below
And ne’re involve’d bee
Physical Note
“w” written over other letter
with Death and Night
Physical Note
This line was inserted after those above and below, in the same hand but slightly smaller script and darker ink, to form a rhyming triplet.
And ne’er involvéd be with death and night,
Critical Note
This line was inserted in the middle of a couplet in the manuscript, in the same hand but in smaller, darker ink. This addition turns lines 39-41 into a triplet, the only one in a poem made up of rhyming couplets. The added line interrupts the desired consummation towards which the poem builds—the reunion of soul and body—to remind the reader one more time of the death and night from which this reunion will release both soul and body into endless pleasure. The triplet ensures just a bit more time to reflect on this remarkable prospect. The poem does not quite recover from the interruption of its rhyming couplets created by the added line. The last two couplets all end in the same rhyme, doubling down on the emphasis on God’s power over dissolution, and using the first and last rhymes in the quadruplet to link God (the first “thee”) to the reader (the final “thee”). But the “if” clause at the start of the final line threatens to unsettle this insistence: “if” man can raise a flower … but what if he can’t?
And ne’er involved be with death and night,
41
But live in endleſs pleaſure Love & Light
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
42
Then Halelujahs will I Sing to thee
Then
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God
hallelujahs will I sing to Thee,
Then hallelujahs will I sing to thee,
43
My Gracious God to all Eternitie
My gracious God, to all eternity.
My gracious God to all eternity.
44
Then at thy diſſolution patient bee
Then at thy dissolution patient be:
Then at thy dissolution patient be.
45
If Man can Raiſe a fflower God can thee
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.
All Notes
Transcription
Editorial note
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of
the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse
as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation,
capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines,
and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and
superscript and subscript representations are retained.
See full
conventions for the transcriptions here.
Elemental Edition
Editorial note
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers,
which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and
punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might
otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not
modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote
aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by
Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to
allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various
possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure
material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford
Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s
edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The
result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry.
See full conventions
for this edition here.
Amplified Edition
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.”
Elemental Edition
Headnote
Can flowers be reincarnated? They can, according to this poem; and through that alleged fact the poet proffers a hopeful emblem of divine power—even though the alchemically-inspired process of resurrecting plants is described here as a labor-intensive “human art.” If mere mortals can raise the dead, the speaker asks, why doubt that God can manage as much after we die? What at first seems a general lesson framed by plural first-person pronouns, however, soon becomes more personal: the speaker shifts from reassuring what sounds like a broad audience, in diction ringing with almost professional confidence, to a much more intimate address which swings disconcertingly between God and her own soul. The speaker’s concluding analogy—if people can revivify flowers, God can revivify people—rings again with confidence, even as the hypothetical it hinges on (“If”) resurrects precisely the grounds of doubt which make such a faith-affirming poem, and others like it in Pulter’s oeuvre, necessary in the first place.
Amplified Edition
Headnote
This poem addresses palingenesis, an alchemical process by which, supposedly, a plant was reduced to ashes and then revived. If humans can accomplish such a thing, the poem asks, then why is it so hard to believe that God can resurrect humans? While it is invaluable to consider the scholarship on Pulter’s relationship to alchemy as a “discourse of change, metamorphosis, and revolution” that “provided the perfect vehicle through which to articulate, examine and understand the experience and ethics of political and religious change” (Jayne Archer, “A ‘Perfect Circle’? Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter,” Literature Compass 2 [2005], pp. 1-14, esp. p. 1), it is also important to see how Pulter sometimes critiques the pretensions of alchemy to control life and death. This poem seems to grant that palingenesis is possible or at least imaginable. The highly technical language claims palingenesis as part of experimental science, suggesting that anyone might reproduce these results with the right equipment and procedures. Indeed, the poem can be read as an experimental brief, detailing the steps (“Then” [line 7] … “Then” [line 9]) and equipment required to achieve this result. But sources through which Pulter might have learned of palingenesis vary in their confidence in the results. Kenelm Digby, for instance, who describes reading about an experiment with exactly these flowers—the rose, tulip and clove gillyflower—confides to his reader that he has tried and failed to replicate the results: “no industry of mine could effect it” (see Digby, Discourse of the Vegetation of Plants, in “Curations”). Palingenesis is always something someone else has accomplished somewhere else. One knows it by report; one accepts it on faith, if at all. The structure of the poem—if you believe this, then why not that?—begins to unravel if we do not accept the opening conceit. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania, 2015), Katherine Eggert argues that learning alchemy sometimes enabled early modern people not to learn other, more challenging disciplines. If alchemy was sometimes a way of disknowing, then what does Pulter use it here not to know?
Elemental Edition
Line number 1
Gloss note
carnation, July flower
Amplified Edition
Line number 1
The command or invitation to “view” and the deictic gesture to “this” that we are to view evoke the image that usually accompanied the text in emblem books. The gillyflower or carnation, a flower whose streaking depended on grafting, is the subject of debate in Shakespeare’sThe Winter’s Tale over the ethics of artful interventions in nature.
Amplified Edition
Line number 1
gillyflower or carnation
Elemental Edition
Line number 3
Critical note
“chaos” here might signal the formless void thought to have existed before the universe; however, it might have been written in error (perhaps from dictation) for “cause,” since Pulter refers to things retiring into their causes in lines 17-8 here and in Universal Dissolution [Poem 6].
Amplified Edition
Line number 3
Critical note
Chaos is the dark abyss of formless matter that preceded the world’s creation in many accounts; Chaos was also the first and oldest of the Greek gods. George Sandys’s translation of Ovid describes Chaos as “An undigested lump, a barren load / Where jarring seeds of things ill-joined abode” (Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures [London, 1632], sig. A1r). Lucy Hutchinson explains that “The Earth at first was a vast empty place, / A rude congestion without form or grace, / A confused mass of undistinguished seed” (Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], 1.301-303). For Pulter, chaos is the state to which living things devolve when they dissolve into their smallest constituent parts, atoms or indivisibles. Flowers have “their chaos” (line 3); humans have “our cause” (line 18).
Amplified Edition
Line number 3
returned
Elemental Edition
Line number 4
Critical note
“raised,” meaning caused to grow or rise, or restored to life; “reinspired” meaning reanimated, as if through life-giving breath; see Genesis 2:7: “God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; the speaker describes flowers that, having died, are brought back to life through a process known as palingenesis, the (supposed) regeneration of living organisms from ashes or putrefying matter.
Amplified Edition
Line number 4
Gloss note
revived
Transcription
Line number 5
Physical note
ascender of initial “h” imperfectly erased; “t” written over earlier letter
Elemental Edition
Line number 5
Critical note
alchemical processes; “macerating,” for instance, is softening by steeping in a liquid; for “calcining,” or burning to ash in palingenesis, see Thomas Browne: “A plant or vegetable consumed to ashe, to a contemplative and school philosopher seems utterly destroyed, and the form to have taken his leave for ever: but to a subtle artist the forms are not perished, but withdrawn into their combustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element. This I make good by experience, and can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it to its stalk and leaves again. What the art of man can do in these inferior pieces, what blasphemy is it to imagine the finger of God cannot do in those more perfect and sensible structures?” Religio Medici (London, 1642), p. 91.
Amplified Edition
Line number 5
Gloss note
steeping/marinating
Amplified Edition
Line number 5
Gloss note
Fermentation here describes a productive form of decay that heats, animates, and transforms.
Amplified Edition
Line number 6
Gloss note
Calcining chemically means purifying alchemically through a process of “rapid, intense dry heating in a sealed vessel, reducing the matter” to dust (Archer 5).
Amplified Edition
Line number 6
Gloss note
Segregation describes a process of purifying a substance by separating it into its constituent parts.
Transcription
Line number 7
Physical note
imperfectly erased letter visible beneath “R,” possibly “r”
Amplified Edition
Line number 7
Critical note
Starting in this line, and extending through the next eight, the poem follows the structure of a recipe, with a sequence of imperative directions: shut up, reanimate, cool the glass. “Then” helps to convey a sequence of actions: first do this, then do that. But “then” also appears nine times in the poem, signalling how the recipe’s sequence of directives opens into the “if-then” logic of the whole poem and its attempt to apply the processes of experimental science to proving the resurrection of the flesh. “Then” also conveys the poem’s teleological focus on resurrection—the “then” that will give meaning to all that has come before.
Elemental Edition
Line number 8
a hermetic seal, tight enough to exclude air; named for the Greek Hermes Trismegistus, identified with the Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as the founder of alchemy
Amplified Edition
Line number 8
Hermes Tresmegistus was the Egyptian originator of alchemy, author of its primary texts, and contemporary and pupil of Moses. To be under his seal is to be shut up airtight. The phrase “hermetically sealed” is still used to describe something that is airtight.
Elemental Edition
Line number 11
Gloss note
gorgeous, showy
Amplified Edition
Line number 11
Gloss note
gorgeous
Elemental Edition
Line number 12
Gloss note
in alchemy, the substances composing all matter: mercury, salt, and sulfur (mentioned in the next line); more generally, origins, constituent parts
Amplified Edition
Line number 13
Critical note
Sulfur, salt, and mercury are the three first principles of matter in alchemy, according to the sixteenth-century writer Paracelsus; that is, they are the building blocks of all matter, from which it came and to which it will return when it “dissolves.”
Elemental Edition
Line number 16
Gloss note
In Greek myth, Hippolytus is unjustly put to death by his father but brought back to life by Asclepius, a god of healing, and renamed Virbius (from vir bis, “a man twice”).
Amplified Edition
Line number 16
Gloss note
Asculepius, Apollo’s son, reassembled and resurrected the pieces of Hippolytus, who had been torn to bits by horses; he was then renamed Virbius, or twice-born. See Ovid’s version of his story in Resurrections of the Body in Curations for this poem.
Transcription
Line number 18
Physical note
“ll” appears written over “th”
Elemental Edition
Line number 18
original, formative elements
Elemental Edition
Line number 19
Critical note
“dust” here is elemental physical matter; see Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return”; it is “dormant” in awaiting resurrection at the Last Judgment.
Elemental Edition
Line number 20
Gloss note
all-enlivening
Elemental Edition
Line number 21
Gloss note
minute and indivisible particles, seen as ultimate components of matter; in a less scientific register, very small amounts of anything
Elemental Edition
Line number 22
Gloss note
atoms
Amplified Edition
Line number 22
Gloss note
Indivisibles are particles so tiny they cannot be subdivided; they seem to be used almost interchangeably here with atoms and even with ashes.
Elemental Edition
Line number 23
Gloss note
life
Amplified Edition
Line number 24
Critical note
This may refer back to the steps of palingenesis—beating, macerating, fermentation and calcining—which move the plant by nature’s paths from dust to glory or reanimation. The lines might also refer to the soul’s process of attaining glory. Richard Sibbes, in The Excellency of the Gospel above the Law (London, 1639), describes the “four degrees of the glory of a Christian” as conversion, growth of grace, enjoying the presence of God in heaven, and, finally, the perfect glory on the day of judgment when body and soul are reunited. Both the discussion of palingenesis and Sibbes’s four degrees of glorification set out recipes for extraordinary transformation.
Elemental Edition
Line number 25
Critical note
The speaker suggests heavenly glory follows from the transformation of dust, or our earthly being, along “Nature’s paths,” those derived from the four elements (earth, air, water, fire). In alchemy, fire was understood to have four degrees, the fourth being the hottest; “degree” could also refer in alchemy to successive stages of intensity in the elementary qualities of bodies (heat, cold, moisture, dryness).
Transcription
Line number 28
Physical note
in left margin
Transcription
Line number 28
Physical note
“Shalt” cancelled with multiple horizontal strike-through and scribbles; insertion marks and “a” in different hand from main scribe
Transcription
Line number 28
Physical note
“Glori” written over other letters, last with descender; “u” originally “y”; “s” also appears added later
Transcription
Line number 28
Physical note
“t” added later, possibly in different hand from main scribe
Elemental Edition
Line number 28
Gloss note
before
Transcription
Line number 30
Physical note
imperfectly erased descender on “n”
Transcription
Line number 31
Physical note
“ff” scribbled out; “As” written over earlier “or”
Elemental Edition
Line number 32
Critical note
The speaker refers to the need for seeds to be buried (and thus “die”) under soil in a furrow or trench in order to return to life (or “quicken”) through growth. See John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Amplified Edition
Line number 32
Critical note
Pulter here seems to refer to John 12.24. But what does it mean to say that wheat does not quicken—show signs of life—until it dies? A contemporary commentary on this biblical verse explains: “A grain of wheat is said to die because the dissolution and change maketh it no longer a grain of wheat, but the seed of many new grains” (Richard Baxter, A paraphrase on the New Testament with notes, doctrinal and practical [London, 1685], “The Gospel According to St. John” (sig. D3v)). See also John Flavel, Husbandry Spiritualized, included in Resurrections of the Body.
Elemental Edition
Line number 37
Critical note
Cairo, possibly identified here with the ancient Egyptian custom of mummifying the dead whole in anticipation of resurrection (one the speaker presumes, in the next line, will be disappointed), or with travellers’ tales, like that of John Greaves, who refers to “the tradition of the rising of dead men’s bones every year in Egypt: a thing superstitiously believed by the Christians.” Pyramidographia, or, A Description of the Pyramids in Egypt (London, 1646), p. 142.
Amplified Edition
Line number 37
Critical note
Eardley identifies a late seventeenth-century account of an annual resurrection in Cairo, Egypt in her invaluable reflections on glossing this poem and Pulter in general. In the passage she cites, this story is recounted as a fraud and no mention is made of the despair following the resurrection. “To these curiosities of Egypt, I might here add that supernatural (but fictitious) prodigy, that’s reported to be yearly seen near to old Caire, viz. the annual resurrection of many dead bones on Holy Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (according to the Old Calendar), which both Turks and Christians in those parts, do firmly believe, and that by the means of some pious frauds, of a few designing santos among them” (Patrick Gordon, Geography Anatomized, or, The Complete Geographical Grammar Being a Short and Exact Analysis of the Whole Body of Modern Geography after a New and Curious Method [London: 1699], p. 296). See Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s ‘Indivisibles’ and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” SEL 52.1 (Winter 2012): 117-41. Leah Knight has identified a much earlier (and deliciously gruesome) account of this annual resurrection, from Simon Goulart’s Admirable and Memorable Histories (1607), included in Resurrections of the Body. Goulart’s account goes to great lengths to discuss his sources and controversies surrounding this “marvelous apparition.” As detailed as his account is, it does not refer to the despair of those who have been resurrected (for whom he uses the word “resusstitants”). In Herodotus’s account, in Book 2 of the Histories, of the annual rituals celebrating the resurrection of Osiris, he claims, “after the sacrifice [of Osiris], all the men and women lament, in countless numbers; but it is not pious for me to say who it is for whom they lament” (2.61.1).
Transcription
Line number 40
Physical note
crowded between lines above and below
Transcription
Line number 40
Physical note
“w” written over other letter
Elemental Edition
Line number 40
Physical note
This line was inserted after those above and below, in the same hand but slightly smaller script and darker ink, to form a rhyming triplet.
Amplified Edition
Line number 40
Critical note
This line was inserted in the middle of a couplet in the manuscript, in the same hand but in smaller, darker ink. This addition turns lines 39-41 into a triplet, the only one in a poem made up of rhyming couplets. The added line interrupts the desired consummation towards which the poem builds—the reunion of soul and body—to remind the reader one more time of the death and night from which this reunion will release both soul and body into endless pleasure. The triplet ensures just a bit more time to reflect on this remarkable prospect. The poem does not quite recover from the interruption of its rhyming couplets created by the added line. The last two couplets all end in the same rhyme, doubling down on the emphasis on God’s power over dissolution, and using the first and last rhymes in the quadruplet to link God (the first “thee”) to the reader (the final “thee”). But the “if” clause at the start of the final line threatens to unsettle this insistence: “if” man can raise a flower … but what if he can’t?
Elemental Edition
Line number 42
Gloss note
songs of praise to God
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