enfolds or envelops, i.e., cocoons. Though this image of cocooning may suggest confinement, the poet indicates that the silkworm does this temporarily to reproduce, but then flies freely until her death. In this context of the female silkworm, to “work” may have the sense of the female labour of weaving, sewing, or embroidering (OED 25). In her autobiography, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life, which was appended to Natures Pictures drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656), Margaret Cavendish refers to the silkworm’s self-sufficiency and to its labour of spinning to illustrate her own process of poetic creation: “yet I must say this in the behalf of my thoughts, that I never found them idle; for if the senses brings no work in, they will work of themselves, like silk-wormes that spinns out of their own bowels” (Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, edited by Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson, Broadview, 2000, p. 59). John Swan describes the bombyx or silk-worm in his Speculum mundi, Or A glasse representing the face of the world shewing both that it did begin, and must also end: the manner how, and time when, being largely examined. Whereunto is joyned an hexameron, or a serious discourse of the causes, continuance, and qualities of things in nature; occasioned as matter pertinent to the work done in the six dayes of the worlds creation (1635), pp. 425-426. He uses the language of breaking free from a prison which is also a house, which parallels Pulter’s imagery in this poem: “when these daintie creatures have made them little husken houses, and spunne out the just length of their silken webs, they eat out themselves from those prisons; and (although they were worms before) yet then they appeare with their prettie wings, and flie about a while” (p. 426). I am grateful to Jessica Wolfe for drawing my attention to Swan and for discussing Thomas Browne with me (for the latter, see below).