Transformations of the Elements

Poet Anne Bradstreet was, like Pulter, interested in transfigured states of material being. In a poem entitled “The Four Elements,” a personified Air meditates on the power of rarefaction:

Anne Bradstreet,
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America
(London, 1650), pp. 18-19.

When burning heat, doth cause you faint, I coole,
And when I smile, your Ocean’s like a Poole.
I ripe the corne, I turne the grinding mill;
And with my selfe, I every vacuum fill.
The ruddy sweet sanguine, is like to Aire,
And youth, and spring, sages to me compare.
My moist hot nature, is so purely thinne,
No place so subtilly made, but I get in.
I grow more pure and pure, as I mount higher,
And when I’m throughly rarifi’d, turn fire.

In The Invocation of the Elements41 Pulter elaborates on the transmutations that she mentions in “The Eclipse.” Here she implores Water, Air, Fire, and Earth to dissolve and reconfigure her physical body so that she is free of mortal life. She writes to Air:

Hester Pulter,
The Invocation of the Elements

Sweet Air, refresher of mankind,
Let me at last thy flavor find:
Do but exhaust a little vapor,
Thou’lt quickly blow out my life’s taper.
’Twill be my last request to thee;
Thou’rt free to all–be so to me!
I oft have made thee such a feast
That all the odors of the east
Could not with their sweet breath compare,
Blossoms so lovely, young, and rare:
The woodbine, ere Aurora doth arise,
The gillyflower before the shadow flies,
The dewy violet, or the half-blown rose.
O say no more! My grief o’erflows;
I into tears am rarefied,
And thou thy part will be denied.
O take this sigh, then, for thy part,
For such another breaks my heart.