Hester Pulter’s poem The Brahman109 is built around tensions between different ways of imagining or understanding the afterlife. Such tensions were particularly heightened in seventeenth-century English culture under the pressure of the reformation, secularization and the rise of early modern science and natural philosophy. That Pulter has an almost suicidal urge to leave her own body behind and enter into some new and more perfect kind of life is clear throughout her poems. But tension between competing ideas about what precisely death and life after death would mean drives the poem forward.

To explore this issue Pulter introduces her titular “Brahman” who derives from Plutarch’s account of Alexander the Great’s invasion of India. There Alexander meets a wise man, what Plutarch himself refers to as a “gymnosophist” but which Pulter, reflecting a burgeoning English interest in India and Indian cultural and religious life, renames the “Brahman.” Plutarch’s word “gymnosophist” derives from “gymnos” meaning “naked” and “sophia” meaning “wisdom.” The gymnosophists were a sect of Indian philosophers who pursued asceticism to the extent of regarding food and clothing as detrimental to purity of thought and who practiced nudity as a statement of their detachment from the materialistic and mundane. Plutarch’s gymnosophist is named Calanus and he is depicted as wanting to escape a physical illness by voluntarily climbing his own funeral pyre and allowing himself to be burned to death. Pulter concludes that his suicidal self-immolation allows his soul to reassume its “pristine glory” (l. 8). Plutarch associates this gymnosophist with Greek and Roman stoicism, as does Pulter. In Pulter’s depiction, the Brahman is associated with a dualist metaphysics in which the body—as the scene of decay, disease and emotional disturbances such as the “sorrow, sin, and age” (l. 24) that Pulter represents herself as experiencing—is imagined as a hindrance to the “glory” (l. 8) of the essentially non-bodily soul. But like many seventeenth-century Christians, Pulter could not quite imagine life after death as a completely disembodied state; indeed, this dualist picture is part of what Pulter associates with the exoticism and presumptively non-Christian East evoked by the name “Brahman.”

The dualist metaphor of death as transcendence of the physical body is swiftly complicated by Pulter’s metaphor of the Phoenix, the mythological bird that burns to death only to be regenerated from its own physical remains, its own ashes. Pulter writes that when the bird’s body burns up “A principle is left” (l. 14). The word “principle” is striking as a supposed analogue to the “soul” but without evoking the easy imagery of the soul as a disembodied version of the person magically able to live on without a body. Instead, the “principle” is what is capable of regenerating the bird or, by implication, the person. The “principle” is in that sense equivalent to the “embryo” she refers to in line 31. Fernando Vidal explores the power of the “embryo” imagery at the cusp of early modern science including scientific approaches to psychology and selfhood.1 In seventeenth-century science, the idea of the “embryo” was widely applied to both plants and animals and it was thought of as a combination of matter and information that together were capable of generating or regenerating a living being. It is the “principle” (to use Pulter’s word) of life reduced to its essence, somewhat along the lines of a seed.

By adding the notion of the “principle” or the “embryo” to her account of a wished for after-life, the metaphor of the Phoenix suggests that as much as Pulter wishes that her “soul shall reascend above / To God, the fount of life, light, joy, and love” (ll. 28-29), this seemingly dualist picture now includes the view that matter and information are inseparable and essential to any life after death. For Pulter, this “principle” or “embryo” of the self combines physical stuff and information and it is the efficient mechanism that allows her to imagine living on after her death. From this perspective, the “principle” upon which her future life depends is not so much a ghostly soul that lives without a body but a principle of information that the god whom she refers to as “That Word that nothing did create in vain” (l. 32) can use to “reinspire my dormant dust again” (l. 33).

Pulter here gestures toward “mortalism,” the theory that with the death of the body the whole person dies and enters an “in-between” time waiting for a future point where the physical body will be reconstructed so that the person might live again in a new form. For Pulter, this time between death (the dissolution of her dust and atoms for which she yearns) and the resurrection (the reassembly of the dust and atoms for which she also yearns) is imagined to be a continuing existence only as information, perhaps the information that resides in Hadassah’s poetry in which she lives on, and it is this which “shall reascend above / To God, the fount of life, light, joy, and love” (ll. 28-29). Here Pulter’s poem frames her poems as a kind of supplement to the God capable of creating and recreating life out of dust. If that is the case then the poems are a data storage mechanism that add up to a set of instructions for how to re-create a perfected form of Hadassah, thereby combining a wish for life after death that is evidently the motivation for many of her poems with Pulter’s insistent emphasis on the material here-and-now of the creation and the individual person in both her pain and her glory.

Pulter shares some version of her perspective on resurrection with several contemporary poets (including Vaughan, Herbert, Donne, and Milton). As I explored in my Fate of the Flesh: Secularization and Resurrection in the Seventeenth Century, these poets see the person as the body and the body as the person, so that any life beyond death will require the actual reanimation of the body as opposed to a purely spiritual post-mortem life.2 And as is the case with Hadassah, for these poets it is their poetry that is imagined as bridging the “in-between” time between death and reassembly. And this bridge can be crossed both ways, from time to the eternal and also from the eternal back into time. For like Vaughan, Herbert, and Donne (Milton’s case is more complex), Pulter bends a wished for future in which the body will be perfected in its very materiality into the here-and-now, searching her body and the bodies that surround her (human, animal, plant, astral) for what Vaughan calls the “Traces, and sounds of a strange kind” (“Vanity of Spirit,” l. 16) or the “Bright shoots of everlastingness” (“The Retreat,” l. 20) that show dust and flesh that in their very fragility are already the raw material of a perfected life.3

In the final image of the poem, Pulter imagines that it will be her “dust” (l. 30 and l. 33) and her “atoms” (l. 34), once reassembled according to the “principle” of Hadassah, that will sing: “And from obscurity my atoms raise / To sing in joy His everlasting praise” (ll. 34-35). If her resurrected body will sing, then in the here-and-now it is her poems that sing; in her poems she hears not merely her conventionally socialized self (mother, aristocrat, woman, sick person) but a voice that anticipates the “sound” of her resurrected body. This notion of the body singing (especially through spontaneous groans) is also an important part of Herbert’s poetics, for example in “Sighs and Groans.”

This is the difference between Pulter as a Christian who harbors suicidal urges and the “Stoical tricks a Christian spirit loathes” (l. 22) that are represented by the titular Brahman. Whereas the “stoic” seeks to transcend the body altogether, a “trick” that seeks to escape the whole material creation including the body, Pulter, through her poetry, seeks transformed understanding of the suffering that saturates her poems as a sign of an apocalyptic transformation already now underway, a pre-experience of a final resurrection captured and furthered by her poetry. It is in the body and its suffering (including its emotional suffering) that she can feel and see and touch and sometimes taste the dust and atoms that will be loosed at Pulter’s death and then reassembled in a perfected form at Hadassah’s resurrection. And it is in poetry that insistently foregrounds her sufferings that Pulter (as poet) and we (as readers) can participate in this experience. In that way Pulter’s poems are a training, a therapy, directed to herself and also to her readers to see suffering not as an evil that should be transcended in a stoical rejection of matter but as the raw material that must be queried in order to glimpse the ultimate reality of the human person.

Footnotes