Poems in Conversation

Pulter may borrow her opening phrase (“Tell me no more”) and dialogic structure, imagining and rebuffing an interlocutor, from other seventeenth-century poems. Her poem is thus about a kind of conversation and itself in conversation with a poetic convention.

One can learn about the poetic conversation into which Pulter enters in Scott Nixon, “‘Ask me no more’ and the Manuscript Verse Miscellany,” English Literary Renaissance 29.1 (1999): 97-130; and Marcy L. North, “Women’s Literary and Intellectual Endeavors: A Case for the Anonymous Riposte,” A Companion to British Literature 2, eds. Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, Samantha Zacher (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 142-163.

Thomas Carew, A Song

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day;
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.

Ask me no more whither doth haste
The nightingale, when May is past;
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters and keeps warm her note.

Ask me no more where those stars light,
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as in their sphere.

Ask me no more if east or west
The phoenix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.

Source: Thomas Carew, Poems (London, 1640), sigs. N2v-N3r, modernized.

Anonymous, On Lesbia

Ask me no more whither doth stray
The sooty night when it is day,
It clothes my Lesbia, dyes her skin
As black without as she’s within.
Ask me no more where the screech-owl
When day is come her hubbubs* howl;
*loud noises
In her harsh throat, whose noise appalls
Worse than ten Irish funerals;
Ask me no more whither do hie*
*haste
The drowsy flies when winter’s nigh;
They all take up their resting place
In the vast pock-holes of her face.
Ask me no more where you shall find
The stink that Gondomar1 left behind;
That horrid steam, that stink uncouth
Flew from his breech into her mouth.
Ask me no more where lust and pride,
Where Messaline2, where hell abide;
Hell’s twixt her legs, and in her breast
Base lust and pride have built their nest.
Ask me no more whither I must,
When this frail flesh must lie with dust;
Sure not to hell, for there will she
Be too, and we shall ne’er agree.

1. Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador to England from 1613-1622, and a notorious figure associated with Catholic intrigue. The Black Knight in Thomas Middleton’s play A Game at Chess (1624) seems to be based on him; he also appears in the popular satirical pamphlet by Thomas Scott, The Second Part of Vox Populi, or Gondomar Appearing in the Likeness of Matchiavell in a Spanish Parliament (London, 1624). The particular visibility of Gondomar in 1624 follows his role in an attempt to broker a “Spanish match” between Prince Charles (the future Charles I) and the Spanish Infanta (Maria Anna). Negotiations proceeded on and off for years, breaking off ignominiously in 1623; Gondomar left London to return to Spain in 1622. Vilifications of Gondomar proliferated after that; his name continued to be synonymous with Catholic scheming long after Charles married a French princess and long after Gondomar died in 1626. For example, The Second Part of Vox Populi was reprinted in 1642, when suspicion of Charles I and his Catholic sympathies intensified as civil war erupted.

2. Messalina was the third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. Her name became synonymous with promiscuity because of slanders whose accuracy we should question. The most influential is embedded in Pliny’s account of “the generation of all kinds of animals.” This is chapter 83 of Book 10 of his Natural History, a text with which Pulter seems to have been familiar. In this chapter, Pliny laments that while other creatures have fixed times and seasons for mating, only humans do not and, what’s more, are sexually insatiable. He documents what he views as the depravity of human sexuality by referring to a sexual contest between Messalina and a prostitute, for which he appears to be the sole source: “Messalina, the wife of Claudius Cæsar, thinking this a palm quite worthy of an empress, selected, for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the most notorious of the women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute; and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day, at the twenty-fifth embrace. In the human race also, the men have devised various substitutes for the more legitimate exercise of passion, all of which outrage Nature; while the females have recourse to abortion. How much more guilty than the brute beasts are we in this respect!” Messalina was executed for plotting to murder her husband, the emperor; we could view her as a rebel or a traitor rather than a whore.

Source: This poem circulated in manuscript without attribution. I here modernize Nixon’s transcription of the version recorded in British Library, Harley MS 6918 (H), fol. 41 (Scott Nixon, “‘Ask me no more’ and the Manuscript Verse Miscellany,” English Literary Renaissance, 29.1 [1999]: 97-130, pp. 120-121). According to Nixon, “The poem is an anti-blazon, which piles increasingly outrageous insults upon one another. It might be argued that this poem picks up the misogyny inherent in the original lyric, as the male speaker seeks to define and hence control the mind and body of his female addressee” (121). We might add that the poem also relies on a racist discourse that associates ugliness with blackness, appalling noise with Irish mourners, and corruption with the Spanish and Catholics.

Henry Moody
Beauty in Eclipse (Tell me no more)

Tell me no more her eyes are like
To rising suns that wonder strike;
For if ’twere so, how could it be,
they could be thus eclipsed to me?

Tell me no more her breasts do grow
Like rising hills of melting snow;
For if ’twere so, how could they lie
So near the sunshine of her eye?

Tell me no more the restless spheres,
Compared to her voice, fright our ears;
For if ’twere so, how then could death
Dwell with such discord in her breath?

No, say her eyes portenders are
Of ruin, of some blazing star,
Else would I feel from their fair fire
Some heat to cherish my desire.

Say that her breasts, though cold as snow,
Are hard as marble, when I woo,
Else they would soften and relent,
With sighs inflamed, from me sent.

Say that although, like to the moon,
She heavenly fair, yet changed as soon,
Else she would constant once remain,
Either to pity, or disdain.

That so by one of them I might
Be kept alive, or murdered quite;
For ’tis no less cruel there to kill,
Where life doth increase the ill.

Source: This is a poem ascribed to Sir Henry Moody in a manuscript that can be dated to c. 1640 (Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. C. 53, fol. 10). It was set to music in William Lawes’s autograph songbook, and later published as it is offered here (modernized) by John Playford, Select Musicall Ayres and Dialogues, In Three Books, . . . Composed by these several Excellent Masters in Music (London, 1653), sig. B3r.