[M]an is the theme of spiritual alchemy. The series of correspondences that define the Elizabethan perception of the universe are a fundamental part of the hermetic experiments. The philosopher’s stone in its relationship to base metal corresponds to Christ’s salvation of humanity, each having the capacity to transform that which is inferior to itself to spiritual perfection … Death parallels the stages known as putrefaction and mortification in the hermetic experiment. The metal putrefying in the limbeck (the alchemical still) is considered dead, its soul having been removed in the first stage of the process. However, with the advent of the noble tincture, the soul of the metal is resurrected, completing the transmutation. Christ exercises the same power over the spirits of humanity as the noble tincture levies against base metals. Donne illustrates this similarity in the language of “Death’s Duel,” where he invites the audience to undergo transmutation through the magical, alchemical qualities of Christ’s blood.

I have seen Minute-glasses; Glasses so short-liv’d. If I were to preach upon this Text, to such a glass, it were enough for half the Sermon; enough to show the wordly man his Treasure, and the Object of his heart (for, where your Treasure is, there will your Heart be also) to call his eye to that Minute-glass, and to tell him, There flows, there flies your Treasure, and your Heart with it. But if I had a Secular Glass, a Glass that would run an age, if the two Hemispheres of the World were composed in the form of such a Glass, and all the World calcin’d and burnt to ashes, and all the ashes, and sands, and atoms of the World put into that Glass, it would not be enough to tell the godly man what his Treasure, and the Object of his Heart is.

• RISE heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
• Without delayes,
• Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
• With him mayst rise:
• That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
• His life may make thee gold, and much more just.

• Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
• With all thy art.
• The crosse taught all wood to resound his name
• Who bore the same.
• His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
• Is best to celebrate this most high day.

• Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
• Pleasant and long:
• Or since all music is but three parts vied,
• And multiplied;
• O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
• And make up our defects with his sweet art.

• I got me flowers to straw thy way;
• I got me boughs off many a tree:
• But thou wast up by break of day,
• And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

• The Sunne arising in the East,
• Though he give light, and th’ East perfume;
• If they should offer to contest
• With thy arising, they presume.

• Can there be any day but this,
• Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
• We count three hundred, but we misse:
• There is but one, and that one ever.

• THE fleet Astronomer can bore
• And thred the spheres with his quick-piercing minde:
• He views their stations, walks from doore to doore,
• Surveys, as if he had design’d
• To make a purchase there: he sees their dances,
• And knoweth long before,
• Both their full-ey’d aspects, and secret glances.

• The nimble Diver with his side
• Cuts through the working waves, that he may fetch
• His dearely-earned pearl, which God did hide
• On purpose from the ventrous wretch;
• That he might save his life, and also hers,
• Who with excessive pride
• Her own destruction and his danger wears.

• The subtil Chymick can devest
• And strip the creature naked, till he finde
• The callow principles within their nest:
• There he imparts to them his minde,
• Admitted to their bed-chamber, before
• They appeare trim and drest
• To ordinarie suitours at the doore.

• What hath not man sought out and found,
• But his deare God? who yet his glorious law
• Embosomes in us, mellowing the ground
• With showres and frosts, with love and aw;
• So that we need not say, Where’s this command?
• Poore man! thou searchest round
• To finde out death, but missest life at hand.

The renewed interest in alchemy during the Interregnum resulted in part from the fact that alchemy is a discourse of change, metamorphosis and revolution. Examining the relationship between spirit and matter, and of the limits of human efforts to reform both themselves and the material world, alchemy provided a perfect vehicle through which to articulate, examine and understand the experience and ethics of political and religious change. [p. 1]

In line 10 of the poem we discover that the philtre to be used in the union of mercury and sulphur is the process of calcination. In the alchemical opus calcination commonly follows the nigredo, the initial breaking down of matter into its constituent parts. Calcination involves rapid, intense and dry heating in a sealed vessel, reducing the matter to calx or dust. In practical or experimental alchemy, the purpose behind this process is to make the prima materia porous, ready for the introduction of a liquid, in the stage called the solutio. In spiritual alchemy, calcination represents the reduction of the human soul to a state of utter despair, when she might be most receptive to the influx of divine spirit. It is in this latter sense that calcination was used in religious writings as a metaphor for the nigredo of mortal life: in the temporal physical world we await the death that will enable us to be born again in the eternal spiritual world. This liminal state, fraught with the temptation to despair, fear and doubt, is a challenge to interpretation and to faith. In “Meditation II,” Donne uses calcination to explore this test: “he feeles that a Feuer doth not melt him like snow, but powr him out like lead, like yron, like brasse melted in a furnace: It doth not only melt him, but Calcine him, reduce him to Atomes, and to ashes; not to water, but to lime.” Experiencing hunger, pain, desire, grief, decay and eventually death, the human being, like the alchemist’s prima materia, is subjected to the nigredo and calcinatio, uncertain whether he or she is anything but a body. The challenge to the alchemist and to the poet, is to understand these physical processes as signs of correlative transformations in our spiritual natures.

Like “circle,” “calcin’d” is another highly-charged and potent term to which Pulter returns in her poetry, precisely so that she can map and explore her fluctuating ambivalent feelings about life and death, matter and spirit. Mostly, as in “The Circle,” calcination is used in a negative context, coupled with the terms “obliviated,” “dust” and “ashes” to describe the finality of death. But there is hope. In another of her poems, “The Perfecsion of Patience and Knowledg,” Pulter couples calcination with another alchemical process, sublimation, in order to contrast the spiritual and physical worlds. [pp. 5-6]