When the speaker of this poem asks her soul to return to her in line 22, it raises the question: what, or who, is the speaker? The body corresponding to the soul? Something or someone else? This curation gathers materials that situate Pulter and the questions of this poem among the metaphysical poets, in order to contextualize the curious relationship between soul, body, and dust in the first part of “The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge.”

Poems that staged encounters between soul and body can be found throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance; one classic example is Andrew Marvell’s “Dialogue between the Soul and Body,” excerpts of which are given below:

But is the opposite or “other” of the soul always the body? While Marvell’s poem imagines an antagonistic relationship between soul and body, John Donne’s poem “The Ecstasy” imagines an encounter between two lovers in which their two souls escape their bodies—the souls “[w]ere gone out” (l. 16)—in order to more truly encounter, and then merge, with one another. In this excerpt from Donne’s poem, he explores the strange things that can happen to pronouns when soul and body separate:

The remainder of Donne’s poem discusses the necessity that their souls, however intermingled, return to their bodies, just as Pulter’s “enfranchised” or set-free soul, having taken her flight “above the spheres of night,” is asked to eventually return “And call [her] in [her] silent urn” (The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge39, ll. 16, 18, 23). The contrast between Pulter and Donne’s poems is striking: while for Donne their bodies “are ours, though not we”—they belong to us, though they are not the same as us, the soul(s)—for Pulter the “me” is clearly not the soul itself.

Perhaps the speaker of Pulter’s poem is in fact the body of the soul addressed, but if so, the poem runs counter to many other visions of the fate of the body after death. Compare, for example, the images of resurrection in the first part of this poem with those in Pulter’s The Hope65 (Amplified Edition) where the whole poem seems to relish the fantasy of the complete destruction of the body only to imagine that somehow God might nevertheless resurrect it.

In “The Hope” (Poem 65), she imagines her body dissolved into dust (l. 5), to salt (l. 6), and to atoms (l. 9), and then annihilated entirely. The emphasis on the body as a temporary collection of dust that could be dissolved at any time is a common feature of seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry: compare, for example, George Herbert’s “Church Monuments”:

While Herbert’s poem uses the repetition of “dust” to conjure the fragility of the body and its eventual dissolution, Pulter, as Eardley also notes (p. 372, s.v. “dust”), is interested in dust not only as ending but as beginning, as ending and origin.

Pulter’s remarkable poem Universal Dissolution6 is worth reading in its entirety, not only because it complicates the questions raised in this curation (about the relationship between the soul and body, about who is the “me” that speaks to the soul, about her unusual use of the keywords “dust” and “cause”), but also because it serves as a kind of sister-poem to “The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge.” The two poems have several verbal echoes: in “Perfection,” “the flower [doth] sleep in its cause” (l. 5), while in “Dissolution” the flowers “seem to hang their heads and weep / ’Cause in their causes they so soon must sleep” (l. 14), and man “Must taste of death and shrink into his cause” (l. 32). In all these instances, the “causes” are an ending that conjures at the same time a beginning (see A039, ed. Liza Blake, note on l. 5). While “Perfection” begins with an exhortation to her “struggling” or “straggling” soul, “Dissolution” addresses her soul as “impatient.” Excerpts from “Universal Dissolution” are given below, including its dramatic, apocalyptic ending; I invite readers to think about why, given that the two poems share so many concerns and so much vocabulary, “The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge” makes such a sudden swerve away from these questions with its move to scientific knowledge at line 30.