Language related to warfare, subjection and punishment often appears in seventeenth-century devotional verse. Pulter’s verse demonstrates a familiarity with the conventions of devotional poetry and well-known poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. Nonetheless, her devotionally-oriented poems markedly differ from these conventions even as they gesture towards them. Seventeenth-century devotional poetry often turns to the theme of repentance in order to articulate the speaker’s desire for God to extend grace unto her. As Abe Davies has pointed out, the process by which God brings the believer back into the fold of the godly is often articulated in this poetry through metaphors of imprisonment and warfare—in essence through a semantic field of violence.1

One biblical source for utilizing the semantics of warfare within the context of Christian discipleship is Ephesians 6:10–17, in which the Christian’s struggle with sin is likened to a warrior’s battle with an enemy:

William Shakespeare picks up on this language in Sonnet 146, in which he, like Pulter, utilizes the apostrophe to the soul. Shakespeare reverses the metaphor of Ephesians and pictures the soul as clothed, not in righteousness, but arrayed instead in the “costly gay” accouterments of “rebel powers”:

In his holy sonnet 14, John Donne takes these images to an extreme, as he, in a series of increasingly violent metaphors, likens his heart (or soul) first to a rebel town that must be “usurp’d” and then to a woman “betroth’d” unto Satan. His solution? God must imprison and rape the soul in order to free it from its subjection to the enemy:

Women writers employ the language of combat and conquest as well. In Anne Bradstreet’s poem “The Flesh and the Spirit,” the speaker takes inspiration from the medieval body-soul dialogue poem to imagine the Spirit (the soul) pursuing and vanquishing the Flesh—in essence, killing the body in order to attain eternal life:

This disciplinary attitude takes on disturbing implications in the elegiac devotional poetry of Mary Carey, who mourns a miscarriage. The speaker interprets this physical and bodily loss as a direct judgment and punishment from God for her lack of spiritual ‘fruit’:

Such examples do not just position the body and soul against one another as foes that must necessarily be opposed because one is earthly and one is heavenly, but they frame bodily punishment and pain as concomitant to spiritual renewal and redemption. In contrast, Pulter’s poems refrain from using martial or violent imagery when dealing with the soul, and when they do mention repentance (as in Poem 40, line 12) or sin (see My Soul’s Sole Desire29, line 5), it is in the most general and impersonal terms possible.

Although George Herbert also frequently turns to repentance in his poems, his devotional poems engage often with the theme of consolation that one finds so often in the devotional poetry of Pulter. Even his use of the martial metaphor can undermine the disciplinary paradigm. In his poem “The Reprisal” from his volume of devotional poems, The Temple, the speaker turns the imagery of warfare on its head by moving the field of battle out of the realm of the corporeal to the realm of his own internal struggle with accepting grace. Herbert undermines the language of conquest and victory against sin through a gradual acknowledgment that his desire to prove himself through spiritual battle is in fact a failure to fully accept the grace of God as evidenced in Christ, in whom God “didst outgo [him]” (l. 10). The poem ends on a paradox: Herbert finds that only through “confession” and accepting the grace of God can he win the battle against his own desire to prove himself victorious over sin on his own: