Writing from the Sickbed
Visceral discomfort shades the opening lines of Pulter’s This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John45. The narrator is “[s]ad, sick, and lame” (l. 1), and, as the full title suggests, she is unable even to move her head from her pillow. Such conditions are the result of her confinement from childbirth, but they are also disclosed using the language of illness. For Pulter, the bed for lying-in is not easily distinguishable from the sickbed, and as such her poem exists in conversation with the work of other artists who have used illness as a catalyst for creative exploration (See Lying-In). As in Rembrandt’s page of studies and Frida Kahlo’s painting—composed by an artist who often worked from the confines of a bed, and itself exploring the visceral effects of childbirth (in this case, miscarriage)—Pulter’s sickbed is embedded in a densely textured landscape even as it suggests a state of isolation.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Sheet of Studies, with a Woman Lying Ill in Bed, c. 1639, etching on white laid paper, 13.9 × 15.2 cm (5 1/2 × 6 in.), Art Institute of Chicago, ref. no. 1927.5197.
Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, oil on metal, 30.5 cm × 38 cm (12 in × 15 in), Wikimedia Commons.
Confinement and Creation
Although a sense of confinement appears repeatedly throughout Pulter’s poetry, and particularly in reference to her own body, in this poem she urges her thoughts to “take their flight” (l. 3) (See Rereading Pulter’s Confinement in the Pandemic). Other early modern authors also transformed the confinement of the sickbed into an opportunity for creative production, whether as a diversion from the discomforts of illness (as in Desiderius Erasmus’s 1514 letter to Martin Dorp regarding the Praise of Folly) or as an outlet for intellectual exercise (as in An Collins’s preface to her poetry). After all, as Emily Wells wrote in A Matter of Appearance, her recent memoir of chronic illness, “one can write from bed” (Seven Stories Press [2003], 56).
For several days I was confined with a kidney ailment. My library had not yet arrived. And even if I had had all the books I wanted, my illness would not have allowed me to apply myself intensely to serious studies. To pass the time I began to amuse myself with an encomium on Folly, not with any intention of publishing it but simply to relieve the discomfort of the disease by a diversion, as it were.
- Being through weakness to the house confin’d,
- My mental powers, seeming long to sleep,
- were summoned up, by want of waking mind
- Their wonted course of exercise to keep,
- And not to waste themselves in slumber deep;
- Though no work can be so from error kept
- But some against it boldly will except:
- Yet sith it was my morning exercise
- The fruit of intellectuals to vent,
- In Songs or counterfeits of Poesies,
- And having therein found no small content,
- To keep that course my thoughts are therefore bent,
- And rather former works to vindicate
- Than any new conception to relate.
Illness and the Cosmos
Treating the sickbed as a site for literary production could result in expansive flights of fancy. In this poem, Pulter’s thoughts move from her bedridden condition outwards to survey the cosmos, roving from the moon to Saturn. Pulter was not alone in undertaking such a voyage from her sickbed: in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne took his illness as an opportunity to catapult his imagination skyward.
Enlarge this Meditation upon this great world, Man, so far, as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces; our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born Giants; that reach from East to West, from earth to Heaven, that do not only bestride all the Sea, and Land, but span the Sun and Firmament at once; My thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery; I their Creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, any where, and any one of my Creatures, my thoughts, is with the Sun, and beyond the Sun, overtakes the Sun, and overgoes the Sun in one pace, one step, everywhere.
By drawing a connection between their ailing bodies and the heavens, both authors toy with prevailing notions of the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. The framework of microcosm and macrocosm, prevalent from antiquity through the early modern period, understood there to be some correspondence between the sweeping world of the cosmos and smaller structures, such as the human body. This could take the form of analogy, in which organs are compared to elements of the astronomical system (the heart might be akin to the sun, for instance) (See Early Modern Astronomy). Alternatively, the relationship between the two could be one of influence, in which astrological shifts are understood to predict or explain physiological changes. As is suggested by Yale University Library’s digital exhibit, “Medical Astrology: Science, Art, and Influence in early-modern Europe” (curated by Laura Phillips), tools to interpret and predict the impact of the planets on the body were a common part of the training undertaken by physicians in the period.
Body in the middle of a circle of zodiac signs, with red lines pointing from parts of the zodiac to points on the body.
Wellcome Apocalypse, c. 1420, MS. 49, manuscript on vellum, Wellcome Collection.
Body standing in 4 concentric circles, Latin writing along the circles, a cloud with Hebrew letters above the head.
Robert Fludd, Der Mensch als Mikrokosmos, c. 1619, Wikimedia Commons.
While Donne places his mind and the sun side-by-side as corresponding, or perhaps even competing entities, Pulter’s poem seems to suggest that her interior state is intruded upon and altered by heavenly bodies. At the apex of her survey of the planets, the narrator’s soul encounters Saturn, “(whose aspects so sads my soul),” suggesting an etiology for her melancholy temperament (l. 45). The English merchant Samuel Jeake seems to toggle between these interpretative frameworks, keeping an astrological diary in which he seeks evidence of planetary influence in the events of his daily life, while also using the movement of the planets as an analogy for the stages of his illness and recovery.
[March] 15 ☿ About 5h 45′ p.m. the 120th fit, gentle. My Ague1 now again turning into a Double Quartan.2
16 ♃ About 2h 20′ p.m. the 121th fit, sharp.
18 ♄ About 5h 30′ p.m. the 122th fit, gentle.
19 ☉ About 2h 14′ p.m. the 123th fit. with sweat milder than the 121th.
…
May 2 ♂ About 2h 30′ p.m. the 142d and last fit; very mild & short.
This Critical Register of the several Paroxysms,3 I undertook the rather, to investigate the cause of their Regular Returns. I shall only observe in this place, That, as the morbific4 matter increased, or the constitution or habit of body was vitiated5 by the continuance of the Quartan; so it became in less than two months a Double Quartan, viz. on the 16th of October last. And increasing more it became a Triple Quartan on the 19th of November which continued till December 21. When it became irregular & uncertain (or as a Planet having run out his direct course, becomes Stationary to Retrocession) failing of the fits that were expected, 22th 24th 25th & 27 December (besides the Chasm6 of December 16) Then as if it took its course Retrograde, it was again reduced to a Double Quartan, on the 28th of December continuing regularly so for 2 months viz. till February 26 when it was further reduced to the narrower Compass of a simple Quartan; but more violent, as if the strength of both fits were now united in one.
1. Ague: fever.
2. Quartan is a way to classify fevers, indicating the number of days that pass between recurrences.
3. Paroxysm: a sudden attack or intensification of illness.
4. Morbific: causing disease.
5. Vitiated: impaired.
6. Chasm: gap, break, or void; in premodern astronomy, a fissure in the heavens.
Horizontality
For all of the ways in which illness could prompt authors to reach towards the cosmos, however, Poem 45 does ultimately return to the borders of the sickroom, with the speaker’s maids drawing her curtains. The fourth meditation of Donne’s Devotions, quoted above, also ends in a humbler state than his striding thoughts had previously suggested: “call back therefore thy Meditation again, and bring it down,” he writes, asking “what’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself, and consumes himself to a handful of dust” (pp. 72–3). In quiet contradiction to Virginia Woolf, who in her 1925 sickbed essay, “On Being Ill,” lamented that authors have neglected the literary possibilities of “[t]hose great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia,” Pulter, Donne, and contemporary poets such as Billy Collins suggest that the borders of the sickroom have indeed provided fodder for intellectual creation throughout literary history (Collected Essays Volume 4, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. [1950], 194).
We attribute but one privilege and advantage to Man’s body, above other moving creatures, that he is not as others, groveling, but of an erect, of an upright form, naturally built, and disposed to the contemplation of Heaven … This is Man’s prerogative; but what state hath he in this dignity? A fever can fillip1 him down, a fever can depose him; a fever can bring that head, which yesterday carried a crown of gold, five foot towards a crown of glory, as low as his own foot, today. When God came to breathe into Man the breath of life, he found him flat upon the ground; when he comes to withdraw that breath from him again, he prepares him to it, by laying him flat upon his bed … A sick bed, is a grave; and all that the patient says there, is but a varying of his own Epitaph … In the Grave I may speak through the stones, in the voice of my friends, and in the accents of those words, which their love may afford my memory; Here I am mine own Ghost, and rather affright my beholders, than instruct them; they conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for dead now, and yet wonder how I do, when they wake at midnight, and ask how I do tomorrow. Miserable and, (though common to all) inhuman posture, where I must practice my lying in the grave, by lying still, and not practice my Resurrection, by rising any more.
1. Fillip: strike
- Every time Canaletto painted Venice
- he painted her from a different angle,
- sometimes from points of view
- he must have imagined,
- for there is no place in the city
- he could have stood to observe such scenes.
- How ingenious of him to visualize
- a dome or canal from any point in space.
- How passionate he was
- to delineate Venice from perspectives
- that required him to mount the air
- and levitate there with his floating brush.
- But I have been sick in this bed
- for over sixty hours,
- and I am not Canaletto,
- and this airless little room,
- with its broken ceiling fan
- and its monstrous wallpaper, is not Venice.
What is made possible by such an “inhuman posture”? Can the horizontal plane produce new modes of thinking? Poet Anne Boyer takes up these questions in her account of her treatment for breast cancer, reading Donne and pushing further into the implications of thinking and writing while prone. A horizontal perspective draws Boyer’s imagination, like Pulter’s, towards the heavens. But this perspective also allows Boyer to excavate qualities of the sickbed that are all too easy to lose sight of, such as the proximity it enforces between sensuality and mortality. While the bed of Poem 45 hardly seems to be a space of eroticism, as the site of Pulter’s lying-in it similarly condenses the seemingly contradictory states of birth and death, not unlike the opening of Elizabeth Metzger’s poem, “Lying In.” Prompted by Boyer and Metzger’s writing, we can ask of Pulter’s poem: how might the postures of childbirth, like those of convalescence, enable distinctive forms of thought?
There is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed, how it falls so quickly from the place we make love to the place we might die in. It is tragic, too, for how it falls so quickly from the place where we sleep to the place where we think ourselves mad. The bed where anyone makes love is also—and too clearly for anyone stuck there because of illness—the grave, as John Donne described it, from which they might never rise.
In vertical life, when you are well or mostly and walking around, pretending to be, the top of your head is the space that the heavens touch. The total area of the top of you is pretty small. You are only moderately airy, then, and your eyes, rather than gazing up, gaze outward at the active world, and it is to this you are mostly reacting. And it is mostly during the night, during dreams, that imagining becomes temporarily expansive and the ceiling air spreads over you, or at least this was, in those days, one magic theory I conjured in bed to explain the relationship of posture to thought.
When you are sick and horizontal, the sky or skyish air of what is above you spreads all over your body, the increased area of airy intersection leads to a crisis of excessive imagining. All that horizontality invites a massive projecting of cognitive forms. When you are so often lying down, you are also so often looking up.
- On bed rest desire becomes a sheet.
- Let it fall over me
- without hands. Let it.
- Before I knew I was in danger
- I did not get up. After,
- when I say how long I lay down
- how can I make you understand it was an order?
- In bed what time has done to me is
- what it cannot do
- to him. I become the mortal
- pregnant with a god, if only he can
- be born.