The Phoenix
Pulter’s brief description of the phoenix resembles conventional accounts of this mythological creature, including its vibrant gold and purple plumage. Yet she omits the widely repeated notion that a new phoenix is born from the ashes of its predecessor’s funeral pyre. This omission is unusual for Pulter, who frames the death of the phoenix as necessary for regeneration in other poems, such as The Brahman109, and My Heart Why Dost Thou Throb So in My Breast?49:
- The phoenix doth assume her funeral pyre,
- And in those flagrant odors doth expire,
- But thou, my soul, unwilling art to die,
- And in thy grave obliviated lie,
- Although it would thy drowsy part calcine
- Away, and infinitely refine
- Thy flesh that it more gloriously may shine.
- (Lines 13-19)
The phoenix owed much of its renown to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, here reproduced from the Philemon Holland translation.
The birds of Ethiopia and India are for the most part of diverse colours, and such as a man is hardly able to decipher and describe. But the Phœnix of Arabia passes all others. Howbeit, I cannot tell what to make of him: and first of all, whether it be a tale or no, that there is never but one of them in the whole world, and the same not commonly seen. By report he is as big as an Eagle: for colour, as yellow & bright as gold (namely, all about the neck); the rest of the body a deep red purple: the tail azure blue, intermingled with feathers among, of rose carnation colour: and the head bravely adorned with a crest and panache finely wrought; having a tuft and plume thereupon, right fair and goodly to be seen. Manilius, the noble Roman Senator, right excellently well seen in the best kind of learning and literature, and yet never taught by any, was the first man of the long Robe, who wrote of this bird at large, & most exquisitely. He reporteth that never man was known to see him feeding: that in Arabia he is held a sacred bird, dedicated unto the Sun; that he liveth 660 years; and when he groweth old, and begins to decay, he builds himself a nest with the twigs and branches of the Canell or Cinnamon, and Frankincense trees; and when he hath filled it with all sort of sweet aromatic spices, yieldeth up his life thereupon. He saith moreover, that of his bones & marrow there breedeth at first as it were a little worm, which afterwards proveth to be a pretty bird. And the first thing that this young new Phœnix doth is to perform the obsequies of the former Phœnix late deceased: to translate and carry away his whole nest into the city of the Sun near Panchæa, and to bestow it full devoutly there upon the altar.
Chaste, powerful, and venerated by other birds, the phoenix conventionally signified Christ in medieval bestiaries. In the sixteenth century, it became a personal emblem of Queen Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen,” who wears a phoenix pendant in a portrait attributed to Nicholas Hilliard. Poets continued to invoke this metaphor in the seventeenth century; for example, the poet Amelia Lanyer referred to Elizabeth as “the phoenix of her age” in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611), while Thomas Cranmer compares the infant Elizabeth to the phoenix in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s play Henry VIII (c. 1613).
Nicholas Hilliard (associated), Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1575, oil on panel, 31 by 24 in. (78.7 by 61.0 cm), London, National Portrait Gallery, distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
Yet the phoenix was not always a hopeful image. Shakespeare’s ambiguous allegorical poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle” praises the pure love between two birds and mourns their passing. The “turtle” of the title is a turtledove, a conventional symbol of fidelity that also appears in Pulter’s This Poor Turtledove85:
- Who can but pity this poor turtledove,
- Which was so kind and constant to her love,
- And since his death his loss she doth deplore
- For his dear sake she’ll never couple more.
- (Lines 1-4)
Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” closes with a funeral lament, or what Pulter might have called an epicedium:
- Beauty, truth, and rarity,
- Grace in all simplicity,
- Here enclos’d, in cinders lie.
- Death is now the Phoenix’s nest,
- And the Turtle’s loyal breast
- To eternity doth rest,
- Leaving no posterity:
- ’Twas not their infirmity,
- It was married chastity.
- Truth may seem but cannot be;
- Beauty brag but ’tis not she;
- Truth and beauty buried be.
- To this urn let those repair
- That are either true or fair;
- For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
In the nineteenth sonnet of Shakespeare’s 1609 collection, another phoenix meets an unfortunate end. Like Pulter, Shakespeare emphasizes the ubiquity of decay, although he seems to have more confidence in the endurance of poetry:
- Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
- And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
- Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
- And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
- Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
- And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
- To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
- But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
- O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
- Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
- Him in thy course untainted do allow
- For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
- Yet, do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
- My love shall in my verse ever live young.