Knowledge, Faith and Doubt

“The Hope” is a poem about the balance between faith and doubt and the role of knowledge in the interplay of these. The phrase which closes the poem, “I know not how,” might express doubt, or faith, in the absence of knowledge. Alice Eardley’s essay, excerpted here, analyses the importance of Pulter’s punctuation in the impact of this phrase. George Herbert’s poem “The Thanksgiving” closes with a similar expression of not knowing, while Margaret Cavendish’s poem “Of the Subtlety of Motion” adapts this position to the context of more philosophical and scientific poems.

Alice Eardley, on Pulter’s punctuation

In Pulter’s poem a full stop appears about two thirds of the way along the final line of the poem and is the only full stop in the entire composition … In Pulter’s poem the full stop marks an abrupt hiatus, disrupting not just the line within which it appears but the poem as a whole … The full stop in the final line curtails the forward thrust of the poem and highlights the ways in which, right up until that point, the poem consistently pushes beyond its own structural boundaries … The poem is a type of sonnet, evoking and then flouting the expectations of readers attuned to sonnet convention. It begins with a quatrain within which a single unit of meaning is neatly contained; Death is appealed to and challenged to reduce the narrator’s body to dust. But if the reader is expecting, on this basis, a second contained quatrain he or she will be disappointed. The next four lines initially appear to be complete in themselves but in fact the meaning of the poem overspills into the next line and pushes on for another six. During the course of these six lines, the poem becomes increasingly unrestrained; line 11 is insufficient to contain meaning, which spills out into line 12, a point highlighted by the mid-line comma. Line 15 is the closing line of a triplet, breaking beyond the limits of the couplets regulating the poem as a whole. The last vestiges of sonnet are disrupted as the poem surpasses the fourteen-line limit. It is clear that this structure is designed to reflect the verbal meaning of the poem, which anticipates the disintegration of the human form into atoms. It is also characteristic of Pulter’s poetry in that it reflects the fluidity and gathering momentum of a train of thought. This is not the first place Pulter introduces a dramatic hiatus just at the moment when a particular reverie reaches a point at which it cannot, or should not, go, usually, as in this instance, when it begins to encroach on divine mysteries.

Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke . . . which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse,” The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: OUP, 2014), pp. 162-178, quoted here pp. 165-6.

George Herbert, The Thanksgiving

Oh King of grief! (a title strange, yet true,
To thee of all kings onely due)
Oh King of wounds! how shall I grieve for thee,
Who in all grief preventest me?
Shall I weep bloud? why, thou hast wept such store
That all thy body was one doore.
Shall I be scourged, flouted, boxed, sold?
’Tis but to tell the tale is told.
My God, my God, why dost thou part from me?
Was such a grief as cannot be.
Shall I then sing, skipping, thy doleful storie,
And side with thy triumphant glorie?
Shall thy stokes be my stroking? thorns, my flower?
Thy rod, my posie? crosse, my bower?
But how then shall I imitate thee, and
Copie thy fair, though bloudie hand?
Surely I will revenge me on thy love,
And trie who shall victorious prove.
If thou dost give me wealth, I will restore
All back unto thee by the poore.
If thou dost give me honour, men shall see,
The honour doth belong to thee.
I will not marry; or, if she be mine,
She and her children shall be thine.
My bosome friend, if he blaspheme thy name,
I will tear thence his love and fame.
One half of me being gone, the rest I give
Unto some Chappell, die or live.
As for thy passion--But of that anon,
When with the other I have done.
For thy predestination I’le contrive,
That three yeares hence, if I survive,
I’le build a spittle, or mend common wayes,
And mend mine own without delayes.
Then I will use the works of thy creation,
As if I us’d them but for fashion.
The world and I will quarrell; and the yeare
Shall not perceive, that I am here.
My musick shall finde thee, and ev’ry string
Shall have his attribute to sing;
That all together may accord in thee,
And prove one God, one harmonie.
If thou shalt give me wit, it shall appeare,
If thou hast give’n it me, ’tis here.
Nay, I will reade thy book, and never move
Till I have found therein thy love,
Thy art of love, which I’le turn back on thee:
O my deare Saviour, Victorie!
Then for thy passion–I will do for that–
Alas, my God, I know not what.

George Herbert, “The Thanksgiving” (published 1633), in Helen Wilcox ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 112-3.

Margaret Cavendish
Of the Subtlety of Motion (1664 version)

Could we the several motions of life know,
The subtle windings, and the ways they go:
We should of unknown things dispute no more,
How they be done, but the great God adore.
But we with ignorance about do run,
To know the ends, and how they first begun.
Spending that life, which God in us did raise
To worship him, and in his works to praise,
With fruitless, vain, impossible pursuits,
In schools, lectures, and quarrelling disputes.
We never give him thanks that did us make,
But proud, as petty gods, our selves do take.

Women Poets of the English Civil War, ed. Sarah C.E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 213.