Devotional Lyrics

“Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low” is one of many devotional lyrics in Pulter’s manuscript, of the kind written in physical and or spiritual “sickness and sorrow,” as the title to this poem describes. It can be read as part of a larger body of such poems in Pulter’s manuscript, including the following:

For comparable poems written on specific occasions, see Universal Dissolution6; Made When I Was Sick, 164731; This Was Written in 1648 When I Lay in, with my Son John45; Made When I Was Not Well, April 20, 165551.

For more general poems about spiritual and / or physical grief, see How Long Shall My Dejected Soul24; O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul28; My Soul: Why Art Thou Full of Trouble?40; A Solitary Discourse44; Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night47; Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory48; My Heart Why Dost Thou Throb So in My Breast?49; My God, I Thee (and Only Thee) Adore50; Dear God, From Thy High Throne Look Down63.

Devotional poetry flourished in English and related literatures after the Reformation, as Barbara Lewalski explored in a still-foundational study. Lewalski describes the way in which “the new focus on scripture occasioned by the Protestant Reformation” generated “the remarkable flowering of the religious lyric in the seventeenth century,” and goes on to say:

Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics

Besides looking to the Bible as source and model for the presentation of sacred truth as art, Protestant poetics also calls for the treatment of another kind of truth in religious lyric poetry—the painstaking analysis of the personal religious life. Working in these terms, the Protestant lyric poet must explore such questions as his [sic] relationship to God, the state of his soul, and his hopes of salvation with direct reference to his own theological assumptions.

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 8, 13.

The devotional lyric was also a literary mode relatively accessible for women readers and writers. Femke Molekamp, discussing a devotional poem by the Scottish Presbyterian poet Elizabeth Melville, summarises in a way that could apply directly to Pulter’s poem:

Femke Molekamp, Female Piety and Religious Poetry

[Melville’s poem] exemplifies many common features of early modern female religious poetry, and of the devotional practices to which it is connected. First, the poem is anchored in scripture, and, second, it is written in a meditative mode. The devotional life of early modern women was marked by reading practices that were often meditative and affective, in the pursuit of divine inspiration. Biographical sources reveal that many literate godly women took time on a daily basis to retreat to a more solitary space to engage in devotional reading, textually based meditation, and prayer, and there are also many extant books of meditation written by and for women of this era.

Femke Molekamp, “Female Piety and Religious Poetry,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), pp. 432-45 (p. 433).

For women writers and devotional poetry, see also Danielle Clarke, “Writing the Divine,” in The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), pp. 123-127.