Pulter’s poem is titled Heliotropians (Emblem 3)69. This Curation is a visual essay that reviews images of flowers turned to the sun in European emblem literature. My aim is not exhaustive; there are other such emblems from the period. My aim is also not identificatory; since it’s hard to know exactly what kind of flower the “heliotropian” is in Emblem 3, it’s all the harder to locate a specific source that could have inspired Pulter. This visual essay thus attends to the array of meanings that was understood to be encoded in the heliotrope’s relationship to the sun. It is not in chronological order; it instead prioritizes possible resonances of meaning to Pulter’s emblem.

Emblem 1: George Wither, “Ad Regis Nutus” (At the King’s Pleasure)

George Wither et al., A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne: Quickened Vvith Metricall Illustrations, Both Morall and Divine: And Disposed into Lotteries … (London, 1635), Internet Archive.

“Our outward Hopes will take effect, / According to the King’s aspect”: this couplet at the top of George Wither’s emblem from 1635 has a clear political message — the hopes of English subjects depend upon the gift of the king’s benevolent radiance. The emblem affirms the life-giving nature of the sun’s rays. In the explanatory poem, the sun (“Phoebus”) is analogized to the “King,” while “the Marigolds” and “The Tulips, Daysies, and the Heliotropes / Of ev’ry kinde” are the subjects of the “Nation.” Emphasizing the strong, if unilateral, bond between monarch and subject, this emblem’s visual and textual program for heliotropic flowers chimes with Pulter’s Royalist commitments.

Emblem 2: Joachim Camerarius the Younger, “Langvesco Sole Latente” (I wither when the sun is hidden)

Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorvm et Emblematvm Centvriae Tres (Leipzig, 1605), 90r. Image Courtesy of Albert R. Mann Library Special Collections, Cornell University.

This early-seventeenth-century emblem centers the tulip, a flower that Pulter does not explicitly classify as heliotropic in the three poems discussed in Identifying Pulter’s Fabulous Flower, but which “close[s]” (l. 26) with the sun in The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee (Emblem 53)118. Its illustration features three blooms, two training toward a sun that seems just outside the frame, and one that droops in the other direction. The motto explains the visual program thus: “Marcidus ut flos hic languescit sole latente, / Coelesti sapimus sic sine luce nihil” (Just as this flower goes limp and withers when the sun is not shining, so too does our being without the light of Heaven).1 Wither’s sun-king has become in Camerarius the Christian God who radiates (and can also withhold) “the light of Heaven.” This emblem provides key coordinates for making sense of the second, devotional analogy in Pulter’s Emblem 3, which features this couplet: “Yet still a blessed influence from above / Sweetly inclines them [“those souls which are to God united”] to a constant love” (ll. 23, 25–26).

Emblem 3: Otto Vaenius, “Qvo pergis, eodem vergo” (I incline to where you go)

Otto van Veen, STC 24627a.52, Leaf K2 Recto (Page 75), Image 200199, in Amorum Emblemata, Figuris Aeneis Incisa Studio Othonis VaenI Batauo-Lugdunensis (Antwerp, 1608), Folger Shakespeare Library.

In this emblem from 1608, Cupid directs a lone sunflower, with his pointing finger, to heed the sun. The explanatory poem, in English, is called “Loues shyning Sunne.” It reads:

This visual and textual program of the polylingual emblem eroticizes the relationship between sun and heliotropic flower. In doing so, it reimagines the cast of characters now familiar to us from the emblems above: the sun, for example, is neither a monarch nor God; she is a female beloved on whom a male lover should “fix” his adoration. Such recasting notwithstanding, the spirit of the emblem belongs, in some measure, to the Ovidian tradition in which a floralized Clytie follows Apollo daily, which Pulter invokes, although not straightforwardly, in The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers12. Vaenius’s emblem also sheds light on the sun’s status as a “radiant lover” in Emblem 3 (l. 22).

Footnotes