Dissolved to Tears
Pulter calls the dying hart “quite dissolved,” and the emblem’s speaker imagines herself dissolving “to tears.” The words “dissolve” and “dissolution” appear frequently in Pulter’s poetry. She rhymes them with “resolve,” “revolve” (one of many terms about planets and lives circling about), and “involve” (which she uses to mean coil around or enwrap, another circular image). Many of her poems—such as View But This Tulip (Emblem 40)105—imagine people, nature, or the universe dissolving in a similar way as John Donne uses the term in “The Dissolution.” Pulter’s tulip emblem and Donne’s poem might help us understand what she means when she refers to the deer as nearly dissolved. What might this use of “dissolve” suggest about Pulter’s view of death and the afterlife?
- She’s dead; and all which die
- To their first elements resolve;
- And we were mutual elements to us,
- And made of one another.
- My body then doth hers involve,
- And those things whereof I consist hereby
- In me abundant grow, and burdenous,
- And nourish not, but smother.
- My fire of passion, sighs of air,
- Water of tears, and earthly sad despair,
- Which my materials be,
- But near worn out by love’s security,
- She, to my loss, doth by her death repair.
- And I might live long wretched so,
- But that my fire doth with my fuel grow.
- Now, as those active kings
- Whose foreign conquest treasure brings,
- Receive more, and spend more, and soonest break,
- This—which I am amazed that I can speak—
- This death, hath with my store
- My use increased.
- And so my soul, more earnestly released,
- Will outstrip hers; as bullets flown before
- A latter bullet may o’ertake, the powder being more.
Pulter also uses “dissolve” to describe excessive crying; in Emblem 22, the speaker says, “I to tears dissolve.” The Circle [1]17 and Dear God, from Thy High Throne Look Down63 both contemplate what would happen if the speaker dissolved into tears, and Upon the Imprisonment of His Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First13 ends with this stanza:
- Then ask no more why I’m in tears dissolved,
- Whilst our good king with sorrow is involved:
- To pray and weep for him I am resolved.
Two useful intertexts for Pulter’s trope of dissolving into tears are John Donne’s sermon on Psalm 6, preached at Whitehall on April 5, 1628, and Henry Vaughan’s poem “The Lamp.”
And this may be some emblem, some useful intimation, how hastily repentance follows sin; David’s sin is placed, but in the beginning of the night in the evening (in the evening he rose and walked upon the terrace and saw Bathsheba) and in the next part of time in the night, he falls a weeping: no more between the sweetness of sin, and the bitterness of repentance, than between evening and night; no morning to either of them, till the sun of grace arise and shine out and proceed to a meridional height, and make the repentance upon circumstance, to be a repentance upon the substance, and bring it to be a repentance for the sin itself, which at first was but a repentance upon some calamity, that that sin induced.
He wept then and wept in the night; in a time, when he could neither receive rest in himself, which all men had, nor receive praise from others, which all men affect. And he wept omni nocte; which is not only omnibus noctibus, some time every night, but it is tota nocte, clean through the night. And he wept in that abundance, as hath put the Holy Ghost to that hyperbole in David’s pen to express it, liquefecit stratum, natare fecit stratum, it drowned his bed, surrounded his bed, it dissolved, it macerated, it melted his bed with that brine. Well; qui rigat stratum, he that washes his bed so with repentant tears, non potest in cogitationem ejus libidinum pompa subrepere. Tentations [temptations] take hold of us sometimes after our tears, after our repentance, but seldom or never in the act of our repentance, and in the very shedding of our tears; at least libidinum pompa, the victory, the triumph of lust breaks not in upon us, in a bed, so dissolved, so surrounded, so macerated with such tears. Thy bed is a figure of thy grave. Such as thy grave receives thee at death, it shall deliver thee up to judgement at last. Such as thy bed receives thee at night, it shall deliver thee in the morning. If thou sleep without calling thyself to an account, thou wilt wake so, and walk so, and proceed so, without ever calling thyself to an account, till Christ Jesus call thee in the clouds. It is not intended, that thou shouldest afflict thyself so grievously, as some overdoing penitents, to put chips and shells and splints and flints and nails and rowels [small spiked wheels attached to spurs] of spurs in thy bed, to wound and macerate thy body so. The inventions of men are not intended here. But here is a precept of God, implied in this precedent and practice of David: that as long as the sense of a former sin, or the inclination to a future oppresses thee, thou must not close thine eyes, thou must not take thy rest, till, as God married thy body and soul together in the creation, and shall at last crown thy body and soul together in the resurrection, so they may also rest together here, that as thy body rests in thy bed, thy soul may rest in the peace of thy conscience, and that thou never say to thy head, rest upon this pillow, till thou canst say to thy soul, rest in this repentance, in this peace.
- ’Tis dead night round about: horror doth creep
- And move on with the shades; stars nod and sleep,
- And through the dark air spin a fiery thread
- Such as doth gild the lazy glowworm’s bed.
- Yet burn’st thou here a full day while I spend
- My rest in cares, and to the dark world lend
- These flames, as thou dost thine to me. I watch
- That hour, which must thy life and mine dispatch,
- But still thou dost outgo me. I can see
- Met, in thy flames, all acts of piety.
- Thy light is charity; thy heat is zeal,
- And thy aspiring, active fires reveal
- Devotion still on wing. Then thou dost weep
- Still as thou burn’st, and the warm droppings creep
- To measure out thy length, as if thou’dst know
- What stock and how much time were left thee now.
- Nor dost thou spend one tear in vain, for still
- As thou dissolv’st to them and they distill,
- They’re stored up in the socket where they lie.
- When all is spent, thy last and sure supply,
- And such is true repentance, every breath
- We spend in sighs is treasure after death;
- Only, one point escapes thee: that thy oil
- Is still out with thy flame and so both fail.
- But when soe’er I’m out, both shall be in,
- And where thou madest an end, there I’ll begin.