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Shades of Death: Hester Pulter and Mortality

by Eileen Sperry

To say Pulter’s poetry is concerned with death is an understatement. Death appears constantly in the many lyrics and emblems collected in the Leeds manuscript: Pulter writes about the death of her many children, of her beloved king, and especially about the specter of her own mortality. Pulter Project editors have tagged 53 of the manuscript’s 120 poems—over 44%—with the topic “death”; this doesn’t include the many others that explore related topics like grief, decay, sickness, and resurrection.

Looking across this body of work, this Exploration traces eight of the major features Pulter seems to identify in death. In each case, I sketch out some of the broad themes that emerge across the collection and identify some poems in which those ideas are developed. Such categories and lists are by no means exclusive; as the following sections make clear, Pulter often approaches death from multiple (and sometimes even contradictory) perspectives in the same poem. Nonetheless, the following eight themes offer readers a starting point from which to start thinking about the complexity of Pulter’s thinking about mortality. Following each feature, I also offer a brief list of other texts from other early modern poets and thinkers that provide additional perspectives on that aspect of mortality.

Death is natural

Pulter’s poems find death written across the rhythms of the natural world. The cycles of living and dying are often prefigured in the revolutions of night and day (see, for instance, Aurora [1]3, Of Night and Morning5, To Aurora [3]34, Aurora [2]37, or Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night47), the movements of the heavens (see, for instance, The Eclipse1 or The Center30), or the meteorological rhythms of the weather (see, for instance, The Circle [1]17.

Pulter also finds death in what we might call the ecological, in the creatures and ecosystems of the non-human world. See, for instance, poems such as The Pismire35 or The Lark46, or many of Pulter’s emblem poems, such as The Turtle74, This Poor Turtledove85, View But This Tulip105, or This Fell Catablepe98.

The insight Pulter draws from death’s ubiquity in nature varies poem to poem. Sometimes, death’s presence in the natural world helps bolster a poem’s argument that the reader has nothing to fear in dying. Death is everywhere, Pulter writes; it inheres in all things, helping to shape the fundamental rhythms of existence. This familiarity—the natural-ness of death—means that mortality isn’t something to be feared, but something instead to be regarded as just part of life itself.

But other times, death’s presence in nature becomes part of the argument for death. The fact that this world is a dying world, a world in which death is everywhere, means that the only way of escaping death is, paradoxically, by dying. Only through the transformation of death can Pulter imagine entering into eternal life, into a world where death is no more.

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Death is physical

Perhaps as a consequence of its presence in nature, death is, in Pulter’s depictions, also closely linked with materiality. Dying seems to be visible, first and foremost, in the physical erosion of matter. In Pulter’s work, this is most immediately visible in the health (or illness) of the human body. Pulter was keenly aware of the (sometimes slow, and sometimes frighteningly quick) breakdown of the body’s systems. See, for instance, poems reflecting on her family’s or her own illness, such as Universal Dissolution6, Upon the Death of my Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter10, Made When I Was Sick31, or Made When I Was Not Well51.

The body’s materiality and therefore its susceptibility to death seems to open a related question for Pulter about the mortality of all matter. Pulter often imagines matter in its smallest, most fundamental units: dust, atoms, elements. In many poems that use the language of alchemy or otherwise explore elemental compositions—see, for instance, The Circle [2]21, View But This Tulip105, Dear God, From Thy High Throne Look Down63, or The Invocation of the Elements41—the speaker wrestles with the question of whether (if at all) such substances also themselves decay and die, or if elemental existence offers something permanent—something potentially beyond death itself.

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Death is spiritual

But if death was a physical change, Pulter makes clear, it was also definitively a spiritual experience. Across the poems, Pulter imagines body and soul locked in a complex relationship with one another. Poems like To Aurora [3]34 often express a sense of frustration at this entanglement, using a familiar rhetoric (certainly within Pulter’s poetry) of confinement and disenfranchisement to describe the frustrating experience of being an embodied soul.

The speakers of Pulter’s poems frequently speak directly to the soul on the subject of death. In these dialogues, they remind their own souls that no matter the decay present in the body, that they are made of something different, something more durable. See, for instance, The Welcome [1]19, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul24, O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul28, Made When I Was Sick31, My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble?40, Pardon Me, My Dearest Love42, Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory48, or My Heart, Why Dost Thou Throb So in My Breast?49. The shared rhetorical strategy in many of these poems—words of reassurance to a worried soul—creates an overarching sense not of confidence, but of doubt. The lyrics become performances not of a speaker offering reassurance about the immortality of the soul, but of a speaker working to convince the reader (and herself) that the spiritual part of her being really is immune from death.

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Death is personal

One of the features that has drawn so many readers to Pulter’s work in recent years is the strong sense of personal voice in these lyrics. As Pulter discusses death, she does so frequently from a first-person perspective, offering a lyric speaker who is able to articulate the experience of wrestling with their own mortality. Many of these take the form of dialogue poems, in which the speaker calls out to God in her despair. In poems such as Dear God, Turn Not Away Thy Face20, Dear God, From Thy High Throne Look Down63, or Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory48, Pulter engages the conventions of 17th-century devotional lyric, in ways that often recall works by Donne or Herbert. In these devotional works, death and poetry begin to become intertwined. Both offer a meeting ground in which an individual might, finally, come face to face with God.

But while the sense of individual identity that can be formed by meditating on death can be comforting, as some of these devotional lyrics suggest, it can also be deeply alienating. In Pulter’s works, the deaths of those around her leave her increasingly alone. In poems like Aurora [1]3 or O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul28, or in the many poems mourning the loss of her children, Pulter highlights a feeling of isolation as one of the primary manifestations of grief. Each death leaves her more and more alone, she writes; death becomes a kind of social erosion, with each loss further erasing the bonds linking Pulter with her family and her community.

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Death is communal

But while death could destroy these personal connections, Pulter also recognized that some deaths could in fact create stronger social bonds. In her reflections on the violence of the English Civil War, Pulter often concentrates on the very public deaths of George Lisle, Charles Lucas, and King Charles in poems such as On those Two Unparalleled Friends7, On That Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder8, On the Horrid Murder of that Incomparable Prince14, or Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle15. These deaths reverberated beyond themselves, representing not only an individual but a collective loss.

Such communal losses often led Pulter to explore the memorial functions of lyric poetry. In these poems, the speaker calls for the nation to grieve and remember. By doing so, Pulter allows her work to become a monument to these notable figures, spaces in which some part of the dead might live on. Particularly in the context of the Civil War, this was a deeply political act, in every sense of the word; Pulter’s poems on these deaths work to transform individual loss into an opportunity to reconstitute the communal bonds of nationhood.

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Death is destructive

Many of Pulter’s poems depict death as an undeniably destructive force. Such destruction is often depicted as senseless, without any immediate or obvious benefit. Death destroys not only Pulter’s youth and body (see for instance, Made When I Was Not Well51) but the lives of many of her children (see, for instance, Upon the Death of my Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter10, Tell Me No More11, or O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul28). The prevalence of grief across Pulter’s poems is a clear indication of death’s devastation; the speakers of these poems find themselves in mourning for all that death has taken from them and from the world.

Sometimes, however, the destruction wrought by death was not purposeless, but instrumental. In poems such as My Heart, Why Dost Thou Throb So in My Breast?49, The Revolution16, The Circle [2]21, or View But This Tulip105, death is compared to the processes of calcination or alchemical refinement. Destruction here becomes a concurrent act of re-creation, a furnace in which the phoenix-like speakers of the poems might be consumed and remade. In such poems, destruction is entwined, mobius-like, with generation, yielding many of Pulter’s favorite rhyming pairs: dissolve/revolve, calcined/refined, create/annihilate.

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Death is restorative

As the above examples suggest, Pulter sees in death not only destruction but the potential for restoration—a consummation, to echo Hamlet, devoutly to be wished. Sometimes, Pulter describes death as offering the potential for enfranchisement and liberation; see, for instance, The Welcome [1]19, Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined57, or The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge39. In these moments, Pulter sees death as the experience that will free her from the many constrictions of life on earth: her solitary life at Broadfield, the grief experienced by the loss of her children, and the decay associated with embodied life.

Pulter also often described death as a kind of narrative culmination, a moment in time that would signal the conclusion of this earthly life. In poems such as My Soul's Sole Desire29, The Welcome [2]33, The Circle [3]25, or Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night47, the speaker calls for the reader (and, more often, herself) to have patience. This term was frequently used in early modern ars moriendi and other descriptions of death to describe the need to accept the divine timeline of life and death. To die patiently meant to understand that death was neither to be delayed or wished for, but to be experienced at its proper time. In such descriptions, death offered a moment of teleological fulfillment—a making whole.

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Death is unknowable

Finally, for Pulter, death was inseparable from what lay beyond death: specifically, the hope of resurrection. Even as death represented a narrative endpoint to earthly experience, it also offered a transformational new beginning, allowing Pulter to imagine a life beyond this one. Poems such as The Desire18, Dear God, Turn Not Away Thy Face20, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul24, My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble?40, or A Solitary Discourse44 showcase the hope that accompanied resurrection in Pulter’s lyric.

The nature of the resurrection Pulter imagines, however, is unclear. While in some poems, eternal life is presented in dualist tones as the persistence of the spirit beyond the limitations of the body, others offer more complicated accounts. In some resurrection poems, for instance, Pulter seems to reference a monist theology of bodily resurrection known in the early modern period as soul-sleeping. Echoing the doctrine espoused by Martin Luther and several Protestant dissenting groups, in poems such as Tell Me No More11, The Center30, Aurora [2]37, The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge39, or The Brahman109, the speaker seems to imply that the soul—while not dying, per se—would be kept apart from God until the day of final judgement when it was reunited with the body. In such visions, death both was and was not final; liminal space emerges between the end of this world and the beginning of the next.

And in some poems, Pulter seems to question the certainty of resurrection altogether. In poems like The Hope65 or View But This Tulip105, Pulter underwrites the hope for resurrection with the simultaneous realization that such a miracle is, necessarily, incomprehensible. For all that Pulter comes to know about death, it seems that one of the final lessons is that death—and what comes after—remains unknowable.

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