When we read a poem aloud, we understand it differently than when we read silently. Reciting or listening to words can help us realize the limitations of eye-based reading—limits produced by our tendency to privilege visual information over that received from our other senses. Overcoming such limits is especially important when we are reading metered verse, which is shaped by patterns and numbers of syllables, stresses, and other sonic patterns like rhyme. Poems, we might say, intensively inhabit an acoustic environment.

We are always making instantaneous judgments based on what we see, even when (as is always the case) we only see part of what we’re looking at. Our brains famously fill in, without prompting or notice, what are technically unseen details in our optical blind spots.1 When we read in our heads, something similar pertains: a fluent reader’s eyes often skip short or frequent words.2 But when we read aloud—and especially when we listen back to a recording of what we have read while in the presence of the corresponding visual text—we often catch with our ears what we miss with our eyes. The affordances of different sensory modes for experiencing texts suggests that the integration of oral and aural readings with the visual kind has inherent value—perhaps especially in a project, like The Pulter Project, centered on editing (a special kind of reading).

While repeated sounds have always been and still are a hallmark of poetry, language in Pulter’s time period operated according to a fluid grid of meaning-making, with multiple associations and meanings carried through variant spelling practices and through sound. In a pre-modern world before standardized spelling, a single set of marks on a page might equally refer to what we now think of as two separate words (with “ther” activating meanings for “there” and “their”). An editor modernizing the text necessarily selects an option for the reader, and other possibilities of meaning disappear visually. Yet vocalizing the poems can release the multiplicities that intrigued early modern writers. Similarly, because words that sounded the same (homophones such as “one” and “won”) were not understood as having two singular and separate proper meanings, writers could capitalize on the richness of secondary wordplay.3 For Pulter, who labeled her poems as “sighs” that were “breathed forth,” the physical performance of poetry was a crucial component of its energy and force.

With this in mind, we offer “Soundings,” audio versions of Hester Pulter’s poems. We hope that these unornamented recordings might spark listeners to produce their own sonic version of our site’s Amplified Editions: a contrastive reading that goes beyond a basic take by leaning into a particular angle of interpretation, emphasis, or tone. In this way, we hope to cultivate an archive of performances of Pulter’s poems which demonstrate the flexibility and potential of her poetics when treated by a diversity of readers.

After all, every voice differs. What did Pulter’s voice sound like when she read her verse aloud? We can’t know, of course; but perhaps those trained in early modern pronunciation add something to the representation of her work.

Punctuation differs among the versions of Pulter’s work in circulation: her manuscript, Eardley’s edition, and those in The Pulter Project, among other possibilities. Since punctuation is applied partly in the service of pacing and stress, as well as syntax, a performance sensitive to one set of marks instead of another has the potential to bring out novel aspects of the text.

How about tone? We can rarely say with certainty if a particular poem, stanza, or line is melancholic, hopeful, joyous, bitter, or angry, among a host of other possibilities; different readings are almost always possible. Few graphic editions even try to specify such matters; yet when reading on our own, it is hard to avoid making nearly automatic decisions about such things. The process of generating an audio version is likely to encourage their creators to make those decisions consciously, and even perhaps mark them with annotations in order to share their rationale for choices made.

Apart from opening up the interpretative potential that might otherwise remain locked in silence when Pulter’s poems stay on the page or screen, audio versions can also serve a variety of audiences: those with visual-processing challenges, or non-native English speakers, or readers encountering early modern English for the first time, or people unfamiliar with metrical verse. We hope these recordings will serve all such potential audiences for Pulter’s poetry, and invite you to join us in this new way of exploring her work.