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The Pulter Project
pulterproject.northwestern.edu
Poem 56

A Dialogue Between Two Sisters, Virgins, Bewailing their Solitary Life, P.P., A.P.1

Edited by Sarah C. E. Ross

This poem brings together in intriguing ways two poetic modes or forms common in seventeenth-century poetry: the complaint and the dialogue poem. The mode of complaint can be broadly understood as the “woe is me” posture and the rhetorical exposition of emotion deriving from it; typically, complaint is an open-ended expression of woe, in which the grief-stricken speaker expands in an exorbitant way on their lamentable circumstances. Complaint is pervasive in seventeenth-century literature, with foundational examples such as Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint and Spenser’s volume of Complaints (1591) influencing a plethora of amatory, religious, and political applications. For definitions and influential discussions of complaint, see John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and "Female Complaint": A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Katharine Craik, “Spenser’s ‘Complaints’ and the New Poet”, Huntington Library Quarterly, 64 (2001): 63-79; Rosalind Smith, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Complaint”, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), pp. 339-52.

Complaint is often female-voiced, and Pulter’s poem bears multiple markers of the mode. Here, the two speaking virgins occupy a landscape that reflects or shares their woe; they help “poor Philomel”, the nightingale, a common poetic figure for sorrow, to sing a lamenting song; and their sad songs are sung “in vain” (“Then let us cease in vain to make our moan”, line 53). While the reason for the sisters’ woe is not explicitly identified, the poem is a broad complaint against the times, the “base world” offering only “wants and losses” (lines 50, 12). Pulter’s wider body of work suggests a political context for this: the poem’s complaint elements can be usefully read alongside The Invitation into the Country2, The Complaint of Thames, 16474; To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, they Being at London, I at Broadfield38, and several other of Pulter’s poems that construe Broadfield as a landscape of loss and loneliness.

At the same time as the poem is a clear example of complaint, its title and form mark it as a dialogue poem, another mode with a “dizzying array of precedents” in the early modern period. (For dialogue poetry, see W. Scott Howard, "Milton’s ‘Hence’: Dialogue and the Shape of History in ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, in Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue, ed. Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 157-74). Pastoral dialogues are the clearest precedent here, in the broad tradition of Spenser’sThe Shepheard’s Calendar, and the poem reflects the proximity of pastoral and complaint that can also be seen in Spenser’s work (see Craik, “Spenser’s ‘Complaints’ and the New Poet”). Spenser is a likely influence on Pulter’s poetry, with commonalities also evident between “The Complaint of Thames, 1647” (Poem 4) and The Ruines of Time, which was published in Complaints (1591). The Spenserian text closest to “A Dialogue Between Two Sisters” is another poem published in the same volume, The Tears of the Muses.

Pulter’s placement of complaint in a dialogue between two sisters is, however, divergent from dominant traditions. Female complainers are most frequently heard in dialogue with a framing male narrator, whose understanding of the complainer’s (or complainers’) plight is limited, and who is unable to offer any consolation. Kerrigan has reflected productively on the “compulsive dialectic” of framed female-voiced complaint, with a “sense of distortion” and an “interpretative instability” emerging between the woman’s grief and the masculine framing narrator’s incomprehension (p. 12). Pulter’s dialogue, in contrast, is between two female speakers who share and understand each other’s grief, sympathising with each other. Their woes are shared not only with each other, but with all aspects of the landscape around them: “For all things here which do in order rise, / Methinks in woe with us do sympathise” (lines 13-14). And at the end of the poem, the sisters turn to their mother (the implied author of the dialogue poem), promising to go and mitigate her sorrowful loneliness. In its dynamic of female woes shared, the poem can be compared to “The Complaint of Thames, 1647” (Poem 4), in which the woeful Thames outlines her sorrows to the implicitly female framing speaker of the poem. Beyond Pulter’s oeuvre, another female-authored, female-voiced complaint in dialogue is Anne Bradstreet’s A Dialog ue Between Old England and New.

Compare Editions
i
1Young Anne: Come, my dear sister, sit with me a while,
2That we both Time and Sorrow may beguile;
3In this sweet shade, by this clear, purling spring,
4We’ll sit and help poor
Philomel2
to sing,
5And to complete the
consort3
and the choir,
6I would I had my
viol, you your lyre4
.
7Elder Pen: Ay me, my sister, Time on restless wheels
8Doth ever turn with wings upon his heels,
9Fast as the sand that
huddles5
through his
glass6
,
10Regardless of our tears, he on doth pass;
11Yet in the shade of this sad sycamore
12We’ll sit, our wants and losses to
deplore7
,
13For all things here which do in
order8
rise,
14Methinks in woe with us do sympathise.
15These
cypress9
, like our hopes, do lesser grow;
16This bubbling fount like our sad eyes does flow,
17And though it doth a greater murmuring keep,
18Yet we may teach this living spring to weep;
19These primroses, like us, neglected fade,
20And violets sit weeping in the shade;
21With us, sad
Hyacinthus10
sighs out “ay”,
22And lovely
Amarantha11
doth display
23Her beauties here to no admiring eye;
24Just so
obliviated12
we live and die.
25And for your viol and my
theorbo lute13
,
26They both unstrung, upon the wall, hang mute,
27And in a unison will scarcely move,
28They’re so unused, ay me, to strains of love.
29With
Philomel14
we may lament too late
30Our most disastrous, and too differing, fate.
31O, my sad heart, would we might pass our hours
32As innocently contented as these flowers
33Who show their beauties to admiring eyes,
34Then breathing aromatic odours
dies15
.
35Come, my dear
Nan16
, in this sad shade we’ll lie,
36And like them sweetly live and sweetly die.
37
Adonis’ blood the anemone uprears:17
38Who knows, such virtue may
be18
in our tears;
39These vi’lets, primrose,
pales19
which
appears20
,
40Perhaps their number
springs from virgins’ tears21
.
41O me, I would I might this very hour
42Sigh my sad soul into this
July flower22
;
43Trust me, I gladly would
transmigerate23
,
44That my afflicted life might
have a date24
,
45But we, alas, in sad obscurity
46Must hopeless live and so, I doubt, must die.
47O, that a
rècluse life25
had been my fate,
48To take our visits at a
courteous grate26
.
49Anne: Stay, my dear sister, I have no mind to die;
50A little more of this base world I’ll try,
51And if what’s future prove like what is past,
52I’ll patient be, I can but die at last.
53Then let us cease in vain to make our moan,
54And go to our sad mother; she’s alone.
Macron symbol indicating the end of a poem.

Amplified Edition,

edited by Sarah C. E. Rossi

Editorial Note

My priority in editing these poems has been to modernise, and to achieve interpretative and visual clarity, in order to make the poems as accessible as possible to as wide a modern audience as is possible. Spelling is modernised, as is punctuation. Modernising the latter, in particular, often involves a significant act of editorial interpretation, but in my view this is one of the most productive areas of editorial intervention, particularly for a manuscript text such as Pulter’s where the punctuation is erratic compared to modern usage (and, indeed, compared to early modern printed texts).1

  • 1. See Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse”, in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 162-178.
Macron symbol indicating the end of a poem.
  • Sarah C. E. Ross, Victoria University of Wellington
  • A Dialogue Between Two Sisters, Virgins, Bewailing their Solitary Life, P.P., A.P.
    MS = P.P., F.P. The “F” seems to be an error, as the two speakers are clearly identified in the poem as Penelope and Anne. These are poetic versions of Pulter’s two daughters Penelope (1633-55) and Anne (1635-66). For other poems addressed to her daughters, see The Invitation into the Country2 and To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, they Being at London, I at Broadfield38.
  • Philomel
    the nightingale. In Greek mythology, Philomela is raped by Tereus, who cuts out her tongue so she is unable to tell anyone what has happened to her; however, she reveals her story in an embroidered tapestry and is metamorphosed into the nightingale. On account of the myth, the nightingale’s song has a long poetic association with sorrow and melancholy; for example, see Milton, “Il Penseroso”, lines 56-64. (In fact, in nature, the female bird is silent and only the male sings.)
  • consort
    a company of musicians making music together (OED n.2 4); here, instrumental musicians to complement the vocal “choir”
  • viol, you your lyre
    stringed instruments, the viol played with a bow and the lyre plucked like a harp
  • huddles
    hurries (OED 4b)
  • glass
    hourglass
  • deplore
    bewail, lament
  • order
    natural order (OED 11c), perhaps with a sense of a fraternity or sorority, a society (OED 8c)
  • cypress
    a tree traditionally associated with death and mourning (OED 1c)
  • Hyacinthus
    the hyacinth. In Greek mythology, a young man loved by both Apollo and Zephyrus; he is killed by Zephyrus in a jealous rage, and turns into the flower.
  • Amarantha
    the amaranth, an imaginary flower reputed never to fade
  • obliviated
    forgotten, committed to oblivion
  • theorbo lute
    a large lute with two sets of tuning pegs and an extended neck, enabling additional bass strings
  • Philomel
    see note to line 4
  • dies
    i.e. die. Verb agreement in Pulter’s verse is not strict; this instance has not been modernised, in order to preserve the rhyme.
  • Nan
    a common pet-name for “Anne”
  • Adonis’ blood the anemone uprears:
    In Greek mythology, Adonis is the young and beautiful man loved by Aphrodite. After he is killed by a wild boar, her tears mingle with his blood to transform him into a brightly-coloured flower, the anemone.
  • be
    The word “be” has been inserted above the line, as a correction in the hand that I take to be Pulter’s own (see Ross (2000), pp. 150-171 and 252-4).
  • pales
    apparently a type of flower, like others listed in the line. For an approximate meaning, see OED n.1.III.7a: The ray (outer florets) of a typical flower of the family Asteraceae (Compositae).
  • appears
    i.e. appear. Verb agreement in Pulter’s verse is not strict; this instance has not been modernised, in order to preserve the rhyme.
  • springs from virgins’ tears
    See note to line 37. For a similar idea, see The Weeping Wish61: “Oh that my tears that fall down to the earth / Might give some noble, unknown flower birth” (lines 9-10).
  • July flower
    gillyflower
  • transmigerate
    i.e. transmigrate, the action of the soul passing, after death, into another body (OED 2a)
  • have a date
    probably in the sense of OED n.2 5: have a limit, an end-point
  • rècluse life
    a life of seclusion, withdrawal from society
  • courteous grate
    metal bars (a grate) through which a conversation is taken, as were common at houses of religious seclusion
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