[Untitled]

Edited by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

This poem draws on several key biblical uses of the “face”: in the Psalms, David wishes God’s face to be turned towards him (Psalm 27:9), in Genesis, the Holy Spirit moves upon the “face” of the seas as the world is created (Genesis 1:2), and that verb is picked up in lines 6-7 here. John Donne also played with similar imagery in “Good Friday 1613 Riding Westward,” though in his poem it is the believer who turns away his face from God (because travelling west on Easter day, and also because of his humility), until the poem’s final lines. As in The Hope65, here Pulter embraces the idea of physical disintegration, suggesting that death of the body is rebirth of the soul. Pulter also incorporates the process of writing into the poem itself. In the second stanza the speaker writes her own “story” while also creating a devotional poem of praise: “I will hallelujahs sing.” The humility of Pulter’s account of her own writing echoes George Herbert’s. Her phrase “my eternal God and King” has biblical origins which Herbert also invokes when he defends plainness, albeit ingeniously, in “Jordan (1)”:

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing;
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for prime;
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, my God, my King.

We might see the same mixture of humility and assertion in Pulter’s poem. When she modestly comments “here I pass my story,” pass means “tell” or “relate” but it could also mean “surpass,” suggesting that Pulter’s speaker lives through (and beyond) her words.

Compare Editions

Dear God, turn not away Thy face.
Desert me not, in such a case
As I am in: without Thy grace,
Involved1
 with death and night.

Oh that the spirits of life and love
Would leave His glorious throne above;
And deign on my dark soul to move,
To illuminate me with light.

Though I no offering fit can bring,
Yet I will hallelujahs sing
To my eternal God and King2
,
Whil’st here I pass my story.

And when the elements3
 are agreed
On my mortality to feed,
And neither faith nor hope shall need,
I’ll shine with love in glory4
.

Oh then turn not Thy face away,
Let love and light bear all the sway:
They’ll soon create eternal day,
Oh do it but explore5
.

Then shall Thy blessèd influence,
Triumph o’er Death her impotence6
Whil’st I, enrobed with innocence,
Am crowned for evermore.