This poem is in a different hand from the main scribe’s, and is one of several added to the manuscript after the conclusion of the main series of poems (which concludes with To Sir William Davenant, Upon the Unspeakable Loss of the Most Conspicuous and Chief Ornament of his Frontispiece60). The same hand has transcribed On the Fall of That Grand Rebel, the Earl of Essex62 and Dear God, from Thy High Throne Look Down63, both of which are on a bifolium that has been tipped into the manuscript. “Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low” is copied into the main bound volume.
One of Pulter’s many poems composed in “sickness and sorrow”, this is a simple devotional lyric that looks forward to “everlasting life and day”, after death. Like many of Pulter’s devotional lyrics, this one exhorts her soul to “Droop not” with the sorrows of the world, and instead to turn to the divine; see, for example, Universal Dissolution6 for a comparable incitement away from religious complaint, and My Soul’s Sole Desire29 for a comparable focus on singing “hallelujahs to thy praise” (Poem 29, line 14). In its movement from addressing the drooping soul of the first stanza to envisaging the soul’s rousing ascent in the second, the poem could be compared to George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”; however, the ascent of the soul is “stay[ed]” in the third stanza, where the speaker insists on the soul’s need to see out the “few and evil days” of life on earth. The final couplet reflexively evokes Pulter’s devotional lyrics themselves, as the thanks and praise that Pulter’s speaker breathes forth while here on earth. Poem 45, This Was Written 164845, makes explicit the connection implicit here between the earthly songs of praise that are Pulter’s devotional lyrics, and the hallelujahs to be sung in the afterlife: “I’ll such lays here begin, shall end above” (Poem 45, line 68).
The poem’s form, in rhyming tercets with a final rhyming couplet, is song-like; for a broad comparison, see see My Soul’s Sole Desire29, and the commentary to the amplified edition of that poem. This lyric, however, is metrically irregular, moving between tetrameter and pentameter lines. It is just possible that the text is a copy of a draft or unpolished poem, appearing as it does in a different hand, after the main series of poems in the manuscript.