In this poem, the speaker addresses her own soul and, in so doing, engages with a number of devotional and poetic traditions without letting those traditions confine her. On the one hand, Pulter’s poem can be read in relation to the body and soul dialogue poem, a tradition rooted in medieval literature but still popular in the seventeenth century, as attested by Anne Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit” and Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body.” Alternatively, her poem could also be read within the devotional tradition of the apostrophe to the soul and be compared to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146, which begins, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.”1 Line 15 likely points to John Donne’s famous apostrophe to death in his holy sonnet “Death be not proud”: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”2 These somewhat diverse devotional traditions share underlying assumptions about the body/soul dichotomy and the need to vocally and actively repent. Such poems frequently use imagery of violence to articulate the soul’s need to be brought back into submission to God.3 This devotional poetic tradition often, as Abe Davies has pointed out, functions as a means of disciplining the speaker and the reader.4 Pulter’s use of the apostrophe to the soul in this and other poems (O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul28, The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge39, Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night47) intervenes in this tradition of addressing the soul and offers an alternative approach: instead of admonishing the soul (or body) to repentance, she uses the devotional form to provide comfort and consolation to her soul as she meditates on the promise of the resurrection.
The speaker’s consolatory tone and poetic stance in this poem bear similarities to her tone in another subset of her poems that are modeled on the biblical psalms, such as The Desire18 and How Long Shall My Dejected Soul24.5 Although not addressed to God, this poem itself has a number of features that align it with the psalms, not the least of which is her opening (ll. 1-2) which bears a striking similarity to Ps. 43: 5: “Why art thou cast downe, O my soule? and why art thou disquieted within me?”6 Additionally, the poem’s meter, quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming abab, link it with The Whole Book of Psalms, i.e., the “Sternhold and Hopkins” metrical psalter, a psalter often used in English church services for singing psalms to popular tunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.7 Poem 40 is the only instance in her manuscript in which she turns to this ‘common meter.’ But here too, as with her consolatory apostrophe to the soul, the speaker destabilizes the expectations of her reader.
The first four stanzas contain references to the psalms and Donne, and the poem continues to the end in a rough version of this popular meter, but Pulter’s content engages with more heterodox ideas about the body and soul than these formal allusions suggest. In castigating the world in these opening stanzas, Pulter at first seems to be endorsing a material/spiritual dichotomy in which the soul must endure a “terrene” (l. 9) existence before being liberated to heaven, but the poem also presents alternatives to this view. In line 13, she points to the soul’s “Mortall Nature,” potentially signaling an unorthodox belief that the soul dies with the body.8 In stanzas five through seven, she continues this heterodox exploration by discussing a number of theories of the afterlife that have their sources outside the Christian tradition. From the impersonal yet oddly gendered “black Oblivion’s womb” in line 20 to references to Empedoclean physics (ll. 21–22) or even Pythagorian reincarnation (ll. 25–28), the speaker never settles on one solution. Perhaps these ideas allow the poet to imagine alternatives to the body/soul/self problem with which so much Christian devotional poetry is plagued, a supposition attested by the subtle shift in pronouns from “thou” to “I,” beginning in line 23.9 Pulter’s use of conjunctions further hints at her attitude toward all these possibilities. Her reiteration of “or” suggests her openness to other heterodox possibilities, while “whether” and “if” are always followed by assurances that even should these theories be true, she is assured of Christian resurrection: “All ends in thy Salvation” (l. 32). Establishing this belief early on (see ll. 7–8) and reiterating it throughout provides a firm foundation from which she can contemplate less traditional understandings of the body and soul without anxiety.
In the last three stanzas, the poem looks to a future—with a reiteration of “then” (ll. 29, 33, 37)—in which Pulter’s pain will have been erased. Here, the speaker returns to a mode recognizable in the biblical psalms, one that is consolatory, even elegiac, an attempt to offer her soul comfort in its distress. Both Psalms 42 and 43 end on such a note, with the speaker imagining a future state of thanksgiving. Rather than thematizing penitence, both of these psalms are more concerned with the speaker lamenting the lack of justice in her situation and articulating a longing to be returned to a state of community. In fact, Pulter’s entire poem may be an expanded meditation on Ps. 43:5, the second part of which continues: “hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” Similarly to the biblical psalmist in this verse, the poet opens her poem with an apostrophe to the soul, asking why she despairs, writes an extended meditation on her hope of resurrection (whatever form it takes) and finishes with an expression of faith in future joy in these final stanzas. This latter upward movement towards imagining future hope, although arguably inspired by the psalms, is another hallmark of devotional poetry, particularly that of the poems of George Herbert, once again signaling Pulter’s knowledge of and engagement with the devotional form.10
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146. Poetry Foundation, l. 1.
- John Donne, Holy Sonnet 10, “Death, be not proud.” Luminarium.org, ll. 13–14.
- Nikolina Hatton, Curation Metaphors of Violence in Devotional Poetry.
- See Abe Davies, Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 121–162.
- See Hatton, Nikolina, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): pp. 364–83.
- Psalms 43:5. The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, (London, 1611). EEBO. This is a refrain that echoes similar verses in Psalms 42:5 and 11. For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to focus on only one. See also Nikolina Hatton, Curation Pulter’s Psalmic Intertexts.
- Beth Quitslund, “The Psalm Book” in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, eds. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 203–11.
- See Kenneth Graham’s Curation Christian Mortalism from the Bible to Pulter.
- For more on the body/soul problem, see Liza Blake’s Curation Body, Soul, Dust.
- See Ross, Sarah C. E., “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then Will I Hallelujahs Ever Sing’” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): pp. 99–119.