Derived from a Latin word meaning “that which has been spoken,” fate in this poem is conflated with death and intertwined with the prognostications of astrologers, prophets, and soothsayers. The biblical and classical figures referenced in this poem learn the details of their demise beforehand, yet not one of these figures escapes the universal fate nor—with one important exception—the promised particulars. The poem makes a lesson out of those who flout fate, from Jezebel who elevates herself in royal resplendence only to be defenestrated, to Caesar who mocks his soothsayer shortly before being stabbed. The irony that imbues these stories implicates pride as a kind of intrinsically fatal folly that underlies not only the presumption that one can evade fate but also the very desire to “Curiously pry” into one’s death, a desire with which the speaker grapples.
The sharp, moralizing contrast drawn between ideal Christian and typical pagan responses to mortality is exemplified foremost by the poem’s augmentation of the emblem conventionally associated with Aeschylus. As Eardley notes, emblems traditionally consist of three parts: “a motto (inscriptio), a printed image (pictura), and a short epigrammatic verse (subscriptio)” (27). While Pulter foregoes the formal elements of inscriptio and pictura, her emblematic verse exhibits didactic and ekphrastic tendencies. The spectacle in this case is the bizarre death of the tragedian Aeschylus, as recounted in Pliny’s Naturalis historia, translated by Philemon Holland: when warned by divinators that he will die on a certain day by means of a falling object, Aeschylus ventures into an open field, “far from house or tree, presuming vpon the securitie of the clear and open skie” (The Historie of the World [London, 1634], 271). As if on cue, an eagle, seeking a hard surface on which to shell her prey, spots the poet’s shiny pate and drops a tortoise on his head. Pulter’s wry tone in these lines and her tongue-in-cheek aside on baldness accentuate the comic outlandishness of the situation. Though this particular emblem seems absent from the popular English collections of Whitney, Peacham, Quarles, and Wither, it does appear in a number of continental collections in the same period, and the mottos of this common emblem variously iterate that fate is inevitable and death, all-powerful.
Pulter, however, diverges from these commonplaces in lines 14–16 by suggesting that the fate of death can be crossed by divine intervention. Such a reprieve, moreover, is obtained not via actions of avoidance but by an attitude of contrition: in contrast with the pagan, hell-bound Aeschlyus who presumes he can outwit what is fated, Hezekiah’s humble tears win him a temporary pardon from death. Despite his political missteps and spiritual faults, Hezekiah is memorialized as one of the few righteous Judean kings within the biblical narrative, upheld in early modern sermons and in works like John Donne’s Devotions for his exemplary response to illness and impending death. When warned by the prophet Isaiah that his illness will be fatal, Hezekiah, rather than seeking the aid of physicians or other deities, “turn[s] his face to the wall” and tearfully prays for the Hebrew god’s intervention, invoking his past devotion and good works as cause for mercy (2 Kings 20:2–3; Isaiah 38:2–3). Listed as an ancestor of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew’s genealogy (1:10), the pre-Christian, imperfect, and yet righteous Hezekiah functions as an important analogue for the Christian speaker, who likewise strives to live righteously so that she may die “with comfort.” Like Hezekiah, the speaker ultimately prays for divine intervention into her “Sad Story,” but her request is not for a mere deferral of death but for a post factum reversal, that is, a glorious resurrection and carefree afterlife, and the fortitude to live her precarious, mortal life according to such a hope (thereby rising, too, from doubt and despair).
The speaker’s portrayal of death as a welcome night’s rest for the weary, then, qualifies her aversion to foreknowledge with an underlying desire not shared by the other figures in the poem. Though she characterizes death as alluringly peaceful, the speaker nevertheless prays that she might not “anticipate [her] grave,” the verb anticipate meaning to consider in advance—to foreknow and to fret over—but also, relatedly, to bring about or put into practice prematurely, like Aeschylus seems to do by trying to prevent his death. For the speaker, anticipation is contrary to the life of spiritual devotion upon which a good death is contingent and by which, with divine aid, a good death is possible. Precise foreknowledge is futile, even pernicious, not only if fate is fixed as per tradition but also if, as intimated by the exceptional “Unless” in line 14, fate is in flux, a working out of salvation.
