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Edited by Megan Heffernan

“Pardon Me, My Dearest Love” is about the limits of love and fidelity. This is Pulter’s only poem addressed to a lover, who seems likely to be her husband; no other earthly lover is named or introduced. In fact, the problem that animates the poem is the poet’s tenuous investment in her relationship. Even though the speaker owes the addressee her body, he cannot constrain the movement of her soul. She acknowledges that “What’s subsolary is yours”—literally that he owns what is below the sun—for as long as “life endures,” but then immediately concedes that her mind seeks a joy that cannot be found among the muck and dust of “this dirty dunghill earth.” What follows is a story about both the past and the future of her lively soul, which is personified to an unusual degree. Born in a “sparkle” of the light of eternal salvation, her “aspiring mind” yearns—or more basically, breathes towards, from the Latin root spirare–the highest good of heaven.

This poem explores marital love by exposing the partial and insufficient satisfaction of erotic commitment. The speaker’s earthly condition is temporary. Death is inevitable, and her body, the “due debt” that she owes her husband, will soon be dissolved back into the elements out of which it is made. When that division takes place, body and soul will be cleaved just as traitors are drawn and quartered in punishment for their rebellion. But in an unexpected turn, this image of violent dismemberment becomes a moment of liberation that will set her “enfranchis’d spirit” free, dissolving the bonds of earthly commitment.

Pulter develops this ambiguous account of marriage through a conceit common to seventeenth-century poetics: the uneasy and mutable tethering together of body and soul. In “Church-Monuments,” George Herbert describes life on earth as a fleshly tomb, a “school” for the body in which it “may learn / To spell his elements, and find his birth / Written in dusty heraldry” (ll. 6-8).1 For Herbert, the body becomes a measure of time, both in the dusty contents it holds and in its form, which will itself dissolve back into dust. Death will “sever that good fellowship of dust” because “flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust / That measures all our time; which also shall / be crumbled into dust” (ll. 13, 20-22). Anticipating this same separation of body and soul, the speaker of Pulter’s “Pardon Me, My Dearest Love” finds solace in the eternal joy promised when her spirit will be free from earthly constraint, “melt[ing] and molder[ing] into dust.”

In a concluding gesture, the poem makes a surprising return to the opening concession, but the plea for a pardon now rings more hollow. The final three lines are a rhyming triplet that add “turtledove,” the bird that famously mates for life, to the pairing of “love” and “above,” a rhyme that appears twice previously in the poem. While triplets are unusual in seventeenth-century poetry, Pulter uses them often. The Revolution16 is written entirely in triplet stanzas, and Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)]15 is also in couplets with a concluding triplet. In “Pardon Me, My Dearest Love,” the effect of the final triplet is to propose that the poem’s exploration of “endless joy and love” cannot be contained by the established couplet rhymes. It offers a concluding “anticouple” that works against the heteroerotic terms of the preceding couplets. The final two lines show the speaker’s mind once again beginning to whirl “above,” away from the “confinement” that currently holds her soul in captivity. With the near repetition of the beginning, we are left to anticipate the poem starting over again, as if the speaker’s lively mind will continually resist the confinement of her dusty body.

1. George Herbert, The Complete Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 58-59.

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Pardon me, my dearest love,
That I place my thoughts above:
What’s subsolary2
 is yours
And so shall be while life endures.
Only my aspiring mind
No felicity can find
In this dirty dunghill earth3
.
My soul remembers still her birth:
She being a sparkle4
 of that light,
Which ne’re5
 shall set in death or night.
Nothing here is worth her love;
Her summum bonum6
 is above,
But this body shortly must
Melt and molder7
 into dust8
.
This due debt can’t be denied:
The elements must me divide.
Thus, like traitors quartered out9
Are old Adam’s rebel rout10
.
Then shall my enfranchised11
 spirit
Those eternal joys inherit,
Which from me shall never part—
With these thoughts I cheer my heart.
Then pardon thy poor turtledove12
That hath placed her thoughts above
Where is endless joy and love.