Written on a loose sheet of paper, probably in Pulter’s own hand, these 41 lines recast recent politics as classical mythology.1 Possibly an unfinished narrative or epic, the poem refers to a battle in the second Anglo-Dutch war that took place in 1667 in the town of Sheerness, on the Isle of Stepney in Kent. Dutch forces captured the town, destroying fortifications, then sailed up the river Medway and part way up the Thames estuary to burn several British ships. The embarrassing defeat for the British is depicted somewhat ambiguously in “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind.” Narrated by an insomniac, the poem recounts a scene in which the sleepless speaker perches on a rock above Sheerness, where she witnesses the tears of the inconsolable Thames. Even though the town has been the site of one notable loss in battle, it remains “unconquered” in the war. “Unconquered Sheere” may mean something like “brave” or “valiant” Sheerness, whatever losses the town has suffered, or it may be one of the rough patches that would have been revised if this work had been completed.
While “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” remains unfinished, the opening recalls Pulter’s tactics elsewhere. Like The Pismire35 and This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John45, this poem begins with a personal distress that first manifests as bodily suffering, then goes on to liberate the speaker’s mind to wander freely in contemplation of the scene that confronts her. “Somnus” provides two seemingly related ways to understand the experience of the watchful insomniac: first, through contemporary political turmoil, and, second, through the mythological motifs that might ultimately transform or lend a cosmic significance to the British defeat. The powers of classical deities are relocated to the English coast as the “trembling bosom” of the sea summons the nautical forces of mythology: sea gods, goddesses, minor nymphs, and even helpful dolphins answer the trumpet call and begin to flow toward Sheerness. Neptune “gazes” upon the same “bloody billows” as the speaker, and we are left to suspect that it is partly her own distress that conjures this epic force.
We can’t know whether Pulter is marshaling the gods to mount a counterattack against the Dutch or to join a mourning procession, but the existing portion of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” suggests that she may have been exploring a reading based on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Early in Book 3, Britomart sits on a rocky shore, watching “a while the surges hore, / That gainst the craggy clifts did loudly rore.”2 An emblem of chastity, Britomart externalizes her erotic suffering in an extended complaint about the “Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,” and it is possible that this scene of reading the seascape offered Pulter an allegorical text through which she could write her own political distress (3.4.8.1). The geography specific to the Sheerness battle also appears at the end of Book 4 of The Faerie Queene, when the narrative thread begun in Britomart’s reading of the sea is brought to a partial resolution by the marriage of the Medway and Thames rivers. Spenser depicts a host of sea gods flowing in to celebrate:
It fortun’d then, a solemne feast was there
To all the Sea-gods and their fruitfull seede,
In honour of the spousalls, which then were
Betwixt the Medway and the Thames agreed. (4.11.8.1-4)
What follows is an epic catalog of the aquatic deities who travel across the globe, from “great Neptune with his threeforkt mace, / That rules the Seas, and makes them rise or fall” to the lesser local nymphs and even the mighty rivers of the Nile and the Amazon (4.11.11.1-2). Like Pulter’s unfinished poem, Spenser’s celebration of England’s fertile estuary overflows its boundaries and remains open-ended. Book 4, Canto 12 of The Faerie Queene opens with Spenser responding to the aquatic marriage festivities with a lament for the futility of his own poetic labor: “O what an endlesse worke haue I in hand, / To count the seas abundant progeny” (4.12.1.1-2).
Whether Pulter was equally stymied by the scope of her task is impossible to say, because “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” is interrupted well before we learn what the gods had planned at the site of Sheerness’s carnage. This truncated scene invites us to place Pulter’s poetic fragment alongside the work of poets including Spenser and Chaucer whose ambitious plans never achieved fruition. While this Amplified Edition attends to the unfinished state of the poem by preserving revisions that offer evidence of Pulter’s writing practice, it resists offering speculations or conclusions about where those revisions might be heading. In this sense, the trailing off of “Somnus Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind” functions, as Catherine Nicholson observes of Spenser’s unfinished Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, “almost as a gloss on the strange unraveling of the work to which they belong.”3
My edition of the poem attempts to record what remains on the page in order to give a sense of one moment in an active process of poetic composition. In words that were scored out and replaced, we can watch Pulter experiment with word choice and verb tense as she transformed this contemporary episode in international politics into an allegorical and classicizing dream narrative. She twice included marginal markers signaling the entrance of named sea deities, as she does with flowers in her The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers12. The final lines of the fragment are rougher, making the relation between clauses particularly mobile, and it is difficult to determine definitively how to punctuate the passages about Doris and her rich jewels. Perhaps the best way to end this edition is with a question: in this unfinished poem, should the last line be closed with a full stop—a final period—or should it remain without any punctuation as a sign of the instant in which Pulter lifted her pen and left her work open for us to receive?
- On Hester Pulter’s hand, see Alice Eardley’s conclusion in Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 2014), 182, note 838.
- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Toshiyuki Suzuki, and Hiroshi Yamashita, 2nd edition, Longman Annotated Poets (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3.4.7.5-6.
- Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and The Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 244.
