The Circle [3]

Edited by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

This poem suggests wittily that unwillingness to die is a kind of impatience with life, because death actually brings life again. When earthly things (including humans) die, Pulter suggests, they are dissolved and “revolve” or return because all matter is recycled or regenerated just as the earth rotates. Pulter’s speaker downplays death by counselling that it comes to all (“In the whole world’s society”, i.e., in the company of everyone in the world) and also that death is only a kind of revolution. The phrase “when thou dost dissolve it is no more” briefly allows the possibility that the world dissolves when we do, but pulls back to the sense of “it [death] is no more” than the revolution of “many things”. This poem is the third in the manuscript to be titled ‘The Circle’ and it plays with religious, philosophical and materialist ideas of circularity, combining Christian-stoical advice not to fear death with a materialist belief in the recycling of matter. The image of the “mound” is potent here, combining the sense of the circular earth, the globe, with a pile of dirt, which rotates and also orbits the sun, and is in a constant process of regeneration.

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To be unwilling or afraid to die
In the whole world’s society1
,
Is a sign of huge impatiency2
.
That many things revolve3
 thou mayest explore
And when thou dost dissolve4
 it is no more,
For so this earthly transitory5
mound6
In an eternal motion still runs round.