In “27. The Stately Mooz”, Pulter presents the titular moose as an ambiguous emblematic figure who occupies an unpredictable and unfeeling world. The moose starts on a secure hilltop, but she descends, driven by hunger, and then seeks shade from the scorching sun under trees that (unknown to her) are infested with deadly serpents. She is consequently devoured by one of the “Hugest” (l.23), most monstrous serpents. Unlike emblems such as The Porcupine (Emblem 13)79 where the prideful porcupine is condemned or Raccoons (Emblem 21)86 where the raccoons (really beavers) are praised for their exemplary teamwork, in “The Stately Mooz” Pulter neither condemns nor praises the moose’s actions. Rather, Pulter characterises the moose as a sympathetic but flawed figure whose “hard fate” (l.26) emblematises the “Casuall” (l.39) and difficult nature of postlapsarian existence.
Pulter understands moose as shrewd, practical animals. The moose is a positive example of parental love in The Indian Moose (Emblem 7)73 where she loves all three of her calves equally and so uses her “policy” (l.7) to pragmatically place them in three different locations and thus protect them from predators. Pulter also presents this astuteness in “The Stately Mooz” where the moose “Politickly… doth the Feilds Survey” (l.7) for lions, tigers, leopards and bears and only leaves the hill once she believes herself, albeit falsely, “Secure” (l.13). Given the“Stately” moose’s eventual demise, her descent of the hill could symbolise a blameworthy moral decline to be avoided by the reader, but Pulter offers no direct caution against this action. Instead, Pulter presents the moose as being compelled by the practicality of hunger. Having “of the beautious prospect tane her fill” (l.2) the moose sensibly next “Considers… her diet” (l.5). Indeed, the emblem implies that eating downhill may be a physical necessity:
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
For Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
(ll.13–15)
Seventeenth-century descriptions of moose, or moose-like creatures such as elk, often allude to their difficulty in eating (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). In his bestiary The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (1607) Edward Topsell describes elk as having to walk “backward like a Sea-crab” while eating to avoid biting their own large upper lip.1 Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1637) characterises moose as “long legged” and thus needing to “kneel” to feed on grass, while the anonymous A Treatise of New England (1645) describes moose as “frequent[ing] the low rank grounds to feed upon long grass, by reason their fore feet are longer than their hinder feet”.2 Pulter’s moose also has difficulty eating because “Nature” has placed her antlers so “low” that she cannot easily reach the grass. While Pulter does not mention the moose’s legs, the conjunction “For” implies that the moose may need to feed going “down” the hill. Perhaps her moose is also moving to the “low rank grounds” (“rank” meaning growing vigorously) and “long grass” at the bottom of the hill to compensate for her “low” antlers.3 Alternatively, the continuous verb in “feeding down did go”, and again in “when in feeding Shee went down the Hill” (l.16), suggests the moose eats as she moves downhill. Interestingly, eating whilst facing or moving downhill would somewhat level the unevenness of overly-long front legs and thus allow the moose’s head to reach closer to the ground. Whatever the exact reasoning, Pulter clearly presents the moose’s descent of the hill as a physical necessity that is nonetheless undertaken cautiously and carefully. Pulter also offers a physical explanation for the moose’s retreat from the sun into the shade: “His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe / That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe” (ll.19–20). The moose’s initial shrewd caution and Pulter’s naturalistic justifications for the moose’s movements make her actions understandable to the reader. Thus, we are more likely to sympathise with the moose when the poem’s speaker parenthetically laments the “poor Beast” (l.24) and “her hard fate” (l.26). Indeed, the references to “Nature” (l.14) and “fate” confer a sense of inevitability onto the moose’s death that somewhat absolves her of culpability.
However, Pulter’s description of the moose’s movement out of the “Scald[ing]” sun and into “the Shades” is complicated by the fact that the scorching sun also makes the moose “envie” (l.18) those feeding beneath the trees. This is an odd detail to include as it does not seem to clearly contribute narratively or causally to the moose’s movement out of the sun which, as above, is directly prompted by the burning sun. On the one hand, the shade is a place of privacy in Pulter’s The Elephant (Emblem 19)84 and of sanctuary in The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22)87 so to a reader of Pulter’s emblems it is understandable that the shade could represent a place of respite. Again, in The Invitation into the Country (Poem 2)2 “shady groves” (l.38) are a key component of the ideal pastoral landscape of pre-Civil War Broadfield, Pulter’s country estate. Given these poems and Pulter’s opening description in “The Stately Mooz” of the “beautious prospect” (l.2) where “Floras Robe” (l.4) is ornamented with lace-like silver streams, the reader is as liable as the moose to misread or misinterpret the environment as a locus amoenus (a lovely or idyllic place). On the other hand, Pulter’s poetry is replete with light imagery and sunlight in particular often symbolises the divine (see, for example, The Eclipse (Poem 1)1, Of Night and Morning (Poem 5)5, The Center (Poem 30)30). The complement to these images is Pulter’s equally pervasive association of darkness and shade with misery, death, sin and hell (see, for example, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul (Poem 24)24, My Soul’s Sole Desire (Poem 29) 29, The Center (Poem 30), and Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory (Poem 48)48). By leaving the hilltop and forsaking the “Sun” (l.17) for the “Shades” (l.20), is the moose forsaking the moral high ground and light of God for the darkness of sin, implied by her “envie”? If the moose’s actions are meant to be understood as sinful, then is Pulter using the epithet “Stately” (l.1) in the now obsolete sense of haughty or arrogant?4 This is how she seems to use the term in Universal Dissolution (Poem 6)6 where a “stately cedar” is characterised as overly ambitious and proud (ll.23–25). If so, the moose may misread her environment not through an understandable error, but because she is too proud and thus assured of her own safety to recognise Pulter’s caution that “when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost” (l.36).
Pulter’s precise choice of serpents as the moose’s predator also seems to support the interpretation of the moose as sinful, with snakes being a common Christian symbol of the “Death & Hell” (l.33) the speaker explicitly links them to later in the poem. However, the serpent and moose is not the only example of animal predation Pulter offers in the emblem and the moose’s demise precipitates a list of more predators and prey: hawks trussing pheasant and partridges, cats catching mice, and foxes snatching lambs from their mothers (ll.27–30). Seventeenth-century accounts of New England make no mention of snakes attacking or eating moose (see Curation “Moose: Fact and Fiction”), potentially indicating that Pulter’s choice of serpents may be primarily symbolic. Yet, these same accounts demonstrate an understanding of moose as a species of, or at least akin to, deer. Significantly, an antipathy between snakes and deer is not unfounded (see Curation Serpents vs. Deer). For example, both Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History (1601) and Topsell give accounts of deer and snakes fighting. Furthermore, in his Latin emblem book Symbolorum et Emblematum ex Animalibus (1595), Joachim Camerarius uses the antipathy between deers and serpents for an emblem where the serpent-covered deer seeking water becomes a symbol for the Christian seeking God as the one means of salvation. Therefore, Pulter seems to synthesise accounts of New England with older natural histories and emblem tradition to flesh out her knowledge of the moose and its possible symbolic associations. Placing the pairing of moose and snake at the beginning of a longer list of predators and prey partially naturalises the image, complicating the serpent’s devouring of the moose as an emblem for the descent into and punishment of sin: pheasant, partridge, mice and especially the seemingly innocent “playing” (l.30) lambs are the unfortunate prey of a natural, albeit unsparing, order rather than of their own sinful ways.
The poem does not conclude with a call to avoid envy and sin, or with a recommendation to keep to the security of the high ground and divine light. Rather, by layering the natural brutality of animal predation and the symbolic punishment of sin, Pulter implicates the postlapsarian world as a whole in the emblem’s scope: “By which example wee may plainly See / That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie” (ll.31–32). The final ten lines of the poem are in first-person plural, involving both the speaker and reader in the emblem’s wretched world. Like the serpent, hawk, cat and fox, “Death & Hell” are continually “Watch[ing]” and stalking us, predators waiting to “devour” “Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies” (ll.33–34). By mentioning “Our Sinfull Souls”, Pulter evokes the human postlapsarian condition as inherently sinful. In A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44)44 Pulter describes the sun as able to scorch the speaker because of the biblical Fall that imbues humanity with sin (ll.77–80). In “The Stately Mooz”, the moose being scorched by the sun may indicate her, and by extension the reader’s, inherited fallen condition. Perhaps the fact that the sun scorches the moose is more emblematically significant than the moose entering the shade. Furthermore, perhaps the moose is not sinful because she is envious, but rather her enviousness is a symptom of her fallenness. The moose is sinful, but we nonetheless are expected to empathise with her flawed character because we too are fallen. As such, the emblem as a whole imagines the transitory, postlapsarian world as a relentless “Sea of Sorrows” (l.35) that can only end in death.
For the Royalist Pulter, this postlapsarian “Sea of Sorrows” is also a post-Civil War world. Alice Eardley dates the composition of Pulter’s emblems to between 1653 and 1658, during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.5 While less explicitly political than some of Pulter’s other emblems, the adjective “Stately” (l.1) and adverb “Politickly” (l.7) place the poem in the realm of politics. Moreover, Pulter’s mention of the drowning of “Beauclarks Children” (l.37) references a shipwreck where King Henry I’s only legitimate male heir to the throne died, thus contributing to a civil war upon his death between Matilda, his only surviving legitimate child, and his nephew Stephen for the throne (see Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War). In the wake of the Civil War and Charles I’s execution, this story of English royalty in crisis may have particularly evoked Pulter’s Royalist sympathies. Finally, Pulter’s description of the moose’s “Stag like horns” is suggestive of the hunted harts and stags that so often represent the plight of Charles I in seventeenth-century poetry, including Pulter’s own verse (see Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter (Poem 10)10, The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) and This Flying Fish (Emblem 25)90. See also Elizabeth Kolkovich’s Curation The Hunted Deer).6 Pulter’s moose is not hunted, but the fact that her forest is infested with “horrid Serpents” bears symbolic similarities to the many-headed, serpentine hydra that Pulter and other Royalists used to depict the Republican government (see This Huge Leviathan (Emblem 42)107. See also Victoria E. Burke’s Curation The Many Headed Hydra). As such, it is perhaps not too outlandish to suggest that the “Hugest” (l.23) serpent, described as a “Monster” (l.25), could emblematise Cromwell himself and (from a Royalist perspective) his sinful role in Charles I’s execution. In “The Stately Mooz”, the inevitability of predators catching prey, as well as the moose’s rapidly changing fortune, bear similarity to the overtly political emblem "This Flying Fish (Emblem 25)". In this reading, Charles I as the “Stately Mooz” becomes a sympathetic, although not flawless, victim of the “Monster” (l.25) Cromwell, but also secondarily of the relentlessly brutal, unpredictable world.
In the face of such a world, Pulter closes the emblem by enacting the “devotional turn” that Rachel Dunn identifies as characteristic of her emblems.7 Rather than ending with a moral call to action (e.g., avoid envy or stay in God’s light), Pulter turns inward. Unable to resolve the world’s unpredictability, the speaker can only rely on God: “Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Casuall bee / Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee” (ll.39–40). It is this unpredictability that makes the moose such an ambiguous and complicated emblematic figure, straddling both sympathy and culpability: if the moose’s “hard fate” is the outcome of the changeable, uncontrollable world of animal predation, then how could her caution and pragmatism ever counteract this? Pulter cannot conclude with a call to emulate or condemn the moose, because the poem forces us all, including the speaker, to grapple with our own sinful, postlapsarian and mortal nature. Ultimately, “The Stately Mooz” is an emblem for the unavoidable transience and difficulty of our own existence. We cannot model the moose, Pulter suggests, because we are all already the moose, involved in an infelicitous and brutal world.
- Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T5r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised]
- Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an abstract of New England, composed in three books (Printed for Charles Green, 1637), sig. K1v. EEBO; A treatise of Nevv England published in anno Dom. 1637. And now reprinted (London, 1645), sig. A4r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised].
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “rank, adj., sense II.6”, last modified December 2023.
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “stately, adj., sense 3.a”, last modified September 2023.
- Alice Eardley, “Introduction”, in Poems, Emblems and the Unfortunate Florinda, by Hester Pulter (Toronto, Iter Press, 2014), 21.
- See also Anne Elizabeth Carson, “The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King”, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45, no.3 (2005): 537–56.
- Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book”, The Seventeenth Century 30, no.1 (2015): 63.