The Welcome [2]1

Edited by Andrea Crow

The apparent simplicity of the short couplets and images of childhood that make up this brief poem are in tension with a persistent metrical irregularity that suggests resistant discomfort underlying the speaker’s overt claims to view death as a welcome, temporary rest.1 Pulter’s rhyme scheme and inventive use of rhetorical devices realizes in poetic form how death can at once be a definitive end (echoed in her consistently endstopped couplets) and a transformation that brings something new into being out of earlier material (echoed in the inventive forms of repetition in her use of homoioteleuton [the repetition of word endings] and antanaclasis [repeating a word but changing its meaning]). Like the earlier poem, The Welcome [1]19, the poem approaches Pulter’s constant theme of her impending mortality from the persona of a hospitable hostess, a role not unlike that which Pulter would have played in her estate at Broadfield. The mood of this poem shifts rapidly in a short space, from domestic scenes of going to bed, to elemental dissolution in the alchemical urn, and finally to the apocalypse.

1. On Pulter desiring death, see Frances E. Dolan, Desiring Death (Curation for The Desire18) and More Ruminations on Death and Resurrection (Curation for To Aurora [3]34), Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Dear Death (Curation for The Hope65), and Helen Smith, The Good Death (Curation for Made When I Was Sick, 164731) in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018).

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Death, come2
, and welcome3
; thou art my ancient friend,
Of all my suff’rings, thou wilt make an end4
.
Young children cry, or grumble at the best,
To go to bed; I know it is my rest.
Therefore as cheerfully5
 I’ll lay me down
In dust as in the daintiest bed of down6
.
Where I to my first principles7
 must turn,
And take a nap in black oblivion’s urn8
.
Until the sun of life9
 arise in glory—
And then begins my everlasting story10
.