The Pulter Project

pulterproject.northwestern.edu

Poem 47

[Untitled]

Edited by Sarah C. E. Ross

Like many of Pulter’s religious poems, this one begins as an address to her “melancholy soul” (2), encouraging it to desist in its spiritual complaint. “Night” and “light” are in this context representations of death and life, and Pulter uses the “revolution” of day and night to figure a cycle of “life and death and life” (12); that is, life, death, and resurrection. The poem builds as it progresses on a set of ideas and images that recurs throughout Pulter’s poems: the “dissolution” (disintegration into elements or dust) of the body in death, and the interrelated process of “revolution” (alteration, change, transmutation of elements) or renewal in God’s love. Pulter sees life, death, and renewal in God as a circular process, and “revolution” is a word and image she uses repeatedly for this positive transformation in God: “revolution / Is the preserving of the universe / From dissolution” (lines 18-20). Revolution is, then, an image for the way in which Christ’s sacrifice has conquered death: “Death at last is conquered quite, / O happy victory!” (7-8). For the biblical sources for this idea, see note to lines 7-8 (below); and among Pulter’s other poems, see The Eclipse1, especially lines 43-8 and 65-6; and Immense Fount of Truth48.

Pulter’s devotional musings on dissolution and revolution are distinctive and recurrent. She commonly pairs “dissolve / revolve” and “dissolution / revolution” in rhyme, as she does in stanzas 3 and 5 of this poem. “The Eclipse” has very similar concerns, and uses this rhyme three times; in that poem, revolution is a “passage” to eternal love (line 45). She uses the same rhyme in the poem immediately following this one, “Immense Fount of Truth”; in that poem, “the stairs of revolution” enable the speaker to “attain thy radiant throne above” (lines 5-6). See the amplified edition of “Immense Fount of Truth”, edited by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann.

In the last three stanzas of the poem, Pulter melds her concept of dissolution and revolution with other of her recurring images: those of dust and “causes”, the elements or matter from which the body is first produced, and to which it returns in death. Pulter’s dust is analogous to George Herbert’s, whose “Easter” she may echo in the “dust / just” rhyme of lines 22 and 24. Herbert’s lines are “as his death calcined thee to dust, / His life may make thee gold, and much more just” (lines 5-6); see also My Heart Why Do Thou Throb So in My Breast?49. For a similar sense of “causes” as the dust-like first elements to which one is returned in death, see Universal Dissolution6, lines 14, 32, 46. Present in her use of both terms (“dust”, “causes”) is the sense of dissolution to these elements being necessary for the revolutionary passage into heavenly glory—the “happy victory” over death.

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Why art thou sad at the approach of night,
My melancholy soul?
Should not obscurity and cheerful light
After each other roll?

For as sad, gloomy shades doth follow light,
So after life we die;
But Death at last is conquered1
 quite,
O happy victory!

There’s nothing like day’s dissolution2
Within my mind so rife3
;
Methinks it’s like the revolution4
Of life and death and life.

Come, cruel Lachesis and Clotho5
 both,
Come, show your outmost spite;
Methinks you twirl and twist, as loath
To come and do me right.

For seeing the voice of Nature doth rehearse 
That revolution
Is the preserving of the universe
From dissolution6
,

What need I care, then, when I do expire,
Although I turn to dust7
,
Seeing total Nature still is kept entire,
In all her actions just?

Then let Erinys and her cursed train8
Scare those that fear their might;
Their blazing brands and vipers vain
Shall me no more affright.

29For I as gladly in my quiet grave

30Will lay me down to rest

31As in the finest downy bed I have;

32In

causes9

all sleep best.