How Long Shall My Dejected Soul

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

Servile vassal or heavenly monarch? The decision is God’s, the speaker states, in this poem that formally toys with creating and dissolving constraints. Pulter’s complaint about her spiritual abjection is described conventionally, as she confesses to being mere dust bound to a world of sin and pain. But the political vocabulary that she offers in muted form in Poem 20 (a verse in which the speaker similarly implores God for a heavenly crown) appears more overtly here. Unenfranchised, unfree, and in servitude, the speaker professes her readiness to “reign” with God in heaven. As in Poem 20, she offers the only gift to God that she feels she has at her disposal: the power to create songs of praise, which, in eternity, might take some new and unknown form. This is one of Pulter’s most intricate and experimental poems formally: one of only five in tercets, it uses rhyme to yoke stanzas into four pairs, each stanza concluding with a short dimeter line that visually stages contraction and deterioration on the page. This complex structure is offset, however, by extensive enjambment, which creates a breathless rush and a proliferation of clauses that refuses expected separations and terminations.

Compare Editions

How long shall my dejected1
 soul
(Dear God) in dust and darkness roll2
,
Without one ray

Of thy eternal love and light
To conquer these sad shades of night?
That3
 endless day

In my forsaken4
 soul may shine,
The hallelujah5
 shall be Thine.
O then, look down

Upon a ruined heap of dust6
,
Slave to those tyrants, Death and Lust;
My hopes, O crown7
.

My God, vouchsafe8
 t’enfranchise9
 me;
Let me no more a vassal10
 be	
To sin and pain.

These vanities I fain11
 would leave;
O then, my weary12
 soul receive,
With Thee to reign

In those celestial joys above,
Involved13
 with glory, life and love,
And then Thy praise

22(My everlasting God and King)

23To all eternity I’ll sing,

24In unknown

lays14