Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

Alluding to love sonnets that promise to immortalize a beloved in writing, Pulter, like John Donne, creates a 14-line poem with God as its object of devotion. The speaker cements this association by concluding with a promise to inscribe God in verse that glorifies him not only on earth (as her own poem currently does) but beyond, in some vast and yet unknown eternity. In fact, the speaker’s pleading for an infusion of heavenly light into her soul becomes a type of contract, since it is phrased contingently: if she is “irradiated” with divine spirit, she will be resurrected and able to produce songs that amplify God’s name (a proper name interestingly withheld in this mortal poem). Pulter’s vision of transformation includes an elemental recycling of elements: her body’s dissolution at death converts to ascend what she uniquely and vividly terms “the stairs of revolution,” the restless motions necessary for salvation.

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Immense Fount of truth, life, love, joy, glory:
Irradiate1
 my soul in her dark story2
.
Let not th’erroneous shades of death and night
Obscure Thy love and glory from my sight.
Though this my corpse (until my dissolution,
And then but3
 by the stairs of revolution4
)
Cannot attain Thy radiant throne above,
Yet be Thou pleaséd to infuse Thy love
And light unto my sad, deserted soul,
That in Thy endless mercy I may roll5
;
And when Death closeth up my mortal eye,
I then may live and only Sin may die;
And then Thy blessed name I’ll magnify6
Beyond the reach of all eternity.