Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

In tense, terse rhyming tercets, the speaker objects to her interdiction (or prohibition) from religious “comforts.” She complains that God restrains his “ordinances,” but it may be that her all-too-human fellows had a hand in the matter: Elizabeth Clarke has argued that the vicar of Pulter’s church may not have shared her sense of how to celebrate Communion, at a time when such matters divided a nation at war (“Women in Church and in Devotional Spaces.” In The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers, 110–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 115). So little or so much may have been enough to keep Pulter from attending church; and, if so, may have been yet another cause of the confinement she laments in other poems. Here, too, she seeks the restoration of the privilege of moving freely, as birds do, in God’s “sacred temple”: whether an actual church, membership therein, or more abstractly, creation as a whole. Until then, she seeks spiritual sustenance, possibly in such complaints as this one, the earthly form of the “hallelujahs” she promises one day to proffer in return for God’s pardon and pity.

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Must I thus ever interdicted1
 be,
My gracious God? To Thee and only Thee
I will complain: pardon and pity me.

Have I Thy sacred pledges2
 took in vain,
Or heard Thy blessed word applause to gain,
That Thou dost thus Thine ordinances3
 restrain?

If it be so, Thy mercy I implore,
To lay my sins upon my Savior’s score4
And me unto Thy church again restore.

The wanton sparrow5
 and the chaster dove6
Within Thy sacred temple7
 freely move;
But I (ay me!) am kept from what I love.

O, let Thy Spirit my sad soul sustain
Until those comforts I do reattain;
Then let me never part with them again

Until my captivated soul takes wing;
Then will I hallelujahs8
 ever sing
To Thee, my gracious God and glorious king.