Pardon Me, My Dearest Love

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

Pulter’s only poem written to her husband consists of an apology for courting another “love.” In this poem, she unusually acknowledges her romantic and marital commitments by describing herself as her husband’s “poor turtledove,” a creature famed for virtuous and lifelong fidelity. Conceding that her husband has a right to her care and attention while she is on earth, she asks his pardon for her constant preoccupation with the allures of Heaven, her flights of fancy that allow her to activate the “sparkle” of heavenly essence in her soul and seemingly abandon “this dirty, dunghill earth.” The world materializes as a place of excrement, violent dismemberment, and sin, with the glories of heaven drawing out a “love” that Pulter represents as rivalling (rather than complementing) her romantic attachments on earth.

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Pardon me, my dearest love,
That I place my thoughts above.
What’s subsolary1
 is yours
And so shall be while life endures.
Only my aspiring mind
No felicity can find
In this dirty, dunghill2
 earth.
My soul remembers still her birth,
She being a sparkle of that Light3
Which ne’er shall set in death or night.
Nothing here is worth her love;
Her summum bonum4
 is above.
But this body shortly must
Melt and moulder into dust5
.
This due debt can’t be denied;
The elements6
 must me divide.
Thus, like traitors quartered out7
,
Are old Adam’s rebel rout8
.
Then shall my enfranchised9
 spirit
Those eternal joys inherit,
Which from me shall never part:
With these thoughts, I cheer my heart.
Then pardon thy poor turtledove10
That hath placed her thoughts above
Where is endless joy and love.