To Aurora [1]

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

In poetry, lovers often lament daybreak because it disrupts the pleasures afforded by night. Pulter is instead drawn to the beauty, power, and virtue of Aurora (goddess of the dawn), here and throughout the collection. In this poem she uses apostrophe to urge Aurora to unite in military solidarity with the speaker and Aurora’s daughter (Truth) so as to conquer the hellish miseries of conscience unleashed at night. While other Pulter poems dwell on the details of Aurora’s physical appearance, here the speaker merely mentions the beauty of this virginal naked maid who paradoxically has a daughter, Astraea (whom Pulter imagines as Truth, rather than the traditional allegorical association with Justice). The poem is marked by a sudden reflexive moment, when the speaker suddenly doubts her own claims of innocence and uses her soul searching as a more urgent reason for these personified female figures to enlighten the darkness that still exists at the end of the poem.

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Fair rosy virgin1
, when wilt thou arise
And show the radiant luster of thine eyes?
Couldst thou but only view and not expel
This ugly hag, thou wouldst trample her to hell.
Old Night (I mean) with her infernal brood2
,
Who make men’s miseries their accursed food.
Did guilty only suffer, I would cease
These sad complaints and ever hold my peace.
Though Innocence I hold still in my breast,
Yet she (ay me) disturbs my quiet rest.
But I forget myself; what do I mean?
For who (alas) can say their heart is clean?
Come then, sweet maid, with thine immortal issue3
,
Who for a veil no bodkin needs, nor tissue
Her alabaster fabric to invest4
;
For in her naked beauty she shows best.
Come then, and conquer these infernal fiends,
Sweet Light and Truth, my two eternal friends.