Upon the
Crown Imperial1

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

As in The Garden12, Pulter reads in the botanical world a host of otherwise human-seeming concerns with such things as courtship, constancy, and heroism. Here, a female flower offers non-violent resistance to a masculine sun who burns with lust; she does so through the mere yet steady moisture of her tears. The speaker, ironically, is just as desirous as is the sun of the flower’s emblematic equilibrium—and, through excess, just as lacking in what she loves. It thus seems fitting that the lines are frequently hypermetrical, flush with syllables which threaten to overflow the poem’s grounding in iambic pentameter.

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Why doth the tears stand in the orient2
 eyes
Of the imperial crown? Th’emergencies3
Of her sad heart just to that height doth rise.
Though cataracts4
 fall, or numerous drops distill5
,
Yet she is like the constant Caspian6
 still.
Though Phœbus7
 courts her with his amorous rays,
And with his burning kisses oft essays8
,
Yet finds he it far, far above his power
To exhale9
 one tear from this heroic flower,
But she remains; O, that my soul did so,
Ever brimful, yet never overflow10
.

Curations

Upon the Crown Imperia…

Curations offer an array of verbal and visual materials that invite contemplation of different ways in which a particular poem might be contextualized. Sources, analogues, and glimpses into earlier or subsequent cultural phenomena all might play into possible readings of a given poem. Don't show again

Upon the
Crown Imperial1

Upon the Crown Imperia…

The Crown Imperial in the Early Modern English Imagination

Tears and Ink