Title note
Critical note
The title seems to locate the poem in a particular moment. When the speaker was unwell, this is how she saw herself; perhaps her perspective changed when she recovered. The date April 20, 1655 has been added in the manuscript next to the poem’s title, linking the poem to a particular moment of illness when Pulter was fifty.
Editorial note
My “amplified” editions seek to make the poems as accessible as possible by modernizing spelling and punctuation and providing only brief definitions for words, while discursive notes and the materials I gather for the “curations” section place Pulter’s poems into conversations. As I build the curations for a given poem—provisional and quirky as they are—I keep returning to the poem, re-reading, rethinking, and adding layers to the notes. I hope to show that Pulter was intellectually and politically embedded rather than isolated, taking up issues, genres, and tropes that also interested her contemporaries and that sometimes accrue unpredictable salience in later periods. Rather than focusing only on possible sources or influences, I cast a wide net both within the seventeenth century and outside it, trying to catch cultural materials Pulter might have engaged, some she excludes or ignores, and even some she probably could never have imagined. Curations don’t precede the poems nor are they implied by the poems—as if the poem gathers them to itself (although it can sometimes feel that way) or hales them forth. Instead, as a curator I weave the poem into a web of relations, seeking to open out rather than close down interpretive possibilities. This extends to including extracts that are long enough that readers might find things therein that I do not anticipate. I also look for a multi-vectored traffic among Pulter’s poetry and the other materials. What might the materials I’ve gathered help readers see in the poems—or notice is not there? But also, how do the poems bring fresh perspectives into the conversations into which I draw them? The more one reads the poems as participants in wider ranging conversations, the more fascinatingly twisty Pulter appears. Often, I don’t grasp how she upends or comes at conventions aslant until I have mucked about composting my “curations.”
Headnote
The title of this poem suggests that it will be a reflection on mortality prompted by illness, similar to those by poets including Donne and Herbert (see Illness and Poetry). To a certain extent it is. But Pulter’s poem differs from other reflections from the sickroom in two ways: 1) the speaker’s gaze dwells on her own body, past and present, struggling to shift the focus to the future, to the death and resurrection that she is supposed to desire and that animate other Pulter poems (such as The Desire [Poem 18]); and 2) the speaker never directly addresses God. The poem is self-contained, a conversation between speaker and soul about the body. What Pulter produces here is a diptych self-portrait, braiding together a blazon of her beauties when young with an anti-blazon frankly assessing her body now, ravaged by illness, age, and grief. (On the blazon, see Hester Pulter and the Blazon in Early Modern England in “Explorations”). The two pictures are not simply set side by side. Throughout, the speaker tempers the assertion that this body is a ruined prison she should be eager to abandon with puzzled ruminations on her attachment to it regardless. What’s curious here is that the poem suggests that it is the soul, so often depicted as imprisoned in the body and released by death, that mourns over the ruined body and wants to stay in it. The speaker keeps urging the soul to look at this body and thereby get over being attached to it; the tone verges on hectoring: “see’st thou these eyes?” (line 3). The poem begins and ends with questions to the soul: why does it mourn the decaying flesh? Why does it want to stay in the world? The sharp observation driving the poem suggests one reason: an attachment to the specifics of the body, now as well as then. Particular hostility focused on women’s aging bodies in the early modern period. An old woman often appeared in allegories of vanity, looking into or out of a mirror (see Aging Women). John Gaule warns that “every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow, a hairy lip, a gobber [buck] tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue … is not only suspected, but pronounced for a witch” (John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft [London, 1646], 5). While today it is often said that aging women are culturally invisible, Pulter insists on seeing the aging female body and pointing out its features to the soul—and to the reader. The speaker regrets what she sees, but never looks away. Line number 2
Critical note
It was conventional to describe the body as the soul’s prison, usually so as to promote death as a release. Richard Allestree, for example, reminds readers that the friends they mourn for are no longer “confined to this prison of the body, but gone to dwell in the region of spirits; they are no longer exposed to these stormy seas, but are gladly arrived at their safe harbor” (The Whole Duty of Mourning and the Great Concern of Preparing Ourselves for Death [London, 1695], p. 154). Pulter knows this logic, repeats it often in her poetry, and struggles to reconcile it with her attachment to lost persons and, here, to her own flesh and the memory of its lost youth. If it is the soul that is imprisoned in the body, then it is particularly interesting that the speaker has to work to detach the soul from the body, interrogating the soul as to why it loves and clings to its prison. In the poem, “I” and “me” (lines 23, 26) reside with the decaying flesh and not the soul.Line number 5
Gloss note
shiningLine number 9
Gloss note
face, facial expressionLine number 10
Critical note
Popular books of prognostication and almanacs were attributed to Erra Pater, “a Jew, born in Jewry,” throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These texts were so ubiquitous and popular that the name came to describe the books themselves; an almanac might be called an “erra pater” or, since these predictions were considered unreliable or erring, an “errans pater.” Erra Pater was often described as old, as in the broadside “Erra Pater’s Prophesy or Frost Fair 1683,” or depicted with a lined face (see Erra Pater and the Sibyl). In Beaumont and Fletcher’s popular play The Scornful Lady (1616), Elder Loveless describes the aged servant, Abigail, as “Thou with a face as old as Erra Pater, such a prognosticating nose: thou thing that ten years since has left to be a woman, outworn the expectation of a bawd, and thy dry bones can reach at nothing now, but gords or ninepins [dice]” (4.1).Line number 10
Critical note
Sibyls were female prophets in ancient Greece and Rome. Although they were mortals, they were often depicted as preternaturally old. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Phoebus, trying to gain the Cumaean sibyl’s virginity, offered her extended life, but when she refused him, he did not include lasting youth in the bargain. When the sibyl encounters Aeneas in Ovid’s tale, she is 700 years old and decrepit; she imagines that her body will gradually wither until nothing is left but her prophetic voice (see Erra Pater and the Sibyl). Pulter chooses prophets as her images of the aged face, perhaps linking age and wisdom, but she also chooses prophets whose ability to foresee the future many of her contemporaries held in doubt.Line number 12
Critical note
That is, those who seek color in her lips and cheeks. In lines 15 and 18, the speaker emphasizes that she associates her youthful beauty with the whiteness of her skin.Line number 14
Gloss note
limitLine number 16
Gloss note
bright blueLine number 16
Gloss note
scarletLine number 17
Critical note
A skeletal timeline of Pulter’s life would focus on what we might call reproductive events: she married at age 13 and gave birth to at least 15 children between the ages of 19 and 48 (the last two years before this poem). Yet this striking evocation of her body as a source of pleasure is unusual in the poetry. The description of her breasts does not specify for whom they served as the bed of love. Pulter may refer to a husband or lover; Pulter’s husband Arthur is almost invisible in these poems, especially compared to her children. She might also remember nursing her children here.Line number 22
Gloss note
playfulLine number 24
Critical note
Pulter’s daughter Penelope died in 1655 at age 22 (Eardley). Pulter may have suffered her own illness and written this poem that same year. One might hear the homonym between the nickname “Pen” and the pen as a writing implement, linking Pulter’s procreative and creative activities. Sorry, but there are no notes associated with
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