Title note
Critical note
The title continues: “May 1667, I Being Seventy-One Years Old”; “Seventy” seems an error in transcription for “Sixty.” Sarah Ross provisionally identifies this poem as written by the eighteenth-century antiquarian, Angel Chauncy, the local parish rector in Cottered, who annotated the manuscript. See Sarah C. E. Ross, “Women and Religious Verse in English Manuscript Culture, d. 1660–1668: Lady Anne Southwell, Lady Hester Pulter and Katherine Austen” (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2000), pp. 161–168.
Editorial note
The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers,
which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and
punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might
otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not
modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote
aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by
Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to
allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various
possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure
material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford
Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s
edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The
result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry.
See full conventions
for this edition here.
Headnote
Ill and despondent, the speaker fantasizes about death, urging her soul to blast out of her body and travel through the galaxies to join God in eternity. This short poem of four stanzas (written in rhyming tercets), breaks in the middle, as the speaker suddenly reverses her directive to her soul. Because the creator requires it, she must remain on earth and limit her own creations to this sphere. The abbreviated final couplet formally demonstrates the constriction the speaker feels in being confined on earth and bound to her body. Yet her renewed commitment to “breathe nothing forth” but thanks and praise notably reflects back to her collection’s title, Poems Breathed Forth By the Noble Hadassah, demonstrating that she has indeed fulfilled part of this creative promise. The poem is the latest dated poem in the collection, written eleven years before Pulter died.Line number 1
Gloss note
be hesitant or timidLine number 2
Gloss note
songs of praise to GodLine number 4
Critical note
the body; see Isaiah 64:8: “But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.”Line number 5
Gloss note
ThroughLine number 5
Critical note
In referencing the possible plurality of universes and worlds, the speaker is at the forefront of new scientific work on astronomy challenging the older Ptolemaic system.Line number 11
Note that one of the manuscript titles is “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Haddasah.” Sorry, but there are no notes associated with
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