Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low

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Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low

Poem 66

Original Source

Hester Pulter, Poems breathed forth by the nobel Hadassas, University of Leeds Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32

Versions

  • Facsimile of manuscript: Photographs provided by University of Leeds, Brotherton Collection

  • Transcription of manuscript: By Leah Knight and Wendy Wall.
  • Elemental edition: By Leah Knight and Wendy Wall.
  • Amplified edition: By Sarah C. E. Ross.

How to cite these versions

Conventions for these editions

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making

  • Created by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
  • Encoded by Katherine Poland, Matthew Taylor, Elizabeth Chou, and Emily Andrey, Northwestern University
  • Website designed by Sergei Kalugin, Northwestern University
  • IT project consultation by Josh Honn, Northwestern University
  • Project sponsored by Northwestern University, Brock University, and University of Leeds
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X (Close panel)Notes: Transcription
Title note

 Physical note

This poem is written in a hand other than the main scribe’s (H1) or H2.

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Line number 3

 Physical note

“g” extends into curled line
Line number 6

 Physical note

“y” extends into curled line
Line number 11

 Physical note

remaining half-page blank
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
X (Close panel)Transcription
Transcription

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder
Physical Note
This poem is written in a hand other than the main scribe’s (H1) or H2.
Made when my Spirits were ſunk very low with ſickneſs and ſorrow. May 1667 I being ſeventy one years old.
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.
Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low With Sickness and Sorrow
Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low with Sickness and Sorrow,
Critical Note
The title continues, “I being Seventy-One Years Old”. This is probably an error, as Pulter’s likely birthdate of 1605 would make her 61 years old in (early) 1667. See Eardley (ed.), Lady Hester Pulter, p. 13.
May 1667
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
My priority in editing these poems has been to modernise, and to achieve interpretative and visual clarity, in order to make the poems as accessible as possible to as wide a modern audience as is possible. Spelling is modernised, as is punctuation. Modernising the latter, in particular, often involves a significant act of editorial interpretation, but in my view this is one of the most productive areas of editorial intervention, particularly for a manuscript text such as Pulter’s where the punctuation is erratic compared to modern usage (and, indeed, compared to early modern printed texts).
Critical Note
1. See Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse”, in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 162–178.
1


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This poem is in a different hand from the main scribe’s, and is one of several added to the manuscript after the conclusion of the main series of poems (which concludes with To Sir William Davenant, Upon the Unspeakable Loss of the Most Conspicuous and Chief Ornament of his Frontispiece [Poem 60]). The same hand has transcribed On the Fall of That Grand Rebel, the Earl of Essex [Poem 62] and Dear God, from Thy High Throne Look Down [Poem 63], both of which are on a bifolium that has been tipped into the manuscript. “Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low” is copied into the main bound volume.
One of Pulter’s many poems composed in “sickness and sorrow”, this is a simple devotional lyric that looks forward to “everlasting life and day”, after death. Like many of Pulter’s devotional lyrics, this one exhorts her soul to “Droop not” with the sorrows of the world, and instead to turn to the divine; see, for example, Universal Dissolution [Poem 6] for a comparable incitement away from religious complaint, and My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29] for a comparable focus on singing “hallelujahs to thy praise” (Poem 29, line 14). In its movement from addressing the drooping soul of the first stanza to envisaging the soul’s rousing ascent in the second, the poem could be compared to George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”; however, the ascent of the soul is “stay[ed]” in the third stanza, where the speaker insists on the soul’s need to see out the “few and evil days” of life on earth. The final couplet reflexively evokes Pulter’s devotional lyrics themselves, as the thanks and praise that Pulter’s speaker breathes forth while here on earth. Poem 45, This Was Written 1648 [Poem 45], makes explicit the connection implicit here between the earthly songs of praise that are Pulter’s devotional lyrics, and the hallelujahs to be sung in the afterlife: “I’ll such lays here begin, shall end above” (Poem 45, line 68).
The poem’s form, in rhyming tercets with a final rhyming couplet, is song-like; for a broad comparison, see see My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29], and the commentary to the amplified edition of that poem. This lyric, however, is metrically irregular, moving between tetrameter and pentameter lines. It is just possible that the text is a copy of a draft or unpolished poem, appearing as it does in a different hand, after the main series of poems in the manuscript.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
Droop not, my Soul, nor hang the Wing
Droop not, my soul, nor
Gloss Note
be hesitant or timid
hang the wing
,
Droop not, my soul, nor
Critical Note
hesitate, show timidity (OED n. 18). See George Herbert, “Easter wings”, for a directly contrasting evocation of wings advancing flight towards the divine: “if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me” (lines 9–10). This sense of “taking wing” towards the divine is used at the end of Pulter’s Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be [Poem 55], describing the future time at which “my captivated soul takes wing / Then will I hallelujahs ever sing” (lines 16–17).
hang the wing
,
2
for thou Shalt shortly Hallelujah’s ſing
For thou shalt shortly
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God
hallelujahs
sing
For thou shalt shortly
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God.
hallelujahs
sing
3
To Our Inuiſible Eternall
Physical Note
“g” extends into curled line
King
To our invisible eternal King.
To our invisible, eternal king.
4
Rouſe up, my ſoul, Shake off theſe Rags of Clay
Rouse up, my soul, shake off these rags of
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.”
clay
,
Rouse up, my soul, shake off these
Critical Note
the body. See Poem 6, “this frail frame, this feeble house of clay” (line 2); and Isaiah 64:8, “O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter”.
rags of clay
5
And thorow all the ſuns & Worlds make way
And
Gloss Note
Through
thorough
all the
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.
suns and worlds
make way
And
Gloss Note
MS = thorow. Through
thorough
all the suns and worlds make way
6
To Everlasting Life &
Physical Note
“y” extends into curled line
Day
To everlasting life and day.
To everlasting life and day.
7
But stay, My ſoul, thou Cans’t not goe,
But stay, my soul: thou cans’t not go,
But stay, my soul, thou canst not go,
8
Thy Great Creator he ſays, No,
Thy Great Creator, He says, “no,”
Thy great Creator,
Critical Note
These lines (and the reference to breath in line 11) may echo John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”: “As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go, / Whilst some of their sad friends do say, / ‘Now his breath goes,’ and some say, ‘No’” (lines 1–4; www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php).
he says “no”
,
9
For thou Must praiſe him longer here below.
For thou must praise Him longer here below.
For thou must praise him longer here below.
10
Then lett me here my few and Evil Dayes
Then let me here, my few and evil days,
Then let me here, my
Critical Note
See Genesis 47:9: “And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage”. For the same description of life as “my few and evil days”, see The Center [Poem 30], line 47; and A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44], line 110.
few and evil days
,
11
Breath Nothing forth but thanks &
Physical Note
remaining half-page blank
Praise
.
Note that one of the manuscript titles is “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Haddasah.”
Breathe
nothing forth but thanks and praise.
Critical Note
Pulter recurrently figures her poems as “breathed forth”, most notably in the titles given to her two poem series, “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”, and “Emblems. The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”. A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44] ends very similarly to this one: “I’ll improve’t, my few and evil days, / Until it doth exhale in thanks and praise” (lines 110–11).
Breathe nothing forth
but thanks and praise.
horizontal straight line
X (Close panel)Notes: Elemental Edition
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 timid
Line number 2

 Gloss note

songs of praise to God
Line 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

Through
Line 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 any currently displayed witness.
X (Close panel)Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder
Physical Note
This poem is written in a hand other than the main scribe’s (H1) or H2.
Made when my Spirits were ſunk very low with ſickneſs and ſorrow. May 1667 I being ſeventy one years old.
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.
Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low With Sickness and Sorrow
Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low with Sickness and Sorrow,
Critical Note
The title continues, “I being Seventy-One Years Old”. This is probably an error, as Pulter’s likely birthdate of 1605 would make her 61 years old in (early) 1667. See Eardley (ed.), Lady Hester Pulter, p. 13.
May 1667
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
My priority in editing these poems has been to modernise, and to achieve interpretative and visual clarity, in order to make the poems as accessible as possible to as wide a modern audience as is possible. Spelling is modernised, as is punctuation. Modernising the latter, in particular, often involves a significant act of editorial interpretation, but in my view this is one of the most productive areas of editorial intervention, particularly for a manuscript text such as Pulter’s where the punctuation is erratic compared to modern usage (and, indeed, compared to early modern printed texts).
Critical Note
1. See Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse”, in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 162–178.
1


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This poem is in a different hand from the main scribe’s, and is one of several added to the manuscript after the conclusion of the main series of poems (which concludes with To Sir William Davenant, Upon the Unspeakable Loss of the Most Conspicuous and Chief Ornament of his Frontispiece [Poem 60]). The same hand has transcribed On the Fall of That Grand Rebel, the Earl of Essex [Poem 62] and Dear God, from Thy High Throne Look Down [Poem 63], both of which are on a bifolium that has been tipped into the manuscript. “Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low” is copied into the main bound volume.
One of Pulter’s many poems composed in “sickness and sorrow”, this is a simple devotional lyric that looks forward to “everlasting life and day”, after death. Like many of Pulter’s devotional lyrics, this one exhorts her soul to “Droop not” with the sorrows of the world, and instead to turn to the divine; see, for example, Universal Dissolution [Poem 6] for a comparable incitement away from religious complaint, and My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29] for a comparable focus on singing “hallelujahs to thy praise” (Poem 29, line 14). In its movement from addressing the drooping soul of the first stanza to envisaging the soul’s rousing ascent in the second, the poem could be compared to George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”; however, the ascent of the soul is “stay[ed]” in the third stanza, where the speaker insists on the soul’s need to see out the “few and evil days” of life on earth. The final couplet reflexively evokes Pulter’s devotional lyrics themselves, as the thanks and praise that Pulter’s speaker breathes forth while here on earth. Poem 45, This Was Written 1648 [Poem 45], makes explicit the connection implicit here between the earthly songs of praise that are Pulter’s devotional lyrics, and the hallelujahs to be sung in the afterlife: “I’ll such lays here begin, shall end above” (Poem 45, line 68).
The poem’s form, in rhyming tercets with a final rhyming couplet, is song-like; for a broad comparison, see see My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29], and the commentary to the amplified edition of that poem. This lyric, however, is metrically irregular, moving between tetrameter and pentameter lines. It is just possible that the text is a copy of a draft or unpolished poem, appearing as it does in a different hand, after the main series of poems in the manuscript.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
Droop not, my Soul, nor hang the Wing
Droop not, my soul, nor
Gloss Note
be hesitant or timid
hang the wing
,
Droop not, my soul, nor
Critical Note
hesitate, show timidity (OED n. 18). See George Herbert, “Easter wings”, for a directly contrasting evocation of wings advancing flight towards the divine: “if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me” (lines 9–10). This sense of “taking wing” towards the divine is used at the end of Pulter’s Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be [Poem 55], describing the future time at which “my captivated soul takes wing / Then will I hallelujahs ever sing” (lines 16–17).
hang the wing
,
2
for thou Shalt shortly Hallelujah’s ſing
For thou shalt shortly
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God
hallelujahs
sing
For thou shalt shortly
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God.
hallelujahs
sing
3
To Our Inuiſible Eternall
Physical Note
“g” extends into curled line
King
To our invisible eternal King.
To our invisible, eternal king.
4
Rouſe up, my ſoul, Shake off theſe Rags of Clay
Rouse up, my soul, shake off these rags of
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.”
clay
,
Rouse up, my soul, shake off these
Critical Note
the body. See Poem 6, “this frail frame, this feeble house of clay” (line 2); and Isaiah 64:8, “O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter”.
rags of clay
5
And thorow all the ſuns & Worlds make way
And
Gloss Note
Through
thorough
all the
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.
suns and worlds
make way
And
Gloss Note
MS = thorow. Through
thorough
all the suns and worlds make way
6
To Everlasting Life &
Physical Note
“y” extends into curled line
Day
To everlasting life and day.
To everlasting life and day.
7
But stay, My ſoul, thou Cans’t not goe,
But stay, my soul: thou cans’t not go,
But stay, my soul, thou canst not go,
8
Thy Great Creator he ſays, No,
Thy Great Creator, He says, “no,”
Thy great Creator,
Critical Note
These lines (and the reference to breath in line 11) may echo John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”: “As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go, / Whilst some of their sad friends do say, / ‘Now his breath goes,’ and some say, ‘No’” (lines 1–4; www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php).
he says “no”
,
9
For thou Must praiſe him longer here below.
For thou must praise Him longer here below.
For thou must praise him longer here below.
10
Then lett me here my few and Evil Dayes
Then let me here, my few and evil days,
Then let me here, my
Critical Note
See Genesis 47:9: “And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage”. For the same description of life as “my few and evil days”, see The Center [Poem 30], line 47; and A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44], line 110.
few and evil days
,
11
Breath Nothing forth but thanks &
Physical Note
remaining half-page blank
Praise
.
Note that one of the manuscript titles is “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Haddasah.”
Breathe
nothing forth but thanks and praise.
Critical Note
Pulter recurrently figures her poems as “breathed forth”, most notably in the titles given to her two poem series, “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”, and “Emblems. The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”. A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44] ends very similarly to this one: “I’ll improve’t, my few and evil days, / Until it doth exhale in thanks and praise” (lines 110–11).
Breathe nothing forth
but thanks and praise.
horizontal straight line
X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition
Title note

 Critical note

The title continues, “I being Seventy-One Years Old”. This is probably an error, as Pulter’s likely birthdate of 1605 would make her 61 years old in (early) 1667. See Eardley (ed.), Lady Hester Pulter, p. 13.

 Editorial note

My priority in editing these poems has been to modernise, and to achieve interpretative and visual clarity, in order to make the poems as accessible as possible to as wide a modern audience as is possible. Spelling is modernised, as is punctuation. Modernising the latter, in particular, often involves a significant act of editorial interpretation, but in my view this is one of the most productive areas of editorial intervention, particularly for a manuscript text such as Pulter’s where the punctuation is erratic compared to modern usage (and, indeed, compared to early modern printed texts).
Critical Note
1. See Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse”, in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 162–178.
1

 Headnote

This poem is in a different hand from the main scribe’s, and is one of several added to the manuscript after the conclusion of the main series of poems (which concludes with To Sir William Davenant, Upon the Unspeakable Loss of the Most Conspicuous and Chief Ornament of his Frontispiece [Poem 60]). The same hand has transcribed On the Fall of That Grand Rebel, the Earl of Essex [Poem 62] and Dear God, from Thy High Throne Look Down [Poem 63], both of which are on a bifolium that has been tipped into the manuscript. “Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low” is copied into the main bound volume.
One of Pulter’s many poems composed in “sickness and sorrow”, this is a simple devotional lyric that looks forward to “everlasting life and day”, after death. Like many of Pulter’s devotional lyrics, this one exhorts her soul to “Droop not” with the sorrows of the world, and instead to turn to the divine; see, for example, Universal Dissolution [Poem 6] for a comparable incitement away from religious complaint, and My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29] for a comparable focus on singing “hallelujahs to thy praise” (Poem 29, line 14). In its movement from addressing the drooping soul of the first stanza to envisaging the soul’s rousing ascent in the second, the poem could be compared to George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”; however, the ascent of the soul is “stay[ed]” in the third stanza, where the speaker insists on the soul’s need to see out the “few and evil days” of life on earth. The final couplet reflexively evokes Pulter’s devotional lyrics themselves, as the thanks and praise that Pulter’s speaker breathes forth while here on earth. Poem 45, This Was Written 1648 [Poem 45], makes explicit the connection implicit here between the earthly songs of praise that are Pulter’s devotional lyrics, and the hallelujahs to be sung in the afterlife: “I’ll such lays here begin, shall end above” (Poem 45, line 68).
The poem’s form, in rhyming tercets with a final rhyming couplet, is song-like; for a broad comparison, see see My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29], and the commentary to the amplified edition of that poem. This lyric, however, is metrically irregular, moving between tetrameter and pentameter lines. It is just possible that the text is a copy of a draft or unpolished poem, appearing as it does in a different hand, after the main series of poems in the manuscript.
Line number 1

 Critical note

hesitate, show timidity (OED n. 18). See George Herbert, “Easter wings”, for a directly contrasting evocation of wings advancing flight towards the divine: “if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me” (lines 9–10). This sense of “taking wing” towards the divine is used at the end of Pulter’s Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be [Poem 55], describing the future time at which “my captivated soul takes wing / Then will I hallelujahs ever sing” (lines 16–17).
Line number 2

 Gloss note

songs of praise to God.
Line number 4

 Critical note

the body. See Poem 6, “this frail frame, this feeble house of clay” (line 2); and Isaiah 64:8, “O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter”.
Line number 5

 Gloss note

MS = thorow. Through
Line number 8

 Critical note

These lines (and the reference to breath in line 11) may echo John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”: “As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go, / Whilst some of their sad friends do say, / ‘Now his breath goes,’ and some say, ‘No’” (lines 1–4; www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php).
Line number 10

 Critical note

See Genesis 47:9: “And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage”. For the same description of life as “my few and evil days”, see The Center [Poem 30], line 47; and A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44], line 110.
Line number 11

 Critical note

Pulter recurrently figures her poems as “breathed forth”, most notably in the titles given to her two poem series, “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”, and “Emblems. The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”. A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44] ends very similarly to this one: “I’ll improve’t, my few and evil days, / Until it doth exhale in thanks and praise” (lines 110–11).
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Physical Note
This poem is written in a hand other than the main scribe’s (H1) or H2.
Made when my Spirits were ſunk very low with ſickneſs and ſorrow. May 1667 I being ſeventy one years old.
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.
Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low With Sickness and Sorrow
Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low with Sickness and Sorrow,
Critical Note
The title continues, “I being Seventy-One Years Old”. This is probably an error, as Pulter’s likely birthdate of 1605 would make her 61 years old in (early) 1667. See Eardley (ed.), Lady Hester Pulter, p. 13.
May 1667
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

— Sarah C. E. Ross
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.

— Sarah C. E. Ross
My priority in editing these poems has been to modernise, and to achieve interpretative and visual clarity, in order to make the poems as accessible as possible to as wide a modern audience as is possible. Spelling is modernised, as is punctuation. Modernising the latter, in particular, often involves a significant act of editorial interpretation, but in my view this is one of the most productive areas of editorial intervention, particularly for a manuscript text such as Pulter’s where the punctuation is erratic compared to modern usage (and, indeed, compared to early modern printed texts).
Critical Note
1. See Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse”, in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 162–178.
1


— Sarah C. E. Ross
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.

— Sarah C. E. Ross
This poem is in a different hand from the main scribe’s, and is one of several added to the manuscript after the conclusion of the main series of poems (which concludes with To Sir William Davenant, Upon the Unspeakable Loss of the Most Conspicuous and Chief Ornament of his Frontispiece [Poem 60]). The same hand has transcribed On the Fall of That Grand Rebel, the Earl of Essex [Poem 62] and Dear God, from Thy High Throne Look Down [Poem 63], both of which are on a bifolium that has been tipped into the manuscript. “Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low” is copied into the main bound volume.
One of Pulter’s many poems composed in “sickness and sorrow”, this is a simple devotional lyric that looks forward to “everlasting life and day”, after death. Like many of Pulter’s devotional lyrics, this one exhorts her soul to “Droop not” with the sorrows of the world, and instead to turn to the divine; see, for example, Universal Dissolution [Poem 6] for a comparable incitement away from religious complaint, and My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29] for a comparable focus on singing “hallelujahs to thy praise” (Poem 29, line 14). In its movement from addressing the drooping soul of the first stanza to envisaging the soul’s rousing ascent in the second, the poem could be compared to George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”; however, the ascent of the soul is “stay[ed]” in the third stanza, where the speaker insists on the soul’s need to see out the “few and evil days” of life on earth. The final couplet reflexively evokes Pulter’s devotional lyrics themselves, as the thanks and praise that Pulter’s speaker breathes forth while here on earth. Poem 45, This Was Written 1648 [Poem 45], makes explicit the connection implicit here between the earthly songs of praise that are Pulter’s devotional lyrics, and the hallelujahs to be sung in the afterlife: “I’ll such lays here begin, shall end above” (Poem 45, line 68).
The poem’s form, in rhyming tercets with a final rhyming couplet, is song-like; for a broad comparison, see see My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29], and the commentary to the amplified edition of that poem. This lyric, however, is metrically irregular, moving between tetrameter and pentameter lines. It is just possible that the text is a copy of a draft or unpolished poem, appearing as it does in a different hand, after the main series of poems in the manuscript.


— Sarah C. E. Ross
1
Droop not, my Soul, nor hang the Wing
Droop not, my soul, nor
Gloss Note
be hesitant or timid
hang the wing
,
Droop not, my soul, nor
Critical Note
hesitate, show timidity (OED n. 18). See George Herbert, “Easter wings”, for a directly contrasting evocation of wings advancing flight towards the divine: “if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me” (lines 9–10). This sense of “taking wing” towards the divine is used at the end of Pulter’s Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be [Poem 55], describing the future time at which “my captivated soul takes wing / Then will I hallelujahs ever sing” (lines 16–17).
hang the wing
,
2
for thou Shalt shortly Hallelujah’s ſing
For thou shalt shortly
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God
hallelujahs
sing
For thou shalt shortly
Gloss Note
songs of praise to God.
hallelujahs
sing
3
To Our Inuiſible Eternall
Physical Note
“g” extends into curled line
King
To our invisible eternal King.
To our invisible, eternal king.
4
Rouſe up, my ſoul, Shake off theſe Rags of Clay
Rouse up, my soul, shake off these rags of
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.”
clay
,
Rouse up, my soul, shake off these
Critical Note
the body. See Poem 6, “this frail frame, this feeble house of clay” (line 2); and Isaiah 64:8, “O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter”.
rags of clay
5
And thorow all the ſuns & Worlds make way
And
Gloss Note
Through
thorough
all the
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.
suns and worlds
make way
And
Gloss Note
MS = thorow. Through
thorough
all the suns and worlds make way
6
To Everlasting Life &
Physical Note
“y” extends into curled line
Day
To everlasting life and day.
To everlasting life and day.
7
But stay, My ſoul, thou Cans’t not goe,
But stay, my soul: thou cans’t not go,
But stay, my soul, thou canst not go,
8
Thy Great Creator he ſays, No,
Thy Great Creator, He says, “no,”
Thy great Creator,
Critical Note
These lines (and the reference to breath in line 11) may echo John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”: “As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go, / Whilst some of their sad friends do say, / ‘Now his breath goes,’ and some say, ‘No’” (lines 1–4; www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php).
he says “no”
,
9
For thou Must praiſe him longer here below.
For thou must praise Him longer here below.
For thou must praise him longer here below.
10
Then lett me here my few and Evil Dayes
Then let me here, my few and evil days,
Then let me here, my
Critical Note
See Genesis 47:9: “And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage”. For the same description of life as “my few and evil days”, see The Center [Poem 30], line 47; and A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44], line 110.
few and evil days
,
11
Breath Nothing forth but thanks &
Physical Note
remaining half-page blank
Praise
.
Note that one of the manuscript titles is “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Haddasah.”
Breathe
nothing forth but thanks and praise.
Critical Note
Pulter recurrently figures her poems as “breathed forth”, most notably in the titles given to her two poem series, “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”, and “Emblems. The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”. A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44] ends very similarly to this one: “I’ll improve’t, my few and evil days, / Until it doth exhale in thanks and praise” (lines 110–11).
Breathe nothing forth
but thanks and praise.
horizontal straight line
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Transcription
Title note

 Physical note

This poem is written in a hand other than the main scribe’s (H1) or H2.
Elemental Edition
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.
Amplified Edition
Title note

 Critical note

The title continues, “I being Seventy-One Years Old”. This is probably an error, as Pulter’s likely birthdate of 1605 would make her 61 years old in (early) 1667. See Eardley (ed.), Lady Hester Pulter, p. 13.
Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Elemental Edition

 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.
Amplified Edition

 Editorial note

My priority in editing these poems has been to modernise, and to achieve interpretative and visual clarity, in order to make the poems as accessible as possible to as wide a modern audience as is possible. Spelling is modernised, as is punctuation. Modernising the latter, in particular, often involves a significant act of editorial interpretation, but in my view this is one of the most productive areas of editorial intervention, particularly for a manuscript text such as Pulter’s where the punctuation is erratic compared to modern usage (and, indeed, compared to early modern printed texts).
Critical Note
1. See Alice Eardley, “‘I haue not time to point yr booke … which I desire you yourselfe to doe’: Editing the Form of Early Modern Manuscript Verse”, in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 162–178.
1
Elemental Edition

 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.
Amplified Edition

 Headnote

This poem is in a different hand from the main scribe’s, and is one of several added to the manuscript after the conclusion of the main series of poems (which concludes with To Sir William Davenant, Upon the Unspeakable Loss of the Most Conspicuous and Chief Ornament of his Frontispiece [Poem 60]). The same hand has transcribed On the Fall of That Grand Rebel, the Earl of Essex [Poem 62] and Dear God, from Thy High Throne Look Down [Poem 63], both of which are on a bifolium that has been tipped into the manuscript. “Made when my Spirits were Sunk Very Low” is copied into the main bound volume.
One of Pulter’s many poems composed in “sickness and sorrow”, this is a simple devotional lyric that looks forward to “everlasting life and day”, after death. Like many of Pulter’s devotional lyrics, this one exhorts her soul to “Droop not” with the sorrows of the world, and instead to turn to the divine; see, for example, Universal Dissolution [Poem 6] for a comparable incitement away from religious complaint, and My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29] for a comparable focus on singing “hallelujahs to thy praise” (Poem 29, line 14). In its movement from addressing the drooping soul of the first stanza to envisaging the soul’s rousing ascent in the second, the poem could be compared to George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”; however, the ascent of the soul is “stay[ed]” in the third stanza, where the speaker insists on the soul’s need to see out the “few and evil days” of life on earth. The final couplet reflexively evokes Pulter’s devotional lyrics themselves, as the thanks and praise that Pulter’s speaker breathes forth while here on earth. Poem 45, This Was Written 1648 [Poem 45], makes explicit the connection implicit here between the earthly songs of praise that are Pulter’s devotional lyrics, and the hallelujahs to be sung in the afterlife: “I’ll such lays here begin, shall end above” (Poem 45, line 68).
The poem’s form, in rhyming tercets with a final rhyming couplet, is song-like; for a broad comparison, see see My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29], and the commentary to the amplified edition of that poem. This lyric, however, is metrically irregular, moving between tetrameter and pentameter lines. It is just possible that the text is a copy of a draft or unpolished poem, appearing as it does in a different hand, after the main series of poems in the manuscript.
Elemental Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

be hesitant or timid
Amplified Edition
Line number 1

 Critical note

hesitate, show timidity (OED n. 18). See George Herbert, “Easter wings”, for a directly contrasting evocation of wings advancing flight towards the divine: “if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me” (lines 9–10). This sense of “taking wing” towards the divine is used at the end of Pulter’s Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be [Poem 55], describing the future time at which “my captivated soul takes wing / Then will I hallelujahs ever sing” (lines 16–17).
Elemental Edition
Line number 2

 Gloss note

songs of praise to God
Amplified Edition
Line number 2

 Gloss note

songs of praise to God.
Transcription
Line number 3

 Physical note

“g” extends into curled line
Elemental Edition
Line 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.”
Amplified Edition
Line number 4

 Critical note

the body. See Poem 6, “this frail frame, this feeble house of clay” (line 2); and Isaiah 64:8, “O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter”.
Elemental Edition
Line number 5

 Gloss note

Through
Elemental Edition
Line 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.
Amplified Edition
Line number 5

 Gloss note

MS = thorow. Through
Transcription
Line number 6

 Physical note

“y” extends into curled line
Amplified Edition
Line number 8

 Critical note

These lines (and the reference to breath in line 11) may echo John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”: “As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go, / Whilst some of their sad friends do say, / ‘Now his breath goes,’ and some say, ‘No’” (lines 1–4; www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php).
Amplified Edition
Line number 10

 Critical note

See Genesis 47:9: “And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage”. For the same description of life as “my few and evil days”, see The Center [Poem 30], line 47; and A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44], line 110.
Transcription
Line number 11

 Physical note

remaining half-page blank
Elemental Edition
Line number 11
Note that one of the manuscript titles is “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Haddasah.”
Amplified Edition
Line number 11

 Critical note

Pulter recurrently figures her poems as “breathed forth”, most notably in the titles given to her two poem series, “Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”, and “Emblems. The Sighs of a Sad Soul Emblematically Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassah”. A Solitary Discourse [Poem 44] ends very similarly to this one: “I’ll improve’t, my few and evil days, / Until it doth exhale in thanks and praise” (lines 110–11).
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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