Mark But Those Hogs (Emblem 34)

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Mark But Those Hogs (Emblem 34)

Poem #99

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 Megan Heffernan.
  • Amplified edition: By Rachel Zhang.

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

 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 1

 Gloss note

A determiner indicating “that.”
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Transcription
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[Emblem 34]
Mark But Those Hogs
(Emblem 34)
Mark But Those Hogs Amplified Edition A
When Pigs Don’t Fly Amplified Edition B
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
To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text of Pulter’s manuscript by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Do you agree with the punctuation that I’ve introduced? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
The rich complexity of this poem is best appreciated with reference both to Pulter’s other poems and to poems by other emblem writers. Accordingly, I’ve tried to contextualize the many images and concepts in this poem within the world of Pulter’s manuscript as well as the world of early modern English emblem books, sometimes by referencing an analogous poem or image, and sometimes an opposing one.
With an eye to the contemporary reader, I have modernized spelling, and inserted additional punctuation as needed to aid in understanding. As seventeenth-century writers often used capitalization for emphasis, though, I have tried to retain the manuscript’s original capitalization. The capitalization of some letters (e.g., “s”) is difficult to determine; in these cases, I have made individual determinations in line with Pulter’s style.
Abbreviations: AE—Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Toronto: Iter, Inc. and the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014).


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Which would you rather be: hog or dove? Pulter makes the choice even easier than it might first seem with her contrasting portraits of the dietary habits of each creature. Grunting hogs root for nuts with their snouts in the dirt, never even thinking to thank those who made them fall to the ground in the first place, while turtledoves alternate between dainty sips, grateful prayers, and thoughts of still higher things than mere food and drink. But then comes the twist: doves, though innocent, are often sacrificial victims, while hogs, through no virtue of their own, have the good fortune to be banned from the altar. This is the moral quandary on which Pulter’s final invocation turns: knowing all this, now which would you rather be? She claims the choice remains clear.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Like all of Pulter’s emblems, this is a poem that draws moral lessons out of a visual scenario, even though there are no images present in the manuscript. The effect is to require readers to “see” the scenes with their spiritual “eye,” placing them ahead of common readers, who (like the hogs) require physically visible emblems. The emblem begins with a command to pay attention to a group of swine greedily devouring acorns. As the pigs root about in the dirt, they gaze resolutely down at the earth, oblivious to the oak trees and the farmers who provide this bounty by shaking the nuts loose from the branches.
In four further scenes of “thankless people” who repeat the pigs’ behavior, the poem illustrates the limits of a sight that is bound to the earth. This repeated scenario is strikingly kinetic. Instead of a static image, Pulter’s emblem is a series of tiny pantomimes or dumbshows that, over and over again, convey their truth through behavior. Each example depicts the common crudeness of humans who never lift their eyes from earthly concerns. In all four scenes, the swinish figures are criticized not just for their innate flaws but also for how their actions mire them in an earthly filth they cannot see past or beyond. Each example begins with “So” or “Even so,” a rhetorical gesture that keeps referring back to the initial behavior of the hogs.
Pulter’s hogs thus offer a negative example for the emblem’s implied reader, who is meant to learn, from this visual poem, how to see beyond the limits of her own circumstances. The agricultural imagery plays a significant part in this lesson. Pulter may have been drawing here on the tradition connecting land management and poetic craft. Thomas Tusser’s husbandry manuals, which offered versified advice to farmers and poets alike, were so tremendously popular that they were actively published for more than a century, from 1557 to 1672. Unearthing the trope of the pig in early modern literature, Jessica Rosenberg has explained how swine were often used as figures for bad readers who are inattentive to the virtues of the texts they devour.
Gloss Note
Jessica Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2022).
1 In Pulter’s emblem, the agricultural context is explored most pointedly in the example of the “grumbling farmers,” who are doubly ungrateful because they both complain about laboring in their fields and fail to trust in the divine providence that will provide for their harvest.
The second stanza takes an abrupt turn, offering the turtledove as a counterexample to the worldly obsessions of the hogs. A bird that mates for life, the turtledove was a common image of constancy and fidelity. Here the turtledove is also an emblem of temperance, since she is able to “sip” from the earthly pleasures that so wholly absorbed the figures earlier in the poem and “then thro[w] her eyes above.” Like the first stanza, the second develops a repeated rhetorical pattern, but this time it conveys spiritual transcendence, not stasis. In two pairs of “when” and “then” scenarios, Pulter describes how the godly partake moderately, for instance, moving from “terrene toys” to a proper appreciation of “celestial joys.”
Pulter proposes that the lessons of the emblem require an active embrace of self-sacrifice. The final “then” extends these lessons directly to the reader, who is offered the choice to follow either the pattern of the first stanza or of the second. The stanza’s only enjambment (a grammatical continuation across the break between lines) invites “the reader” to “try, which best he loves / To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.” The gap between the lines actually sets up two decisions for the reader, making him pick first which animal he prefers, and then which he wishes to imitate. The male gendering of the reader is striking here. Pulter actively invokes a reader in other emblems, including British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116], Aristomenes (Emblem 45) [Poem 110], and The Ostrich (Emblem 41) [Poem 106]. But pronouns are not used in those poems and the identity of the reader is left more open. Specifying that this reader is male is particularly interesting because he is asked to assume the example of the turtledove, frequently an image of female chastity. The speaker also enters the poem at this moment (“But as for me”) and declares her own mind in a homonym: “’tis my soul’s sole desire” to live and die like the chaste dove. The pairing of “soul/sole” toys with the stated singularity of the desire, perhaps undercutting it, or perhaps amplifying it through the reiterated sound.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Emblem 34 is a stellar example both of Pulter’s love for antithesis, and of her innovative approach toward emblems. The poem is structurally divided into two parts: the first twelve lines elaborating upon a “thankless” hog as an emblem of worldliness, and the concluding ten lines interpreting a “Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” as an emblem of people rightly focused on “Celestial Joys.” This contrapuntal structure—unusual, though not unknown, for emblem poems—would seem to suggest a relatively even-handed depiction of two contrasting spiritual perspectives. But lines 19-20, asking the reader to choose between “base Hogs or Turtle Doves” (emphasis added), are representative of the poem as the whole in clearly indicating the doves’ superiority (even if that means contradicting Pulter’s likely source).
In so presenting the contrast between these two animals, Emblem 34 is the structural opposite of Emblem 36 [Poem 101], which begins lauding constant turtledoves, and ends castigating the “swine” who profane God’s temple. The poems are best read in conjunction, and together demonstrate competing, yet equally valid attitudes toward earthly chaos. By its conclusion, Emblem 36 becomes mired in political diatribe—as stuck in the mire of the civil wars, one could say, as pigs in a mudpit. Emblem 34, however, avoids explicit political commentary. It exhibits precisely the transcendence of earthly concerns represented by the turtledove, focusing on future promises that obviate earthly pain and suffering.
Hogs are an appropriate antithesis to this faithful turtledove, for they have a long biblical and polemical association with immoral behavior in emblem and non-emblem literature.
Gloss Note
I distinguish between “hogs,” domesticated animals like those Pulter depicts, and “boars,” which are almost always invoked so as to privilege their wildness (see the definitions and examples given in OED “hog,” n.1 vs. “boar,” n.). This association with wildness means that boars have their own complex biblical, moral, and polemical history, which is not examined here.
1 George Wither’s Collection of Emblems (1635), for instance, implicitly references Matthew 7:6’s famous injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Wither emphasizes the socioeconomic implications of this injunction, depicting a hog with a pearl ring balanced on its nose in order to critique those who misuse the privileges given to them by fortune (224).
If hogs are commonplace in emblem literature, though, Pulter’s choice of the turtledove itself is not. Constancy, a notoriously multifaceted concept, is typically an immobile virtue.
Gloss Note
Consider, for instance, the Son in Milton’s Paradise Regained: Satan describes his battle against the Son as “try[ing] / his constancy,” and the Son achieves victory simply by standing still (2.225-6). For more on constancy and its literary representations, see Rachel Zhang, “The Constant Paradox: Constancy, Genre, and Literary Tradition in the English Civil Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018).
2 Often defined as remaining faithful to a person or idea despite inducements to the contrary (see OED, n.1, n.2), constancy is usually depicted in emblems as a person or animal actively refusing to move. For example, Geoffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) explains that Aesculapius’ “sittinge, shewes he must be setled still / With constant minde” (212).
Gloss Note
Similarly, in another poem, Whitney presents fishermen who “constant stande[s], abyding sweete or sower, / Untill the Lord appoynte an happie hower” (Choice of Emblemes, 97).
3 Indeed, where constancy is immobile, it is inconstancy which moves, as demonstrated by Henry Peacham’s emblem of “Inconstancia” in Minerva Britanna (1612): “never at a stay,” like the zodiac Cancer, who “Forward, and backward,…keepes his pace” (147).
Pulter’s depiction of “the Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” is then exceedingly unusual in emblem literature, although widespread in her own poetry (The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], Emblem 36).
Gloss Note
The turtledove also embodies constancy in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the death of the birds also means the death of “Love and constancy” (22).
4 Pulter’s depictions often highlight the bird’s mobility, despite it being anathema to typical representations of constancy. In “Why must I be forever thus confined,” for instance, Pulter writes, “Though she resolves to have no second mate / Yet she her flight about the air doth take,” contrasting the dove’s “freedom [to] freely both enjoy and love” to the poet’s own confinement (67-8, 76-9). This avian transcendence is precisely the picture of constancy we see in Emblem 34. Just as the dove flies upward in Pulter’s lyric, the emblem’s turtledoves “turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,” thereby transcending the evils of this world. This transcendent mobility once again contrasts with the hogs, who are so stubbornly rooted to the earth that they cannot get their snouts out of the muck.
This transcendence is muted, though, by the poem’s acknowledgement of pain and suffering. The poem’s final lines, which repeat Pulter’s nearly unprecedented tendency to end her emblem poems focusing on herself, underscore the possibility of martyrdom (another situation commonly associated with constancy in emblem books).
Gloss Note
For Pulter’s self-focused endings, see Rachel Dunn [Zhang], "Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book," The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015): 55-73. For constancy’s association with martyrdom, see George Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 81.
5 True joy, Pulter suggests, is a party to suffering, and transcendence often comes by one’s own sacrifice. The return to the speaker personalizes this message, and suggests that she has already accepted suffering for her own life.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
34Mark but those Hogs w:ch underneath
Gloss Note
A determiner indicating “that.”
yond tree
Gloss Note
Consider only, or just notice
Mark but those hogs which, underneath
Gloss Note
that (implying something within view)
yon tree
Gloss Note
attend to; watch. This command becomes explicitly visual at the end of line 2, where readers are told they “may see” the scene that the speaker is conjuring verbally.
Mark but those hogs, which underneath yond tree,
Mark but those
Gloss Note
A favorite image of emblematists, almost universally deplored. See, for example, Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 224, a variation of the biblical warning not to cast pearls before swine.
Hogs which, underneath yond tree
2
Nuſling and eating Acorns, you may See
Gloss Note
digging or rooting up with the snout
Nuzzling and eating acorns, you may see:
Gloss Note
digging with the nose; an animalistic approach to turning over the soil. This action of grubbing repeats across the first stanza.
Nuzzling and eating acorns, you may see:
Gloss Note
“To burrow or dig with the nose; to poke or push with the nose or snout” (OED v.1. 2a. and b.). This use of “nuzzling” may echo Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Pulter’s hogs are similar to Venus’ description of the boar, “[w]hose downward eye still looketh for a grave” (1106), and the boar kills Adonis by “nuzzling in his flank” (1115).
Nuzzling and Eating Acorns, you may See:
3
they never cast an eye to thoſe which Shake
Gloss Note
Eardley notes that the shaking of acorns from trees was a common practice among swine farmers.
They never cast an eye to those which shake;
They never
Gloss Note
The hogs are blind to the efforts of the farmers who tend to them. The pigs’ eyes are so resolutely trained on the ground that they never realize the providence of those who loosen and drop the acorns from the branches of the oak trees.
cast an eye to those which shake.
They never cast an eye to those which
Gloss Note
AE notes that it was common practice for farmers to shake acorns out of trees to feed their pigs.
Shake.
4
Soe thankles People doe Gods bleſſings take
So thankless people do God’s blessings take
So thankless people do God’s blessings take,
So thankless People do God’s blessings take
5
And never doe his bounteous Love Adore
And never do His bounteous love adore,
And never do his bounteous love adore,
And never do his bounteous Love Adore,
6
But Swiniſhly Root on and Grunt for more
But swinishly root on and grunt for more;
But
Gloss Note
The animal qualities of the hogs are attributed to people who do not properly acknowledge God’s care. The “thankless people” dig in the ground, perhaps with their snouts as the pigs do above, and make incomprehensible sounds instead of properly celebrating divine blessings.
swinishly root on and grunt for more.
But swinishly root and Grunt for more.
7
Soe gripeing Worldlings Still their Wealthe increase
So
Gloss Note
someone who is grasping or greedy and dedicated to earthly (instead of heavenly) pleasures and interests
griping worldlings still their wealth increase
So
Gloss Note
people greedy for earthly pleasures. They are described as wholly of this earth, “worldings” who never cast their minds beyond their worldly affairs, in the same way the hogs do not look beyond their hunt for acorns.
griping worldings still their wealth increase
So
Gloss Note
“Grasping, usurious, avaricious” (OED adj.1).
griping
People devoted to the pleasures of this world (as opposed to life in heaven after death).
Worldlings still their Wealth increase
8
And onely pray their bags may Rest in peace
And only pray their
Gloss Note
money bags
bags may rest in peace;
And only pray their
Gloss Note
money bags. The worldings care only for the eternal peace of their wealth, not their souls.
bags may rest in peace.
Gloss Note

Pulter’s “griping Worldlings” have nothing to ensure that their “bags”—i.e., moneybags—will remain secure after they die; they can “only pray” that their wealth will “rest in peace.” Pulter’s warning against greed and addiction to earthly treasures has numerous biblical echoes, contrasting the transience of earthly possessions with the eternal treasures of heaven. Matthew 6:19-21, for instance, reminds readers, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

See also Luke 12:16-21’s parable of the rich man who tears down his barns in order to build bigger ones.

And only pray their bags may rest in peace.
9
Soe Grumbling ffarmers Still turn up the Earth
So grumbling farmers still turn up the earth,
So grumbling farmers still
Gloss Note
prepare the soil for planting by stirring up and aerating it. Strikingly the grumbling farmers do not till the earth with a plow, the omnipresent symbol of human cultivation (See Frances E. Dolan, Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020], 20). Without a mention of agricultural tools, the farmers appear more like swinish hogs mucking blindly in the dirt.
turn up the earth,
So Grumbling Farmers still turn up the Earth,
10
ffearing that every Shower will cauſ a Dearth
Gloss Note
The misguided farmers (from the line above) plow their fields, but are overly concerned that rain will kill the crops) rather than appreciating the nourishing rain from heaven.
Fearing that every shower will cause a dearth.
Gloss Note
a crop failure that leaves no food to maintain life. While a dearth is perhaps the most fearsome fate for farmers, this line shows how blind these grumblers are to divine providence, just like the hogs. While too much rain certainly can harm crops, it’s more often the case that rain is a figure for refreshment and the promise of bounty. These farmers are receiving even God-sent showers with anxious suspicion rather than gratitude.
Fearing that every shower will cause a dearth.
Fearing that every Shower will cause a
Gloss Note
Pulter’s farmers are forever working, constantly plowing (“turn[ing] up the Earth”) so that the rain won’t wash away their seeds. Rather than seeing the rain as a blessing falling from above (like the acorns falling from the tree in line 3), the farmers live in perpetual fear that rain will impair their crops and cause a “dearth,” or shortage.
Dearth.
11
Even Soe voluptius Gallants dance along
Even so
Gloss Note
“gallants” are men and women of fashion and pleasure who are inclined to “voluptuous” ease, luxury, and gratification of the senses
voluptuous gallants dance along,
Even so
Gloss Note
fashionable people committed to sensuous pleasure.
voluptuous gallants dance along,
Even so voluptuous
Gloss Note
“Gallants” is a multi-valent term in Pulter’s poetry, having both positive connotations (e.g., On those Two Unparalleled Friends [Poem 7], ll. 14, 24) and negative (e.g., Emblem 8 [Poem 74], ll. 12, 22). Here the term refers pejoratively to young men of fashion and pleasure (see OED n.1, 3), whose “voluptuous[ness]” marks them as more interested in sensual pleasures than morality.
Gallants dance along,
12
Their meetings ending in A drunken Song
Their meetings ending in a drunken song.
Their meetings ending in a drunken song.
Their meetings ending in a drunken Song.
13
When Like the Chast & conſtant turtle Dove
When, like the chaste and constant turtledove,
When like the chaste and constant
Gloss Note
a bird that mates for life, emblematizing constancy and devotion. See This Poor Turtle Dove (Emblem 20) [Poem 85], Pardon Me, My Dearest Love [Poem 42], Of A Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43], Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57].
turtledove,
When like the
Gloss Note
The turtledove is frequently associated with marital chastity because it mates for life. See, for instance, Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the turtledove epitomizes “married chastity” (61). Henry Peacham similarly celebrates turtledoves as an emblem of “love of Matrimony” in Minerva Britanna, 92.
Chaste and constant
Gloss Note
A favorite image of Pulter’s. See The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], and Emblem 36 [Poem 101].
Turtle Dove,
14
Which takes a Sip then throws her eyes above
Which takes a sip then throws her eyes above,
Which takes a sip then throws her eyes above,
Which takes a Sip then
Gloss Note

Pulter’s depiction of the turtle dove as constantly gazing heavenward actually contradicts her most likely source, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (from which Pulter frequently draws). According to Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation, Pliny describes doves as “drinking not to hold up their bills between-whiles, and draw their necks backe, but to take a large draught at once, as horses and kine do.” Pliny, Historie of the World, 1:290. Pulter’s turtledoves, however, look up, in direct contrast to the hogs “rooting” in the ground.

Henry Peacham similarly aligns the turtledove with piety in Minerva Britanna, comparing it to a “godly wight, whome no delight of Sinne, Doth with vaine pleasure draw: or worldly care,” esteeming “these fleeting joies a pinne” (110).

throws her eyes above,
15
Gods Children here but Sip of Terren Toys
God’s children here but sip of
Gloss Note
“toys” are amorous sports; trumpery, rubbish, playthings, amusements; “terrene” can mean earthly, secular, temporal, material, or human
terrene toys,
God’s children here but sip of
Gloss Note
frivolous playthings defined by being earthly. “Terrene,” from the same root as “terrestrial,” creates a sense of these “toys” as akin to the hogs’ acorns, rooted and sourced from the soil rather than the heavens.
terrene toys,
Gloss Note
Picking up on the metaphor of Christians as God’s “children,” Pulter compares things we know on Earth, things that are “terrene”—that is, “of the earth; worldly, secular, temporal, material, human” (OED, a.1)—to the insignificant, infantile “toys” children play with. In doing so, Pulter draws a contrast between two different types of children: one childish only in relation to God the father, and the other childish by virtue of their earthly perspective.
God’s Children here but Sip of Terrene toys,
16
Then turn their thoughts to true Celestiall Joys
Then turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,
Then turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,
Then turn their thoughts to true Celestial Joys.
17
Like Innocent Doves they often victims die
Like innocent doves, they often victims die,
Gloss Note
Turtledoves were among the prescribed sacrificial animals in Jewish ritual (Leviticus: 1:14-17).
Like innocent doves they often victims die.
Gloss Note
Jews unable to afford a lamb or bull often sacrificed doves at the biblical temple as an offering to God (see Leviticus 1:14, Leviticus 12:8, Luke 2:24).
Like Innocent Doves they often victims die,
18
When Hogs his Sacred Alter come not Nie
When
Critical Note
Eardley notes the biblical allusions in this line and the one above: “Isa. 66:3 states that the sacrificing of swine pollutes the sacred church and is therefore an abomination. Here this is compared with the sacrifice of the doves in Luke 2:24, which provides a prefiguration of the death of Christ.”
hogs His sacred altar come not nigh.
Gloss Note
By contrast to doves, swine could not be brought near the temple because their sacrifice would pollute it (Isaiah 66:3).
When hogs His sacred altar come not nigh,
Gloss Note
Pigs, declared unclean by God in Leviticus 11:7, were utterly forbidden to Jews, and therefore banned from approaching God’s “sacred Altar.” Isaiah 66:3 references the killing of swine as epitomizing people’s wickedness, an identification emblematized in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblems (1635), 38. But it is the evil of the hogs themselves, not the people using them, that seems the focus of Pulter’s ire here. Pulter draws a clear contrast between the hogs, which must remain distant from the temple, and the doves, which are willingly, sacrificially at the center of the temple’s activity.
When Hogs his Sacred Altar come not Nigh.
19
Then let the Reader trie, which best hee loves
Then let the reader
Gloss Note
sift or distinguish; ascertain, find out (i.e., by effort or experiment, effort, experience); test, put to proof
try which best he loves
Then let the reader try which best he loves
Then let the Reader try, which best he loves
20
To imitate, baſe Hogs or Turtle Doves
To imitate: base hogs or turtledoves.
To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.
To imitate,
Gloss Note
Pulter’s rhetorical presentation of the reader’s choice here is typical of the poem as a whole, which clearly favors one side. Hogs are “base”—that is, distant from God in their depravity (see OED, adj. A.II.10)—while doves stand alone in their heavenly virtue. “Base,” indicating the pigs’ low position relative to the ground, also reinforces the animals’ physical distinction, between the mobile, transcendent dove and the earth-bound swine (see OED “base,” adj. A.I.2a).
base Hogs or Turtle Doves.
21
But as for mee ’tis my Souls Sole deſire
But as for me, ’tis my soul’s sole desire
But as for me, ’tis
Critical Note
Pulter returned to this phrase, for instance, “my soul’s sole joy” in To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield [Poem 38]; “my soul’s sole choice” in The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]; and especially in the title of My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29].
my soul’s sole desire,
But as for me, ’tis my Soul’s Sole desire
22
Like Spotles Doves to live and Soe expire.
Like
Gloss Note
innocent, free from sin, pure
spotless doves to live and so expire.
Like spotless doves to live and so expire.
Gloss Note
The poem’s concluding focus on the speaker, rather than the reader, occurs in the majority of Pulter’s emblems, but is almost without precedence in other emblem books. In this case, the return effectively underscores the poem’s emblematic moral while highlighting the personal sacrifice involved in living out that moral.
Like Spotless Doves to live and so Expire.
horizontal straight line
X (Close panel)Notes: 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.

 Headnote

Which would you rather be: hog or dove? Pulter makes the choice even easier than it might first seem with her contrasting portraits of the dietary habits of each creature. Grunting hogs root for nuts with their snouts in the dirt, never even thinking to thank those who made them fall to the ground in the first place, while turtledoves alternate between dainty sips, grateful prayers, and thoughts of still higher things than mere food and drink. But then comes the twist: doves, though innocent, are often sacrificial victims, while hogs, through no virtue of their own, have the good fortune to be banned from the altar. This is the moral quandary on which Pulter’s final invocation turns: knowing all this, now which would you rather be? She claims the choice remains clear.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Consider only, or just notice
Line number 1

 Gloss note

that (implying something within view)
Line number 2

 Gloss note

digging or rooting up with the snout
Line number 3

 Gloss note

Eardley notes that the shaking of acorns from trees was a common practice among swine farmers.
Line number 7

 Gloss note

someone who is grasping or greedy and dedicated to earthly (instead of heavenly) pleasures and interests
Line number 8

 Gloss note

money bags
Line number 10

 Gloss note

The misguided farmers (from the line above) plow their fields, but are overly concerned that rain will kill the crops) rather than appreciating the nourishing rain from heaven.
Line number 11

 Gloss note

“gallants” are men and women of fashion and pleasure who are inclined to “voluptuous” ease, luxury, and gratification of the senses
Line number 15

 Gloss note

“toys” are amorous sports; trumpery, rubbish, playthings, amusements; “terrene” can mean earthly, secular, temporal, material, or human
Line number 18

 Critical note

Eardley notes the biblical allusions in this line and the one above: “Isa. 66:3 states that the sacrificing of swine pollutes the sacred church and is therefore an abomination. Here this is compared with the sacrifice of the doves in Luke 2:24, which provides a prefiguration of the death of Christ.”
Line number 19

 Gloss note

sift or distinguish; ascertain, find out (i.e., by effort or experiment, effort, experience); test, put to proof
Line number 22

 Gloss note

innocent, free from sin, pure
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X (Close panel)Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition
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[Emblem 34]
Mark But Those Hogs
(Emblem 34)
Mark But Those Hogs Amplified Edition A
When Pigs Don’t Fly Amplified Edition B
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
To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text of Pulter’s manuscript by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Do you agree with the punctuation that I’ve introduced? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
The rich complexity of this poem is best appreciated with reference both to Pulter’s other poems and to poems by other emblem writers. Accordingly, I’ve tried to contextualize the many images and concepts in this poem within the world of Pulter’s manuscript as well as the world of early modern English emblem books, sometimes by referencing an analogous poem or image, and sometimes an opposing one.
With an eye to the contemporary reader, I have modernized spelling, and inserted additional punctuation as needed to aid in understanding. As seventeenth-century writers often used capitalization for emphasis, though, I have tried to retain the manuscript’s original capitalization. The capitalization of some letters (e.g., “s”) is difficult to determine; in these cases, I have made individual determinations in line with Pulter’s style.
Abbreviations: AE—Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Toronto: Iter, Inc. and the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014).


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Which would you rather be: hog or dove? Pulter makes the choice even easier than it might first seem with her contrasting portraits of the dietary habits of each creature. Grunting hogs root for nuts with their snouts in the dirt, never even thinking to thank those who made them fall to the ground in the first place, while turtledoves alternate between dainty sips, grateful prayers, and thoughts of still higher things than mere food and drink. But then comes the twist: doves, though innocent, are often sacrificial victims, while hogs, through no virtue of their own, have the good fortune to be banned from the altar. This is the moral quandary on which Pulter’s final invocation turns: knowing all this, now which would you rather be? She claims the choice remains clear.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Like all of Pulter’s emblems, this is a poem that draws moral lessons out of a visual scenario, even though there are no images present in the manuscript. The effect is to require readers to “see” the scenes with their spiritual “eye,” placing them ahead of common readers, who (like the hogs) require physically visible emblems. The emblem begins with a command to pay attention to a group of swine greedily devouring acorns. As the pigs root about in the dirt, they gaze resolutely down at the earth, oblivious to the oak trees and the farmers who provide this bounty by shaking the nuts loose from the branches.
In four further scenes of “thankless people” who repeat the pigs’ behavior, the poem illustrates the limits of a sight that is bound to the earth. This repeated scenario is strikingly kinetic. Instead of a static image, Pulter’s emblem is a series of tiny pantomimes or dumbshows that, over and over again, convey their truth through behavior. Each example depicts the common crudeness of humans who never lift their eyes from earthly concerns. In all four scenes, the swinish figures are criticized not just for their innate flaws but also for how their actions mire them in an earthly filth they cannot see past or beyond. Each example begins with “So” or “Even so,” a rhetorical gesture that keeps referring back to the initial behavior of the hogs.
Pulter’s hogs thus offer a negative example for the emblem’s implied reader, who is meant to learn, from this visual poem, how to see beyond the limits of her own circumstances. The agricultural imagery plays a significant part in this lesson. Pulter may have been drawing here on the tradition connecting land management and poetic craft. Thomas Tusser’s husbandry manuals, which offered versified advice to farmers and poets alike, were so tremendously popular that they were actively published for more than a century, from 1557 to 1672. Unearthing the trope of the pig in early modern literature, Jessica Rosenberg has explained how swine were often used as figures for bad readers who are inattentive to the virtues of the texts they devour.
Gloss Note
Jessica Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2022).
1 In Pulter’s emblem, the agricultural context is explored most pointedly in the example of the “grumbling farmers,” who are doubly ungrateful because they both complain about laboring in their fields and fail to trust in the divine providence that will provide for their harvest.
The second stanza takes an abrupt turn, offering the turtledove as a counterexample to the worldly obsessions of the hogs. A bird that mates for life, the turtledove was a common image of constancy and fidelity. Here the turtledove is also an emblem of temperance, since she is able to “sip” from the earthly pleasures that so wholly absorbed the figures earlier in the poem and “then thro[w] her eyes above.” Like the first stanza, the second develops a repeated rhetorical pattern, but this time it conveys spiritual transcendence, not stasis. In two pairs of “when” and “then” scenarios, Pulter describes how the godly partake moderately, for instance, moving from “terrene toys” to a proper appreciation of “celestial joys.”
Pulter proposes that the lessons of the emblem require an active embrace of self-sacrifice. The final “then” extends these lessons directly to the reader, who is offered the choice to follow either the pattern of the first stanza or of the second. The stanza’s only enjambment (a grammatical continuation across the break between lines) invites “the reader” to “try, which best he loves / To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.” The gap between the lines actually sets up two decisions for the reader, making him pick first which animal he prefers, and then which he wishes to imitate. The male gendering of the reader is striking here. Pulter actively invokes a reader in other emblems, including British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116], Aristomenes (Emblem 45) [Poem 110], and The Ostrich (Emblem 41) [Poem 106]. But pronouns are not used in those poems and the identity of the reader is left more open. Specifying that this reader is male is particularly interesting because he is asked to assume the example of the turtledove, frequently an image of female chastity. The speaker also enters the poem at this moment (“But as for me”) and declares her own mind in a homonym: “’tis my soul’s sole desire” to live and die like the chaste dove. The pairing of “soul/sole” toys with the stated singularity of the desire, perhaps undercutting it, or perhaps amplifying it through the reiterated sound.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Emblem 34 is a stellar example both of Pulter’s love for antithesis, and of her innovative approach toward emblems. The poem is structurally divided into two parts: the first twelve lines elaborating upon a “thankless” hog as an emblem of worldliness, and the concluding ten lines interpreting a “Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” as an emblem of people rightly focused on “Celestial Joys.” This contrapuntal structure—unusual, though not unknown, for emblem poems—would seem to suggest a relatively even-handed depiction of two contrasting spiritual perspectives. But lines 19-20, asking the reader to choose between “base Hogs or Turtle Doves” (emphasis added), are representative of the poem as the whole in clearly indicating the doves’ superiority (even if that means contradicting Pulter’s likely source).
In so presenting the contrast between these two animals, Emblem 34 is the structural opposite of Emblem 36 [Poem 101], which begins lauding constant turtledoves, and ends castigating the “swine” who profane God’s temple. The poems are best read in conjunction, and together demonstrate competing, yet equally valid attitudes toward earthly chaos. By its conclusion, Emblem 36 becomes mired in political diatribe—as stuck in the mire of the civil wars, one could say, as pigs in a mudpit. Emblem 34, however, avoids explicit political commentary. It exhibits precisely the transcendence of earthly concerns represented by the turtledove, focusing on future promises that obviate earthly pain and suffering.
Hogs are an appropriate antithesis to this faithful turtledove, for they have a long biblical and polemical association with immoral behavior in emblem and non-emblem literature.
Gloss Note
I distinguish between “hogs,” domesticated animals like those Pulter depicts, and “boars,” which are almost always invoked so as to privilege their wildness (see the definitions and examples given in OED “hog,” n.1 vs. “boar,” n.). This association with wildness means that boars have their own complex biblical, moral, and polemical history, which is not examined here.
1 George Wither’s Collection of Emblems (1635), for instance, implicitly references Matthew 7:6’s famous injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Wither emphasizes the socioeconomic implications of this injunction, depicting a hog with a pearl ring balanced on its nose in order to critique those who misuse the privileges given to them by fortune (224).
If hogs are commonplace in emblem literature, though, Pulter’s choice of the turtledove itself is not. Constancy, a notoriously multifaceted concept, is typically an immobile virtue.
Gloss Note
Consider, for instance, the Son in Milton’s Paradise Regained: Satan describes his battle against the Son as “try[ing] / his constancy,” and the Son achieves victory simply by standing still (2.225-6). For more on constancy and its literary representations, see Rachel Zhang, “The Constant Paradox: Constancy, Genre, and Literary Tradition in the English Civil Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018).
2 Often defined as remaining faithful to a person or idea despite inducements to the contrary (see OED, n.1, n.2), constancy is usually depicted in emblems as a person or animal actively refusing to move. For example, Geoffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) explains that Aesculapius’ “sittinge, shewes he must be setled still / With constant minde” (212).
Gloss Note
Similarly, in another poem, Whitney presents fishermen who “constant stande[s], abyding sweete or sower, / Untill the Lord appoynte an happie hower” (Choice of Emblemes, 97).
3 Indeed, where constancy is immobile, it is inconstancy which moves, as demonstrated by Henry Peacham’s emblem of “Inconstancia” in Minerva Britanna (1612): “never at a stay,” like the zodiac Cancer, who “Forward, and backward,…keepes his pace” (147).
Pulter’s depiction of “the Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” is then exceedingly unusual in emblem literature, although widespread in her own poetry (The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], Emblem 36).
Gloss Note
The turtledove also embodies constancy in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the death of the birds also means the death of “Love and constancy” (22).
4 Pulter’s depictions often highlight the bird’s mobility, despite it being anathema to typical representations of constancy. In “Why must I be forever thus confined,” for instance, Pulter writes, “Though she resolves to have no second mate / Yet she her flight about the air doth take,” contrasting the dove’s “freedom [to] freely both enjoy and love” to the poet’s own confinement (67-8, 76-9). This avian transcendence is precisely the picture of constancy we see in Emblem 34. Just as the dove flies upward in Pulter’s lyric, the emblem’s turtledoves “turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,” thereby transcending the evils of this world. This transcendent mobility once again contrasts with the hogs, who are so stubbornly rooted to the earth that they cannot get their snouts out of the muck.
This transcendence is muted, though, by the poem’s acknowledgement of pain and suffering. The poem’s final lines, which repeat Pulter’s nearly unprecedented tendency to end her emblem poems focusing on herself, underscore the possibility of martyrdom (another situation commonly associated with constancy in emblem books).
Gloss Note
For Pulter’s self-focused endings, see Rachel Dunn [Zhang], "Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book," The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015): 55-73. For constancy’s association with martyrdom, see George Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 81.
5 True joy, Pulter suggests, is a party to suffering, and transcendence often comes by one’s own sacrifice. The return to the speaker personalizes this message, and suggests that she has already accepted suffering for her own life.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
34Mark but those Hogs w:ch underneath
Gloss Note
A determiner indicating “that.”
yond tree
Gloss Note
Consider only, or just notice
Mark but those hogs which, underneath
Gloss Note
that (implying something within view)
yon tree
Gloss Note
attend to; watch. This command becomes explicitly visual at the end of line 2, where readers are told they “may see” the scene that the speaker is conjuring verbally.
Mark but those hogs, which underneath yond tree,
Mark but those
Gloss Note
A favorite image of emblematists, almost universally deplored. See, for example, Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 224, a variation of the biblical warning not to cast pearls before swine.
Hogs which, underneath yond tree
2
Nuſling and eating Acorns, you may See
Gloss Note
digging or rooting up with the snout
Nuzzling and eating acorns, you may see:
Gloss Note
digging with the nose; an animalistic approach to turning over the soil. This action of grubbing repeats across the first stanza.
Nuzzling and eating acorns, you may see:
Gloss Note
“To burrow or dig with the nose; to poke or push with the nose or snout” (OED v.1. 2a. and b.). This use of “nuzzling” may echo Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Pulter’s hogs are similar to Venus’ description of the boar, “[w]hose downward eye still looketh for a grave” (1106), and the boar kills Adonis by “nuzzling in his flank” (1115).
Nuzzling and Eating Acorns, you may See:
3
they never cast an eye to thoſe which Shake
Gloss Note
Eardley notes that the shaking of acorns from trees was a common practice among swine farmers.
They never cast an eye to those which shake;
They never
Gloss Note
The hogs are blind to the efforts of the farmers who tend to them. The pigs’ eyes are so resolutely trained on the ground that they never realize the providence of those who loosen and drop the acorns from the branches of the oak trees.
cast an eye to those which shake.
They never cast an eye to those which
Gloss Note
AE notes that it was common practice for farmers to shake acorns out of trees to feed their pigs.
Shake.
4
Soe thankles People doe Gods bleſſings take
So thankless people do God’s blessings take
So thankless people do God’s blessings take,
So thankless People do God’s blessings take
5
And never doe his bounteous Love Adore
And never do His bounteous love adore,
And never do his bounteous love adore,
And never do his bounteous Love Adore,
6
But Swiniſhly Root on and Grunt for more
But swinishly root on and grunt for more;
But
Gloss Note
The animal qualities of the hogs are attributed to people who do not properly acknowledge God’s care. The “thankless people” dig in the ground, perhaps with their snouts as the pigs do above, and make incomprehensible sounds instead of properly celebrating divine blessings.
swinishly root on and grunt for more.
But swinishly root and Grunt for more.
7
Soe gripeing Worldlings Still their Wealthe increase
So
Gloss Note
someone who is grasping or greedy and dedicated to earthly (instead of heavenly) pleasures and interests
griping worldlings still their wealth increase
So
Gloss Note
people greedy for earthly pleasures. They are described as wholly of this earth, “worldings” who never cast their minds beyond their worldly affairs, in the same way the hogs do not look beyond their hunt for acorns.
griping worldings still their wealth increase
So
Gloss Note
“Grasping, usurious, avaricious” (OED adj.1).
griping
People devoted to the pleasures of this world (as opposed to life in heaven after death).
Worldlings still their Wealth increase
8
And onely pray their bags may Rest in peace
And only pray their
Gloss Note
money bags
bags may rest in peace;
And only pray their
Gloss Note
money bags. The worldings care only for the eternal peace of their wealth, not their souls.
bags may rest in peace.
Gloss Note

Pulter’s “griping Worldlings” have nothing to ensure that their “bags”—i.e., moneybags—will remain secure after they die; they can “only pray” that their wealth will “rest in peace.” Pulter’s warning against greed and addiction to earthly treasures has numerous biblical echoes, contrasting the transience of earthly possessions with the eternal treasures of heaven. Matthew 6:19-21, for instance, reminds readers, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

See also Luke 12:16-21’s parable of the rich man who tears down his barns in order to build bigger ones.

And only pray their bags may rest in peace.
9
Soe Grumbling ffarmers Still turn up the Earth
So grumbling farmers still turn up the earth,
So grumbling farmers still
Gloss Note
prepare the soil for planting by stirring up and aerating it. Strikingly the grumbling farmers do not till the earth with a plow, the omnipresent symbol of human cultivation (See Frances E. Dolan, Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020], 20). Without a mention of agricultural tools, the farmers appear more like swinish hogs mucking blindly in the dirt.
turn up the earth,
So Grumbling Farmers still turn up the Earth,
10
ffearing that every Shower will cauſ a Dearth
Gloss Note
The misguided farmers (from the line above) plow their fields, but are overly concerned that rain will kill the crops) rather than appreciating the nourishing rain from heaven.
Fearing that every shower will cause a dearth.
Gloss Note
a crop failure that leaves no food to maintain life. While a dearth is perhaps the most fearsome fate for farmers, this line shows how blind these grumblers are to divine providence, just like the hogs. While too much rain certainly can harm crops, it’s more often the case that rain is a figure for refreshment and the promise of bounty. These farmers are receiving even God-sent showers with anxious suspicion rather than gratitude.
Fearing that every shower will cause a dearth.
Fearing that every Shower will cause a
Gloss Note
Pulter’s farmers are forever working, constantly plowing (“turn[ing] up the Earth”) so that the rain won’t wash away their seeds. Rather than seeing the rain as a blessing falling from above (like the acorns falling from the tree in line 3), the farmers live in perpetual fear that rain will impair their crops and cause a “dearth,” or shortage.
Dearth.
11
Even Soe voluptius Gallants dance along
Even so
Gloss Note
“gallants” are men and women of fashion and pleasure who are inclined to “voluptuous” ease, luxury, and gratification of the senses
voluptuous gallants dance along,
Even so
Gloss Note
fashionable people committed to sensuous pleasure.
voluptuous gallants dance along,
Even so voluptuous
Gloss Note
“Gallants” is a multi-valent term in Pulter’s poetry, having both positive connotations (e.g., On those Two Unparalleled Friends [Poem 7], ll. 14, 24) and negative (e.g., Emblem 8 [Poem 74], ll. 12, 22). Here the term refers pejoratively to young men of fashion and pleasure (see OED n.1, 3), whose “voluptuous[ness]” marks them as more interested in sensual pleasures than morality.
Gallants dance along,
12
Their meetings ending in A drunken Song
Their meetings ending in a drunken song.
Their meetings ending in a drunken song.
Their meetings ending in a drunken Song.
13
When Like the Chast & conſtant turtle Dove
When, like the chaste and constant turtledove,
When like the chaste and constant
Gloss Note
a bird that mates for life, emblematizing constancy and devotion. See This Poor Turtle Dove (Emblem 20) [Poem 85], Pardon Me, My Dearest Love [Poem 42], Of A Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43], Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57].
turtledove,
When like the
Gloss Note
The turtledove is frequently associated with marital chastity because it mates for life. See, for instance, Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the turtledove epitomizes “married chastity” (61). Henry Peacham similarly celebrates turtledoves as an emblem of “love of Matrimony” in Minerva Britanna, 92.
Chaste and constant
Gloss Note
A favorite image of Pulter’s. See The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], and Emblem 36 [Poem 101].
Turtle Dove,
14
Which takes a Sip then throws her eyes above
Which takes a sip then throws her eyes above,
Which takes a sip then throws her eyes above,
Which takes a Sip then
Gloss Note

Pulter’s depiction of the turtle dove as constantly gazing heavenward actually contradicts her most likely source, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (from which Pulter frequently draws). According to Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation, Pliny describes doves as “drinking not to hold up their bills between-whiles, and draw their necks backe, but to take a large draught at once, as horses and kine do.” Pliny, Historie of the World, 1:290. Pulter’s turtledoves, however, look up, in direct contrast to the hogs “rooting” in the ground.

Henry Peacham similarly aligns the turtledove with piety in Minerva Britanna, comparing it to a “godly wight, whome no delight of Sinne, Doth with vaine pleasure draw: or worldly care,” esteeming “these fleeting joies a pinne” (110).

throws her eyes above,
15
Gods Children here but Sip of Terren Toys
God’s children here but sip of
Gloss Note
“toys” are amorous sports; trumpery, rubbish, playthings, amusements; “terrene” can mean earthly, secular, temporal, material, or human
terrene toys,
God’s children here but sip of
Gloss Note
frivolous playthings defined by being earthly. “Terrene,” from the same root as “terrestrial,” creates a sense of these “toys” as akin to the hogs’ acorns, rooted and sourced from the soil rather than the heavens.
terrene toys,
Gloss Note
Picking up on the metaphor of Christians as God’s “children,” Pulter compares things we know on Earth, things that are “terrene”—that is, “of the earth; worldly, secular, temporal, material, human” (OED, a.1)—to the insignificant, infantile “toys” children play with. In doing so, Pulter draws a contrast between two different types of children: one childish only in relation to God the father, and the other childish by virtue of their earthly perspective.
God’s Children here but Sip of Terrene toys,
16
Then turn their thoughts to true Celestiall Joys
Then turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,
Then turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,
Then turn their thoughts to true Celestial Joys.
17
Like Innocent Doves they often victims die
Like innocent doves, they often victims die,
Gloss Note
Turtledoves were among the prescribed sacrificial animals in Jewish ritual (Leviticus: 1:14-17).
Like innocent doves they often victims die.
Gloss Note
Jews unable to afford a lamb or bull often sacrificed doves at the biblical temple as an offering to God (see Leviticus 1:14, Leviticus 12:8, Luke 2:24).
Like Innocent Doves they often victims die,
18
When Hogs his Sacred Alter come not Nie
When
Critical Note
Eardley notes the biblical allusions in this line and the one above: “Isa. 66:3 states that the sacrificing of swine pollutes the sacred church and is therefore an abomination. Here this is compared with the sacrifice of the doves in Luke 2:24, which provides a prefiguration of the death of Christ.”
hogs His sacred altar come not nigh.
Gloss Note
By contrast to doves, swine could not be brought near the temple because their sacrifice would pollute it (Isaiah 66:3).
When hogs His sacred altar come not nigh,
Gloss Note
Pigs, declared unclean by God in Leviticus 11:7, were utterly forbidden to Jews, and therefore banned from approaching God’s “sacred Altar.” Isaiah 66:3 references the killing of swine as epitomizing people’s wickedness, an identification emblematized in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblems (1635), 38. But it is the evil of the hogs themselves, not the people using them, that seems the focus of Pulter’s ire here. Pulter draws a clear contrast between the hogs, which must remain distant from the temple, and the doves, which are willingly, sacrificially at the center of the temple’s activity.
When Hogs his Sacred Altar come not Nigh.
19
Then let the Reader trie, which best hee loves
Then let the reader
Gloss Note
sift or distinguish; ascertain, find out (i.e., by effort or experiment, effort, experience); test, put to proof
try which best he loves
Then let the reader try which best he loves
Then let the Reader try, which best he loves
20
To imitate, baſe Hogs or Turtle Doves
To imitate: base hogs or turtledoves.
To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.
To imitate,
Gloss Note
Pulter’s rhetorical presentation of the reader’s choice here is typical of the poem as a whole, which clearly favors one side. Hogs are “base”—that is, distant from God in their depravity (see OED, adj. A.II.10)—while doves stand alone in their heavenly virtue. “Base,” indicating the pigs’ low position relative to the ground, also reinforces the animals’ physical distinction, between the mobile, transcendent dove and the earth-bound swine (see OED “base,” adj. A.I.2a).
base Hogs or Turtle Doves.
21
But as for mee ’tis my Souls Sole deſire
But as for me, ’tis my soul’s sole desire
But as for me, ’tis
Critical Note
Pulter returned to this phrase, for instance, “my soul’s sole joy” in To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield [Poem 38]; “my soul’s sole choice” in The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]; and especially in the title of My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29].
my soul’s sole desire,
But as for me, ’tis my Soul’s Sole desire
22
Like Spotles Doves to live and Soe expire.
Like
Gloss Note
innocent, free from sin, pure
spotless doves to live and so expire.
Like spotless doves to live and so expire.
Gloss Note
The poem’s concluding focus on the speaker, rather than the reader, occurs in the majority of Pulter’s emblems, but is almost without precedence in other emblem books. In this case, the return effectively underscores the poem’s emblematic moral while highlighting the personal sacrifice involved in living out that moral.
Like Spotless Doves to live and so Expire.
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X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition A

 Editorial note

To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text of Pulter’s manuscript by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Do you agree with the punctuation that I’ve introduced? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?

 Headnote

Like all of Pulter’s emblems, this is a poem that draws moral lessons out of a visual scenario, even though there are no images present in the manuscript. The effect is to require readers to “see” the scenes with their spiritual “eye,” placing them ahead of common readers, who (like the hogs) require physically visible emblems. The emblem begins with a command to pay attention to a group of swine greedily devouring acorns. As the pigs root about in the dirt, they gaze resolutely down at the earth, oblivious to the oak trees and the farmers who provide this bounty by shaking the nuts loose from the branches.
In four further scenes of “thankless people” who repeat the pigs’ behavior, the poem illustrates the limits of a sight that is bound to the earth. This repeated scenario is strikingly kinetic. Instead of a static image, Pulter’s emblem is a series of tiny pantomimes or dumbshows that, over and over again, convey their truth through behavior. Each example depicts the common crudeness of humans who never lift their eyes from earthly concerns. In all four scenes, the swinish figures are criticized not just for their innate flaws but also for how their actions mire them in an earthly filth they cannot see past or beyond. Each example begins with “So” or “Even so,” a rhetorical gesture that keeps referring back to the initial behavior of the hogs.
Pulter’s hogs thus offer a negative example for the emblem’s implied reader, who is meant to learn, from this visual poem, how to see beyond the limits of her own circumstances. The agricultural imagery plays a significant part in this lesson. Pulter may have been drawing here on the tradition connecting land management and poetic craft. Thomas Tusser’s husbandry manuals, which offered versified advice to farmers and poets alike, were so tremendously popular that they were actively published for more than a century, from 1557 to 1672. Unearthing the trope of the pig in early modern literature, Jessica Rosenberg has explained how swine were often used as figures for bad readers who are inattentive to the virtues of the texts they devour.
Gloss Note
Jessica Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2022).
1 In Pulter’s emblem, the agricultural context is explored most pointedly in the example of the “grumbling farmers,” who are doubly ungrateful because they both complain about laboring in their fields and fail to trust in the divine providence that will provide for their harvest.
The second stanza takes an abrupt turn, offering the turtledove as a counterexample to the worldly obsessions of the hogs. A bird that mates for life, the turtledove was a common image of constancy and fidelity. Here the turtledove is also an emblem of temperance, since she is able to “sip” from the earthly pleasures that so wholly absorbed the figures earlier in the poem and “then thro[w] her eyes above.” Like the first stanza, the second develops a repeated rhetorical pattern, but this time it conveys spiritual transcendence, not stasis. In two pairs of “when” and “then” scenarios, Pulter describes how the godly partake moderately, for instance, moving from “terrene toys” to a proper appreciation of “celestial joys.”
Pulter proposes that the lessons of the emblem require an active embrace of self-sacrifice. The final “then” extends these lessons directly to the reader, who is offered the choice to follow either the pattern of the first stanza or of the second. The stanza’s only enjambment (a grammatical continuation across the break between lines) invites “the reader” to “try, which best he loves / To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.” The gap between the lines actually sets up two decisions for the reader, making him pick first which animal he prefers, and then which he wishes to imitate. The male gendering of the reader is striking here. Pulter actively invokes a reader in other emblems, including British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116], Aristomenes (Emblem 45) [Poem 110], and The Ostrich (Emblem 41) [Poem 106]. But pronouns are not used in those poems and the identity of the reader is left more open. Specifying that this reader is male is particularly interesting because he is asked to assume the example of the turtledove, frequently an image of female chastity. The speaker also enters the poem at this moment (“But as for me”) and declares her own mind in a homonym: “’tis my soul’s sole desire” to live and die like the chaste dove. The pairing of “soul/sole” toys with the stated singularity of the desire, perhaps undercutting it, or perhaps amplifying it through the reiterated sound.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

attend to; watch. This command becomes explicitly visual at the end of line 2, where readers are told they “may see” the scene that the speaker is conjuring verbally.
Line number 2

 Gloss note

digging with the nose; an animalistic approach to turning over the soil. This action of grubbing repeats across the first stanza.
Line number 3

 Gloss note

The hogs are blind to the efforts of the farmers who tend to them. The pigs’ eyes are so resolutely trained on the ground that they never realize the providence of those who loosen and drop the acorns from the branches of the oak trees.
Line number 6

 Gloss note

The animal qualities of the hogs are attributed to people who do not properly acknowledge God’s care. The “thankless people” dig in the ground, perhaps with their snouts as the pigs do above, and make incomprehensible sounds instead of properly celebrating divine blessings.
Line number 7

 Gloss note

people greedy for earthly pleasures. They are described as wholly of this earth, “worldings” who never cast their minds beyond their worldly affairs, in the same way the hogs do not look beyond their hunt for acorns.
Line number 8

 Gloss note

money bags. The worldings care only for the eternal peace of their wealth, not their souls.
Line number 9

 Gloss note

prepare the soil for planting by stirring up and aerating it. Strikingly the grumbling farmers do not till the earth with a plow, the omnipresent symbol of human cultivation (See Frances E. Dolan, Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020], 20). Without a mention of agricultural tools, the farmers appear more like swinish hogs mucking blindly in the dirt.
Line number 10

 Gloss note

a crop failure that leaves no food to maintain life. While a dearth is perhaps the most fearsome fate for farmers, this line shows how blind these grumblers are to divine providence, just like the hogs. While too much rain certainly can harm crops, it’s more often the case that rain is a figure for refreshment and the promise of bounty. These farmers are receiving even God-sent showers with anxious suspicion rather than gratitude.
Line number 11

 Gloss note

fashionable people committed to sensuous pleasure.
Line number 13

 Gloss note

a bird that mates for life, emblematizing constancy and devotion. See This Poor Turtle Dove (Emblem 20) [Poem 85], Pardon Me, My Dearest Love [Poem 42], Of A Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43], Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57].
Line number 15

 Gloss note

frivolous playthings defined by being earthly. “Terrene,” from the same root as “terrestrial,” creates a sense of these “toys” as akin to the hogs’ acorns, rooted and sourced from the soil rather than the heavens.
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Turtledoves were among the prescribed sacrificial animals in Jewish ritual (Leviticus: 1:14-17).
Line number 18

 Gloss note

By contrast to doves, swine could not be brought near the temple because their sacrifice would pollute it (Isaiah 66:3).
Line number 21

 Critical note

Pulter returned to this phrase, for instance, “my soul’s sole joy” in To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield [Poem 38]; “my soul’s sole choice” in The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]; and especially in the title of My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29].
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X (Close panel)Amplified Edition A
Amplified Edition A
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[Emblem 34]
Mark But Those Hogs
(Emblem 34)
Mark But Those Hogs Amplified Edition A
When Pigs Don’t Fly Amplified Edition B
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.

— Megan Heffernan
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.

— Megan Heffernan
To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text of Pulter’s manuscript by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Do you agree with the punctuation that I’ve introduced? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?


— Megan Heffernan
The rich complexity of this poem is best appreciated with reference both to Pulter’s other poems and to poems by other emblem writers. Accordingly, I’ve tried to contextualize the many images and concepts in this poem within the world of Pulter’s manuscript as well as the world of early modern English emblem books, sometimes by referencing an analogous poem or image, and sometimes an opposing one.
With an eye to the contemporary reader, I have modernized spelling, and inserted additional punctuation as needed to aid in understanding. As seventeenth-century writers often used capitalization for emphasis, though, I have tried to retain the manuscript’s original capitalization. The capitalization of some letters (e.g., “s”) is difficult to determine; in these cases, I have made individual determinations in line with Pulter’s style.
Abbreviations: AE—Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Toronto: Iter, Inc. and the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014).


— Megan Heffernan
Which would you rather be: hog or dove? Pulter makes the choice even easier than it might first seem with her contrasting portraits of the dietary habits of each creature. Grunting hogs root for nuts with their snouts in the dirt, never even thinking to thank those who made them fall to the ground in the first place, while turtledoves alternate between dainty sips, grateful prayers, and thoughts of still higher things than mere food and drink. But then comes the twist: doves, though innocent, are often sacrificial victims, while hogs, through no virtue of their own, have the good fortune to be banned from the altar. This is the moral quandary on which Pulter’s final invocation turns: knowing all this, now which would you rather be? She claims the choice remains clear.

— Megan Heffernan
Like all of Pulter’s emblems, this is a poem that draws moral lessons out of a visual scenario, even though there are no images present in the manuscript. The effect is to require readers to “see” the scenes with their spiritual “eye,” placing them ahead of common readers, who (like the hogs) require physically visible emblems. The emblem begins with a command to pay attention to a group of swine greedily devouring acorns. As the pigs root about in the dirt, they gaze resolutely down at the earth, oblivious to the oak trees and the farmers who provide this bounty by shaking the nuts loose from the branches.
In four further scenes of “thankless people” who repeat the pigs’ behavior, the poem illustrates the limits of a sight that is bound to the earth. This repeated scenario is strikingly kinetic. Instead of a static image, Pulter’s emblem is a series of tiny pantomimes or dumbshows that, over and over again, convey their truth through behavior. Each example depicts the common crudeness of humans who never lift their eyes from earthly concerns. In all four scenes, the swinish figures are criticized not just for their innate flaws but also for how their actions mire them in an earthly filth they cannot see past or beyond. Each example begins with “So” or “Even so,” a rhetorical gesture that keeps referring back to the initial behavior of the hogs.
Pulter’s hogs thus offer a negative example for the emblem’s implied reader, who is meant to learn, from this visual poem, how to see beyond the limits of her own circumstances. The agricultural imagery plays a significant part in this lesson. Pulter may have been drawing here on the tradition connecting land management and poetic craft. Thomas Tusser’s husbandry manuals, which offered versified advice to farmers and poets alike, were so tremendously popular that they were actively published for more than a century, from 1557 to 1672. Unearthing the trope of the pig in early modern literature, Jessica Rosenberg has explained how swine were often used as figures for bad readers who are inattentive to the virtues of the texts they devour.
Gloss Note
Jessica Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2022).
1 In Pulter’s emblem, the agricultural context is explored most pointedly in the example of the “grumbling farmers,” who are doubly ungrateful because they both complain about laboring in their fields and fail to trust in the divine providence that will provide for their harvest.
The second stanza takes an abrupt turn, offering the turtledove as a counterexample to the worldly obsessions of the hogs. A bird that mates for life, the turtledove was a common image of constancy and fidelity. Here the turtledove is also an emblem of temperance, since she is able to “sip” from the earthly pleasures that so wholly absorbed the figures earlier in the poem and “then thro[w] her eyes above.” Like the first stanza, the second develops a repeated rhetorical pattern, but this time it conveys spiritual transcendence, not stasis. In two pairs of “when” and “then” scenarios, Pulter describes how the godly partake moderately, for instance, moving from “terrene toys” to a proper appreciation of “celestial joys.”
Pulter proposes that the lessons of the emblem require an active embrace of self-sacrifice. The final “then” extends these lessons directly to the reader, who is offered the choice to follow either the pattern of the first stanza or of the second. The stanza’s only enjambment (a grammatical continuation across the break between lines) invites “the reader” to “try, which best he loves / To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.” The gap between the lines actually sets up two decisions for the reader, making him pick first which animal he prefers, and then which he wishes to imitate. The male gendering of the reader is striking here. Pulter actively invokes a reader in other emblems, including British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116], Aristomenes (Emblem 45) [Poem 110], and The Ostrich (Emblem 41) [Poem 106]. But pronouns are not used in those poems and the identity of the reader is left more open. Specifying that this reader is male is particularly interesting because he is asked to assume the example of the turtledove, frequently an image of female chastity. The speaker also enters the poem at this moment (“But as for me”) and declares her own mind in a homonym: “’tis my soul’s sole desire” to live and die like the chaste dove. The pairing of “soul/sole” toys with the stated singularity of the desire, perhaps undercutting it, or perhaps amplifying it through the reiterated sound.


— Megan Heffernan
Emblem 34 is a stellar example both of Pulter’s love for antithesis, and of her innovative approach toward emblems. The poem is structurally divided into two parts: the first twelve lines elaborating upon a “thankless” hog as an emblem of worldliness, and the concluding ten lines interpreting a “Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” as an emblem of people rightly focused on “Celestial Joys.” This contrapuntal structure—unusual, though not unknown, for emblem poems—would seem to suggest a relatively even-handed depiction of two contrasting spiritual perspectives. But lines 19-20, asking the reader to choose between “base Hogs or Turtle Doves” (emphasis added), are representative of the poem as the whole in clearly indicating the doves’ superiority (even if that means contradicting Pulter’s likely source).
In so presenting the contrast between these two animals, Emblem 34 is the structural opposite of Emblem 36 [Poem 101], which begins lauding constant turtledoves, and ends castigating the “swine” who profane God’s temple. The poems are best read in conjunction, and together demonstrate competing, yet equally valid attitudes toward earthly chaos. By its conclusion, Emblem 36 becomes mired in political diatribe—as stuck in the mire of the civil wars, one could say, as pigs in a mudpit. Emblem 34, however, avoids explicit political commentary. It exhibits precisely the transcendence of earthly concerns represented by the turtledove, focusing on future promises that obviate earthly pain and suffering.
Hogs are an appropriate antithesis to this faithful turtledove, for they have a long biblical and polemical association with immoral behavior in emblem and non-emblem literature.
Gloss Note
I distinguish between “hogs,” domesticated animals like those Pulter depicts, and “boars,” which are almost always invoked so as to privilege their wildness (see the definitions and examples given in OED “hog,” n.1 vs. “boar,” n.). This association with wildness means that boars have their own complex biblical, moral, and polemical history, which is not examined here.
1 George Wither’s Collection of Emblems (1635), for instance, implicitly references Matthew 7:6’s famous injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Wither emphasizes the socioeconomic implications of this injunction, depicting a hog with a pearl ring balanced on its nose in order to critique those who misuse the privileges given to them by fortune (224).
If hogs are commonplace in emblem literature, though, Pulter’s choice of the turtledove itself is not. Constancy, a notoriously multifaceted concept, is typically an immobile virtue.
Gloss Note
Consider, for instance, the Son in Milton’s Paradise Regained: Satan describes his battle against the Son as “try[ing] / his constancy,” and the Son achieves victory simply by standing still (2.225-6). For more on constancy and its literary representations, see Rachel Zhang, “The Constant Paradox: Constancy, Genre, and Literary Tradition in the English Civil Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018).
2 Often defined as remaining faithful to a person or idea despite inducements to the contrary (see OED, n.1, n.2), constancy is usually depicted in emblems as a person or animal actively refusing to move. For example, Geoffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) explains that Aesculapius’ “sittinge, shewes he must be setled still / With constant minde” (212).
Gloss Note
Similarly, in another poem, Whitney presents fishermen who “constant stande[s], abyding sweete or sower, / Untill the Lord appoynte an happie hower” (Choice of Emblemes, 97).
3 Indeed, where constancy is immobile, it is inconstancy which moves, as demonstrated by Henry Peacham’s emblem of “Inconstancia” in Minerva Britanna (1612): “never at a stay,” like the zodiac Cancer, who “Forward, and backward,…keepes his pace” (147).
Pulter’s depiction of “the Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” is then exceedingly unusual in emblem literature, although widespread in her own poetry (The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], Emblem 36).
Gloss Note
The turtledove also embodies constancy in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the death of the birds also means the death of “Love and constancy” (22).
4 Pulter’s depictions often highlight the bird’s mobility, despite it being anathema to typical representations of constancy. In “Why must I be forever thus confined,” for instance, Pulter writes, “Though she resolves to have no second mate / Yet she her flight about the air doth take,” contrasting the dove’s “freedom [to] freely both enjoy and love” to the poet’s own confinement (67-8, 76-9). This avian transcendence is precisely the picture of constancy we see in Emblem 34. Just as the dove flies upward in Pulter’s lyric, the emblem’s turtledoves “turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,” thereby transcending the evils of this world. This transcendent mobility once again contrasts with the hogs, who are so stubbornly rooted to the earth that they cannot get their snouts out of the muck.
This transcendence is muted, though, by the poem’s acknowledgement of pain and suffering. The poem’s final lines, which repeat Pulter’s nearly unprecedented tendency to end her emblem poems focusing on herself, underscore the possibility of martyrdom (another situation commonly associated with constancy in emblem books).
Gloss Note
For Pulter’s self-focused endings, see Rachel Dunn [Zhang], "Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book," The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015): 55-73. For constancy’s association with martyrdom, see George Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 81.
5 True joy, Pulter suggests, is a party to suffering, and transcendence often comes by one’s own sacrifice. The return to the speaker personalizes this message, and suggests that she has already accepted suffering for her own life.


— Megan Heffernan
1
34Mark but those Hogs w:ch underneath
Gloss Note
A determiner indicating “that.”
yond tree
Gloss Note
Consider only, or just notice
Mark but those hogs which, underneath
Gloss Note
that (implying something within view)
yon tree
Gloss Note
attend to; watch. This command becomes explicitly visual at the end of line 2, where readers are told they “may see” the scene that the speaker is conjuring verbally.
Mark but those hogs, which underneath yond tree,
Mark but those
Gloss Note
A favorite image of emblematists, almost universally deplored. See, for example, Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 224, a variation of the biblical warning not to cast pearls before swine.
Hogs which, underneath yond tree
2
Nuſling and eating Acorns, you may See
Gloss Note
digging or rooting up with the snout
Nuzzling and eating acorns, you may see:
Gloss Note
digging with the nose; an animalistic approach to turning over the soil. This action of grubbing repeats across the first stanza.
Nuzzling and eating acorns, you may see:
Gloss Note
“To burrow or dig with the nose; to poke or push with the nose or snout” (OED v.1. 2a. and b.). This use of “nuzzling” may echo Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Pulter’s hogs are similar to Venus’ description of the boar, “[w]hose downward eye still looketh for a grave” (1106), and the boar kills Adonis by “nuzzling in his flank” (1115).
Nuzzling and Eating Acorns, you may See:
3
they never cast an eye to thoſe which Shake
Gloss Note
Eardley notes that the shaking of acorns from trees was a common practice among swine farmers.
They never cast an eye to those which shake;
They never
Gloss Note
The hogs are blind to the efforts of the farmers who tend to them. The pigs’ eyes are so resolutely trained on the ground that they never realize the providence of those who loosen and drop the acorns from the branches of the oak trees.
cast an eye to those which shake.
They never cast an eye to those which
Gloss Note
AE notes that it was common practice for farmers to shake acorns out of trees to feed their pigs.
Shake.
4
Soe thankles People doe Gods bleſſings take
So thankless people do God’s blessings take
So thankless people do God’s blessings take,
So thankless People do God’s blessings take
5
And never doe his bounteous Love Adore
And never do His bounteous love adore,
And never do his bounteous love adore,
And never do his bounteous Love Adore,
6
But Swiniſhly Root on and Grunt for more
But swinishly root on and grunt for more;
But
Gloss Note
The animal qualities of the hogs are attributed to people who do not properly acknowledge God’s care. The “thankless people” dig in the ground, perhaps with their snouts as the pigs do above, and make incomprehensible sounds instead of properly celebrating divine blessings.
swinishly root on and grunt for more.
But swinishly root and Grunt for more.
7
Soe gripeing Worldlings Still their Wealthe increase
So
Gloss Note
someone who is grasping or greedy and dedicated to earthly (instead of heavenly) pleasures and interests
griping worldlings still their wealth increase
So
Gloss Note
people greedy for earthly pleasures. They are described as wholly of this earth, “worldings” who never cast their minds beyond their worldly affairs, in the same way the hogs do not look beyond their hunt for acorns.
griping worldings still their wealth increase
So
Gloss Note
“Grasping, usurious, avaricious” (OED adj.1).
griping
People devoted to the pleasures of this world (as opposed to life in heaven after death).
Worldlings still their Wealth increase
8
And onely pray their bags may Rest in peace
And only pray their
Gloss Note
money bags
bags may rest in peace;
And only pray their
Gloss Note
money bags. The worldings care only for the eternal peace of their wealth, not their souls.
bags may rest in peace.
Gloss Note

Pulter’s “griping Worldlings” have nothing to ensure that their “bags”—i.e., moneybags—will remain secure after they die; they can “only pray” that their wealth will “rest in peace.” Pulter’s warning against greed and addiction to earthly treasures has numerous biblical echoes, contrasting the transience of earthly possessions with the eternal treasures of heaven. Matthew 6:19-21, for instance, reminds readers, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

See also Luke 12:16-21’s parable of the rich man who tears down his barns in order to build bigger ones.

And only pray their bags may rest in peace.
9
Soe Grumbling ffarmers Still turn up the Earth
So grumbling farmers still turn up the earth,
So grumbling farmers still
Gloss Note
prepare the soil for planting by stirring up and aerating it. Strikingly the grumbling farmers do not till the earth with a plow, the omnipresent symbol of human cultivation (See Frances E. Dolan, Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020], 20). Without a mention of agricultural tools, the farmers appear more like swinish hogs mucking blindly in the dirt.
turn up the earth,
So Grumbling Farmers still turn up the Earth,
10
ffearing that every Shower will cauſ a Dearth
Gloss Note
The misguided farmers (from the line above) plow their fields, but are overly concerned that rain will kill the crops) rather than appreciating the nourishing rain from heaven.
Fearing that every shower will cause a dearth.
Gloss Note
a crop failure that leaves no food to maintain life. While a dearth is perhaps the most fearsome fate for farmers, this line shows how blind these grumblers are to divine providence, just like the hogs. While too much rain certainly can harm crops, it’s more often the case that rain is a figure for refreshment and the promise of bounty. These farmers are receiving even God-sent showers with anxious suspicion rather than gratitude.
Fearing that every shower will cause a dearth.
Fearing that every Shower will cause a
Gloss Note
Pulter’s farmers are forever working, constantly plowing (“turn[ing] up the Earth”) so that the rain won’t wash away their seeds. Rather than seeing the rain as a blessing falling from above (like the acorns falling from the tree in line 3), the farmers live in perpetual fear that rain will impair their crops and cause a “dearth,” or shortage.
Dearth.
11
Even Soe voluptius Gallants dance along
Even so
Gloss Note
“gallants” are men and women of fashion and pleasure who are inclined to “voluptuous” ease, luxury, and gratification of the senses
voluptuous gallants dance along,
Even so
Gloss Note
fashionable people committed to sensuous pleasure.
voluptuous gallants dance along,
Even so voluptuous
Gloss Note
“Gallants” is a multi-valent term in Pulter’s poetry, having both positive connotations (e.g., On those Two Unparalleled Friends [Poem 7], ll. 14, 24) and negative (e.g., Emblem 8 [Poem 74], ll. 12, 22). Here the term refers pejoratively to young men of fashion and pleasure (see OED n.1, 3), whose “voluptuous[ness]” marks them as more interested in sensual pleasures than morality.
Gallants dance along,
12
Their meetings ending in A drunken Song
Their meetings ending in a drunken song.
Their meetings ending in a drunken song.
Their meetings ending in a drunken Song.
13
When Like the Chast & conſtant turtle Dove
When, like the chaste and constant turtledove,
When like the chaste and constant
Gloss Note
a bird that mates for life, emblematizing constancy and devotion. See This Poor Turtle Dove (Emblem 20) [Poem 85], Pardon Me, My Dearest Love [Poem 42], Of A Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43], Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57].
turtledove,
When like the
Gloss Note
The turtledove is frequently associated with marital chastity because it mates for life. See, for instance, Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the turtledove epitomizes “married chastity” (61). Henry Peacham similarly celebrates turtledoves as an emblem of “love of Matrimony” in Minerva Britanna, 92.
Chaste and constant
Gloss Note
A favorite image of Pulter’s. See The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], and Emblem 36 [Poem 101].
Turtle Dove,
14
Which takes a Sip then throws her eyes above
Which takes a sip then throws her eyes above,
Which takes a sip then throws her eyes above,
Which takes a Sip then
Gloss Note

Pulter’s depiction of the turtle dove as constantly gazing heavenward actually contradicts her most likely source, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (from which Pulter frequently draws). According to Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation, Pliny describes doves as “drinking not to hold up their bills between-whiles, and draw their necks backe, but to take a large draught at once, as horses and kine do.” Pliny, Historie of the World, 1:290. Pulter’s turtledoves, however, look up, in direct contrast to the hogs “rooting” in the ground.

Henry Peacham similarly aligns the turtledove with piety in Minerva Britanna, comparing it to a “godly wight, whome no delight of Sinne, Doth with vaine pleasure draw: or worldly care,” esteeming “these fleeting joies a pinne” (110).

throws her eyes above,
15
Gods Children here but Sip of Terren Toys
God’s children here but sip of
Gloss Note
“toys” are amorous sports; trumpery, rubbish, playthings, amusements; “terrene” can mean earthly, secular, temporal, material, or human
terrene toys,
God’s children here but sip of
Gloss Note
frivolous playthings defined by being earthly. “Terrene,” from the same root as “terrestrial,” creates a sense of these “toys” as akin to the hogs’ acorns, rooted and sourced from the soil rather than the heavens.
terrene toys,
Gloss Note
Picking up on the metaphor of Christians as God’s “children,” Pulter compares things we know on Earth, things that are “terrene”—that is, “of the earth; worldly, secular, temporal, material, human” (OED, a.1)—to the insignificant, infantile “toys” children play with. In doing so, Pulter draws a contrast between two different types of children: one childish only in relation to God the father, and the other childish by virtue of their earthly perspective.
God’s Children here but Sip of Terrene toys,
16
Then turn their thoughts to true Celestiall Joys
Then turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,
Then turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,
Then turn their thoughts to true Celestial Joys.
17
Like Innocent Doves they often victims die
Like innocent doves, they often victims die,
Gloss Note
Turtledoves were among the prescribed sacrificial animals in Jewish ritual (Leviticus: 1:14-17).
Like innocent doves they often victims die.
Gloss Note
Jews unable to afford a lamb or bull often sacrificed doves at the biblical temple as an offering to God (see Leviticus 1:14, Leviticus 12:8, Luke 2:24).
Like Innocent Doves they often victims die,
18
When Hogs his Sacred Alter come not Nie
When
Critical Note
Eardley notes the biblical allusions in this line and the one above: “Isa. 66:3 states that the sacrificing of swine pollutes the sacred church and is therefore an abomination. Here this is compared with the sacrifice of the doves in Luke 2:24, which provides a prefiguration of the death of Christ.”
hogs His sacred altar come not nigh.
Gloss Note
By contrast to doves, swine could not be brought near the temple because their sacrifice would pollute it (Isaiah 66:3).
When hogs His sacred altar come not nigh,
Gloss Note
Pigs, declared unclean by God in Leviticus 11:7, were utterly forbidden to Jews, and therefore banned from approaching God’s “sacred Altar.” Isaiah 66:3 references the killing of swine as epitomizing people’s wickedness, an identification emblematized in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblems (1635), 38. But it is the evil of the hogs themselves, not the people using them, that seems the focus of Pulter’s ire here. Pulter draws a clear contrast between the hogs, which must remain distant from the temple, and the doves, which are willingly, sacrificially at the center of the temple’s activity.
When Hogs his Sacred Altar come not Nigh.
19
Then let the Reader trie, which best hee loves
Then let the reader
Gloss Note
sift or distinguish; ascertain, find out (i.e., by effort or experiment, effort, experience); test, put to proof
try which best he loves
Then let the reader try which best he loves
Then let the Reader try, which best he loves
20
To imitate, baſe Hogs or Turtle Doves
To imitate: base hogs or turtledoves.
To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.
To imitate,
Gloss Note
Pulter’s rhetorical presentation of the reader’s choice here is typical of the poem as a whole, which clearly favors one side. Hogs are “base”—that is, distant from God in their depravity (see OED, adj. A.II.10)—while doves stand alone in their heavenly virtue. “Base,” indicating the pigs’ low position relative to the ground, also reinforces the animals’ physical distinction, between the mobile, transcendent dove and the earth-bound swine (see OED “base,” adj. A.I.2a).
base Hogs or Turtle Doves.
21
But as for mee ’tis my Souls Sole deſire
But as for me, ’tis my soul’s sole desire
But as for me, ’tis
Critical Note
Pulter returned to this phrase, for instance, “my soul’s sole joy” in To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield [Poem 38]; “my soul’s sole choice” in The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]; and especially in the title of My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29].
my soul’s sole desire,
But as for me, ’tis my Soul’s Sole desire
22
Like Spotles Doves to live and Soe expire.
Like
Gloss Note
innocent, free from sin, pure
spotless doves to live and so expire.
Like spotless doves to live and so expire.
Gloss Note
The poem’s concluding focus on the speaker, rather than the reader, occurs in the majority of Pulter’s emblems, but is almost without precedence in other emblem books. In this case, the return effectively underscores the poem’s emblematic moral while highlighting the personal sacrifice involved in living out that moral.
Like Spotless Doves to live and so Expire.
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X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition B

 Editorial note

The rich complexity of this poem is best appreciated with reference both to Pulter’s other poems and to poems by other emblem writers. Accordingly, I’ve tried to contextualize the many images and concepts in this poem within the world of Pulter’s manuscript as well as the world of early modern English emblem books, sometimes by referencing an analogous poem or image, and sometimes an opposing one.
With an eye to the contemporary reader, I have modernized spelling, and inserted additional punctuation as needed to aid in understanding. As seventeenth-century writers often used capitalization for emphasis, though, I have tried to retain the manuscript’s original capitalization. The capitalization of some letters (e.g., “s”) is difficult to determine; in these cases, I have made individual determinations in line with Pulter’s style.
Abbreviations: AE—Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Toronto: Iter, Inc. and the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014).

 Headnote

Emblem 34 is a stellar example both of Pulter’s love for antithesis, and of her innovative approach toward emblems. The poem is structurally divided into two parts: the first twelve lines elaborating upon a “thankless” hog as an emblem of worldliness, and the concluding ten lines interpreting a “Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” as an emblem of people rightly focused on “Celestial Joys.” This contrapuntal structure—unusual, though not unknown, for emblem poems—would seem to suggest a relatively even-handed depiction of two contrasting spiritual perspectives. But lines 19-20, asking the reader to choose between “base Hogs or Turtle Doves” (emphasis added), are representative of the poem as the whole in clearly indicating the doves’ superiority (even if that means contradicting Pulter’s likely source).
In so presenting the contrast between these two animals, Emblem 34 is the structural opposite of Emblem 36 [Poem 101], which begins lauding constant turtledoves, and ends castigating the “swine” who profane God’s temple. The poems are best read in conjunction, and together demonstrate competing, yet equally valid attitudes toward earthly chaos. By its conclusion, Emblem 36 becomes mired in political diatribe—as stuck in the mire of the civil wars, one could say, as pigs in a mudpit. Emblem 34, however, avoids explicit political commentary. It exhibits precisely the transcendence of earthly concerns represented by the turtledove, focusing on future promises that obviate earthly pain and suffering.
Hogs are an appropriate antithesis to this faithful turtledove, for they have a long biblical and polemical association with immoral behavior in emblem and non-emblem literature.
Gloss Note
I distinguish between “hogs,” domesticated animals like those Pulter depicts, and “boars,” which are almost always invoked so as to privilege their wildness (see the definitions and examples given in OED “hog,” n.1 vs. “boar,” n.). This association with wildness means that boars have their own complex biblical, moral, and polemical history, which is not examined here.
1 George Wither’s Collection of Emblems (1635), for instance, implicitly references Matthew 7:6’s famous injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Wither emphasizes the socioeconomic implications of this injunction, depicting a hog with a pearl ring balanced on its nose in order to critique those who misuse the privileges given to them by fortune (224).
If hogs are commonplace in emblem literature, though, Pulter’s choice of the turtledove itself is not. Constancy, a notoriously multifaceted concept, is typically an immobile virtue.
Gloss Note
Consider, for instance, the Son in Milton’s Paradise Regained: Satan describes his battle against the Son as “try[ing] / his constancy,” and the Son achieves victory simply by standing still (2.225-6). For more on constancy and its literary representations, see Rachel Zhang, “The Constant Paradox: Constancy, Genre, and Literary Tradition in the English Civil Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018).
2 Often defined as remaining faithful to a person or idea despite inducements to the contrary (see OED, n.1, n.2), constancy is usually depicted in emblems as a person or animal actively refusing to move. For example, Geoffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) explains that Aesculapius’ “sittinge, shewes he must be setled still / With constant minde” (212).
Gloss Note
Similarly, in another poem, Whitney presents fishermen who “constant stande[s], abyding sweete or sower, / Untill the Lord appoynte an happie hower” (Choice of Emblemes, 97).
3 Indeed, where constancy is immobile, it is inconstancy which moves, as demonstrated by Henry Peacham’s emblem of “Inconstancia” in Minerva Britanna (1612): “never at a stay,” like the zodiac Cancer, who “Forward, and backward,…keepes his pace” (147).
Pulter’s depiction of “the Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” is then exceedingly unusual in emblem literature, although widespread in her own poetry (The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], Emblem 36).
Gloss Note
The turtledove also embodies constancy in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the death of the birds also means the death of “Love and constancy” (22).
4 Pulter’s depictions often highlight the bird’s mobility, despite it being anathema to typical representations of constancy. In “Why must I be forever thus confined,” for instance, Pulter writes, “Though she resolves to have no second mate / Yet she her flight about the air doth take,” contrasting the dove’s “freedom [to] freely both enjoy and love” to the poet’s own confinement (67-8, 76-9). This avian transcendence is precisely the picture of constancy we see in Emblem 34. Just as the dove flies upward in Pulter’s lyric, the emblem’s turtledoves “turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,” thereby transcending the evils of this world. This transcendent mobility once again contrasts with the hogs, who are so stubbornly rooted to the earth that they cannot get their snouts out of the muck.
This transcendence is muted, though, by the poem’s acknowledgement of pain and suffering. The poem’s final lines, which repeat Pulter’s nearly unprecedented tendency to end her emblem poems focusing on herself, underscore the possibility of martyrdom (another situation commonly associated with constancy in emblem books).
Gloss Note
For Pulter’s self-focused endings, see Rachel Dunn [Zhang], "Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book," The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015): 55-73. For constancy’s association with martyrdom, see George Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 81.
5 True joy, Pulter suggests, is a party to suffering, and transcendence often comes by one’s own sacrifice. The return to the speaker personalizes this message, and suggests that she has already accepted suffering for her own life.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

A favorite image of emblematists, almost universally deplored. See, for example, Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 224, a variation of the biblical warning not to cast pearls before swine.
Line number 2

 Gloss note

“To burrow or dig with the nose; to poke or push with the nose or snout” (OED v.1. 2a. and b.). This use of “nuzzling” may echo Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Pulter’s hogs are similar to Venus’ description of the boar, “[w]hose downward eye still looketh for a grave” (1106), and the boar kills Adonis by “nuzzling in his flank” (1115).
Line number 3

 Gloss note

AE notes that it was common practice for farmers to shake acorns out of trees to feed their pigs.
Line number 7

 Gloss note

“Grasping, usurious, avaricious” (OED adj.1).
Line number 7
People devoted to the pleasures of this world (as opposed to life in heaven after death).
Line number 8

 Gloss note


Pulter’s “griping Worldlings” have nothing to ensure that their “bags”—i.e., moneybags—will remain secure after they die; they can “only pray” that their wealth will “rest in peace.” Pulter’s warning against greed and addiction to earthly treasures has numerous biblical echoes, contrasting the transience of earthly possessions with the eternal treasures of heaven. Matthew 6:19-21, for instance, reminds readers, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

See also Luke 12:16-21’s parable of the rich man who tears down his barns in order to build bigger ones.

Line number 10

 Gloss note

Pulter’s farmers are forever working, constantly plowing (“turn[ing] up the Earth”) so that the rain won’t wash away their seeds. Rather than seeing the rain as a blessing falling from above (like the acorns falling from the tree in line 3), the farmers live in perpetual fear that rain will impair their crops and cause a “dearth,” or shortage.
Line number 11

 Gloss note

“Gallants” is a multi-valent term in Pulter’s poetry, having both positive connotations (e.g., On those Two Unparalleled Friends [Poem 7], ll. 14, 24) and negative (e.g., Emblem 8 [Poem 74], ll. 12, 22). Here the term refers pejoratively to young men of fashion and pleasure (see OED n.1, 3), whose “voluptuous[ness]” marks them as more interested in sensual pleasures than morality.
Line number 13

 Gloss note

The turtledove is frequently associated with marital chastity because it mates for life. See, for instance, Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the turtledove epitomizes “married chastity” (61). Henry Peacham similarly celebrates turtledoves as an emblem of “love of Matrimony” in Minerva Britanna, 92.
Line number 13

 Gloss note

A favorite image of Pulter’s. See The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], and Emblem 36 [Poem 101].
Line number 14

 Gloss note


Pulter’s depiction of the turtle dove as constantly gazing heavenward actually contradicts her most likely source, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (from which Pulter frequently draws). According to Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation, Pliny describes doves as “drinking not to hold up their bills between-whiles, and draw their necks backe, but to take a large draught at once, as horses and kine do.” Pliny, Historie of the World, 1:290. Pulter’s turtledoves, however, look up, in direct contrast to the hogs “rooting” in the ground.

Henry Peacham similarly aligns the turtledove with piety in Minerva Britanna, comparing it to a “godly wight, whome no delight of Sinne, Doth with vaine pleasure draw: or worldly care,” esteeming “these fleeting joies a pinne” (110).

Line number 15

 Gloss note

Picking up on the metaphor of Christians as God’s “children,” Pulter compares things we know on Earth, things that are “terrene”—that is, “of the earth; worldly, secular, temporal, material, human” (OED, a.1)—to the insignificant, infantile “toys” children play with. In doing so, Pulter draws a contrast between two different types of children: one childish only in relation to God the father, and the other childish by virtue of their earthly perspective.
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Jews unable to afford a lamb or bull often sacrificed doves at the biblical temple as an offering to God (see Leviticus 1:14, Leviticus 12:8, Luke 2:24).
Line number 18

 Gloss note

Pigs, declared unclean by God in Leviticus 11:7, were utterly forbidden to Jews, and therefore banned from approaching God’s “sacred Altar.” Isaiah 66:3 references the killing of swine as epitomizing people’s wickedness, an identification emblematized in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblems (1635), 38. But it is the evil of the hogs themselves, not the people using them, that seems the focus of Pulter’s ire here. Pulter draws a clear contrast between the hogs, which must remain distant from the temple, and the doves, which are willingly, sacrificially at the center of the temple’s activity.
Line number 20

 Gloss note

Pulter’s rhetorical presentation of the reader’s choice here is typical of the poem as a whole, which clearly favors one side. Hogs are “base”—that is, distant from God in their depravity (see OED, adj. A.II.10)—while doves stand alone in their heavenly virtue. “Base,” indicating the pigs’ low position relative to the ground, also reinforces the animals’ physical distinction, between the mobile, transcendent dove and the earth-bound swine (see OED “base,” adj. A.I.2a).
Line number 22

 Gloss note

The poem’s concluding focus on the speaker, rather than the reader, occurs in the majority of Pulter’s emblems, but is almost without precedence in other emblem books. In this case, the return effectively underscores the poem’s emblematic moral while highlighting the personal sacrifice involved in living out that moral.
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X (Close panel)Amplified Edition B
Amplified Edition B
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[Emblem 34]
Mark But Those Hogs
(Emblem 34)
Mark But Those Hogs Amplified Edition A
When Pigs Don’t Fly Amplified Edition B
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.

— Rachel Zhang
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.

— Rachel Zhang
To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text of Pulter’s manuscript by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Do you agree with the punctuation that I’ve introduced? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?


— Rachel Zhang
The rich complexity of this poem is best appreciated with reference both to Pulter’s other poems and to poems by other emblem writers. Accordingly, I’ve tried to contextualize the many images and concepts in this poem within the world of Pulter’s manuscript as well as the world of early modern English emblem books, sometimes by referencing an analogous poem or image, and sometimes an opposing one.
With an eye to the contemporary reader, I have modernized spelling, and inserted additional punctuation as needed to aid in understanding. As seventeenth-century writers often used capitalization for emphasis, though, I have tried to retain the manuscript’s original capitalization. The capitalization of some letters (e.g., “s”) is difficult to determine; in these cases, I have made individual determinations in line with Pulter’s style.
Abbreviations: AE—Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Toronto: Iter, Inc. and the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014).


— Rachel Zhang
Which would you rather be: hog or dove? Pulter makes the choice even easier than it might first seem with her contrasting portraits of the dietary habits of each creature. Grunting hogs root for nuts with their snouts in the dirt, never even thinking to thank those who made them fall to the ground in the first place, while turtledoves alternate between dainty sips, grateful prayers, and thoughts of still higher things than mere food and drink. But then comes the twist: doves, though innocent, are often sacrificial victims, while hogs, through no virtue of their own, have the good fortune to be banned from the altar. This is the moral quandary on which Pulter’s final invocation turns: knowing all this, now which would you rather be? She claims the choice remains clear.

— Rachel Zhang
Like all of Pulter’s emblems, this is a poem that draws moral lessons out of a visual scenario, even though there are no images present in the manuscript. The effect is to require readers to “see” the scenes with their spiritual “eye,” placing them ahead of common readers, who (like the hogs) require physically visible emblems. The emblem begins with a command to pay attention to a group of swine greedily devouring acorns. As the pigs root about in the dirt, they gaze resolutely down at the earth, oblivious to the oak trees and the farmers who provide this bounty by shaking the nuts loose from the branches.
In four further scenes of “thankless people” who repeat the pigs’ behavior, the poem illustrates the limits of a sight that is bound to the earth. This repeated scenario is strikingly kinetic. Instead of a static image, Pulter’s emblem is a series of tiny pantomimes or dumbshows that, over and over again, convey their truth through behavior. Each example depicts the common crudeness of humans who never lift their eyes from earthly concerns. In all four scenes, the swinish figures are criticized not just for their innate flaws but also for how their actions mire them in an earthly filth they cannot see past or beyond. Each example begins with “So” or “Even so,” a rhetorical gesture that keeps referring back to the initial behavior of the hogs.
Pulter’s hogs thus offer a negative example for the emblem’s implied reader, who is meant to learn, from this visual poem, how to see beyond the limits of her own circumstances. The agricultural imagery plays a significant part in this lesson. Pulter may have been drawing here on the tradition connecting land management and poetic craft. Thomas Tusser’s husbandry manuals, which offered versified advice to farmers and poets alike, were so tremendously popular that they were actively published for more than a century, from 1557 to 1672. Unearthing the trope of the pig in early modern literature, Jessica Rosenberg has explained how swine were often used as figures for bad readers who are inattentive to the virtues of the texts they devour.
Gloss Note
Jessica Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2022).
1 In Pulter’s emblem, the agricultural context is explored most pointedly in the example of the “grumbling farmers,” who are doubly ungrateful because they both complain about laboring in their fields and fail to trust in the divine providence that will provide for their harvest.
The second stanza takes an abrupt turn, offering the turtledove as a counterexample to the worldly obsessions of the hogs. A bird that mates for life, the turtledove was a common image of constancy and fidelity. Here the turtledove is also an emblem of temperance, since she is able to “sip” from the earthly pleasures that so wholly absorbed the figures earlier in the poem and “then thro[w] her eyes above.” Like the first stanza, the second develops a repeated rhetorical pattern, but this time it conveys spiritual transcendence, not stasis. In two pairs of “when” and “then” scenarios, Pulter describes how the godly partake moderately, for instance, moving from “terrene toys” to a proper appreciation of “celestial joys.”
Pulter proposes that the lessons of the emblem require an active embrace of self-sacrifice. The final “then” extends these lessons directly to the reader, who is offered the choice to follow either the pattern of the first stanza or of the second. The stanza’s only enjambment (a grammatical continuation across the break between lines) invites “the reader” to “try, which best he loves / To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.” The gap between the lines actually sets up two decisions for the reader, making him pick first which animal he prefers, and then which he wishes to imitate. The male gendering of the reader is striking here. Pulter actively invokes a reader in other emblems, including British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116], Aristomenes (Emblem 45) [Poem 110], and The Ostrich (Emblem 41) [Poem 106]. But pronouns are not used in those poems and the identity of the reader is left more open. Specifying that this reader is male is particularly interesting because he is asked to assume the example of the turtledove, frequently an image of female chastity. The speaker also enters the poem at this moment (“But as for me”) and declares her own mind in a homonym: “’tis my soul’s sole desire” to live and die like the chaste dove. The pairing of “soul/sole” toys with the stated singularity of the desire, perhaps undercutting it, or perhaps amplifying it through the reiterated sound.


— Rachel Zhang
Emblem 34 is a stellar example both of Pulter’s love for antithesis, and of her innovative approach toward emblems. The poem is structurally divided into two parts: the first twelve lines elaborating upon a “thankless” hog as an emblem of worldliness, and the concluding ten lines interpreting a “Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” as an emblem of people rightly focused on “Celestial Joys.” This contrapuntal structure—unusual, though not unknown, for emblem poems—would seem to suggest a relatively even-handed depiction of two contrasting spiritual perspectives. But lines 19-20, asking the reader to choose between “base Hogs or Turtle Doves” (emphasis added), are representative of the poem as the whole in clearly indicating the doves’ superiority (even if that means contradicting Pulter’s likely source).
In so presenting the contrast between these two animals, Emblem 34 is the structural opposite of Emblem 36 [Poem 101], which begins lauding constant turtledoves, and ends castigating the “swine” who profane God’s temple. The poems are best read in conjunction, and together demonstrate competing, yet equally valid attitudes toward earthly chaos. By its conclusion, Emblem 36 becomes mired in political diatribe—as stuck in the mire of the civil wars, one could say, as pigs in a mudpit. Emblem 34, however, avoids explicit political commentary. It exhibits precisely the transcendence of earthly concerns represented by the turtledove, focusing on future promises that obviate earthly pain and suffering.
Hogs are an appropriate antithesis to this faithful turtledove, for they have a long biblical and polemical association with immoral behavior in emblem and non-emblem literature.
Gloss Note
I distinguish between “hogs,” domesticated animals like those Pulter depicts, and “boars,” which are almost always invoked so as to privilege their wildness (see the definitions and examples given in OED “hog,” n.1 vs. “boar,” n.). This association with wildness means that boars have their own complex biblical, moral, and polemical history, which is not examined here.
1 George Wither’s Collection of Emblems (1635), for instance, implicitly references Matthew 7:6’s famous injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Wither emphasizes the socioeconomic implications of this injunction, depicting a hog with a pearl ring balanced on its nose in order to critique those who misuse the privileges given to them by fortune (224).
If hogs are commonplace in emblem literature, though, Pulter’s choice of the turtledove itself is not. Constancy, a notoriously multifaceted concept, is typically an immobile virtue.
Gloss Note
Consider, for instance, the Son in Milton’s Paradise Regained: Satan describes his battle against the Son as “try[ing] / his constancy,” and the Son achieves victory simply by standing still (2.225-6). For more on constancy and its literary representations, see Rachel Zhang, “The Constant Paradox: Constancy, Genre, and Literary Tradition in the English Civil Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018).
2 Often defined as remaining faithful to a person or idea despite inducements to the contrary (see OED, n.1, n.2), constancy is usually depicted in emblems as a person or animal actively refusing to move. For example, Geoffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) explains that Aesculapius’ “sittinge, shewes he must be setled still / With constant minde” (212).
Gloss Note
Similarly, in another poem, Whitney presents fishermen who “constant stande[s], abyding sweete or sower, / Untill the Lord appoynte an happie hower” (Choice of Emblemes, 97).
3 Indeed, where constancy is immobile, it is inconstancy which moves, as demonstrated by Henry Peacham’s emblem of “Inconstancia” in Minerva Britanna (1612): “never at a stay,” like the zodiac Cancer, who “Forward, and backward,…keepes his pace” (147).
Pulter’s depiction of “the Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” is then exceedingly unusual in emblem literature, although widespread in her own poetry (The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], Emblem 36).
Gloss Note
The turtledove also embodies constancy in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the death of the birds also means the death of “Love and constancy” (22).
4 Pulter’s depictions often highlight the bird’s mobility, despite it being anathema to typical representations of constancy. In “Why must I be forever thus confined,” for instance, Pulter writes, “Though she resolves to have no second mate / Yet she her flight about the air doth take,” contrasting the dove’s “freedom [to] freely both enjoy and love” to the poet’s own confinement (67-8, 76-9). This avian transcendence is precisely the picture of constancy we see in Emblem 34. Just as the dove flies upward in Pulter’s lyric, the emblem’s turtledoves “turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,” thereby transcending the evils of this world. This transcendent mobility once again contrasts with the hogs, who are so stubbornly rooted to the earth that they cannot get their snouts out of the muck.
This transcendence is muted, though, by the poem’s acknowledgement of pain and suffering. The poem’s final lines, which repeat Pulter’s nearly unprecedented tendency to end her emblem poems focusing on herself, underscore the possibility of martyrdom (another situation commonly associated with constancy in emblem books).
Gloss Note
For Pulter’s self-focused endings, see Rachel Dunn [Zhang], "Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book," The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015): 55-73. For constancy’s association with martyrdom, see George Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 81.
5 True joy, Pulter suggests, is a party to suffering, and transcendence often comes by one’s own sacrifice. The return to the speaker personalizes this message, and suggests that she has already accepted suffering for her own life.


— Rachel Zhang
1
34Mark but those Hogs w:ch underneath
Gloss Note
A determiner indicating “that.”
yond tree
Gloss Note
Consider only, or just notice
Mark but those hogs which, underneath
Gloss Note
that (implying something within view)
yon tree
Gloss Note
attend to; watch. This command becomes explicitly visual at the end of line 2, where readers are told they “may see” the scene that the speaker is conjuring verbally.
Mark but those hogs, which underneath yond tree,
Mark but those
Gloss Note
A favorite image of emblematists, almost universally deplored. See, for example, Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 224, a variation of the biblical warning not to cast pearls before swine.
Hogs which, underneath yond tree
2
Nuſling and eating Acorns, you may See
Gloss Note
digging or rooting up with the snout
Nuzzling and eating acorns, you may see:
Gloss Note
digging with the nose; an animalistic approach to turning over the soil. This action of grubbing repeats across the first stanza.
Nuzzling and eating acorns, you may see:
Gloss Note
“To burrow or dig with the nose; to poke or push with the nose or snout” (OED v.1. 2a. and b.). This use of “nuzzling” may echo Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Pulter’s hogs are similar to Venus’ description of the boar, “[w]hose downward eye still looketh for a grave” (1106), and the boar kills Adonis by “nuzzling in his flank” (1115).
Nuzzling and Eating Acorns, you may See:
3
they never cast an eye to thoſe which Shake
Gloss Note
Eardley notes that the shaking of acorns from trees was a common practice among swine farmers.
They never cast an eye to those which shake;
They never
Gloss Note
The hogs are blind to the efforts of the farmers who tend to them. The pigs’ eyes are so resolutely trained on the ground that they never realize the providence of those who loosen and drop the acorns from the branches of the oak trees.
cast an eye to those which shake.
They never cast an eye to those which
Gloss Note
AE notes that it was common practice for farmers to shake acorns out of trees to feed their pigs.
Shake.
4
Soe thankles People doe Gods bleſſings take
So thankless people do God’s blessings take
So thankless people do God’s blessings take,
So thankless People do God’s blessings take
5
And never doe his bounteous Love Adore
And never do His bounteous love adore,
And never do his bounteous love adore,
And never do his bounteous Love Adore,
6
But Swiniſhly Root on and Grunt for more
But swinishly root on and grunt for more;
But
Gloss Note
The animal qualities of the hogs are attributed to people who do not properly acknowledge God’s care. The “thankless people” dig in the ground, perhaps with their snouts as the pigs do above, and make incomprehensible sounds instead of properly celebrating divine blessings.
swinishly root on and grunt for more.
But swinishly root and Grunt for more.
7
Soe gripeing Worldlings Still their Wealthe increase
So
Gloss Note
someone who is grasping or greedy and dedicated to earthly (instead of heavenly) pleasures and interests
griping worldlings still their wealth increase
So
Gloss Note
people greedy for earthly pleasures. They are described as wholly of this earth, “worldings” who never cast their minds beyond their worldly affairs, in the same way the hogs do not look beyond their hunt for acorns.
griping worldings still their wealth increase
So
Gloss Note
“Grasping, usurious, avaricious” (OED adj.1).
griping
People devoted to the pleasures of this world (as opposed to life in heaven after death).
Worldlings still their Wealth increase
8
And onely pray their bags may Rest in peace
And only pray their
Gloss Note
money bags
bags may rest in peace;
And only pray their
Gloss Note
money bags. The worldings care only for the eternal peace of their wealth, not their souls.
bags may rest in peace.
Gloss Note

Pulter’s “griping Worldlings” have nothing to ensure that their “bags”—i.e., moneybags—will remain secure after they die; they can “only pray” that their wealth will “rest in peace.” Pulter’s warning against greed and addiction to earthly treasures has numerous biblical echoes, contrasting the transience of earthly possessions with the eternal treasures of heaven. Matthew 6:19-21, for instance, reminds readers, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

See also Luke 12:16-21’s parable of the rich man who tears down his barns in order to build bigger ones.

And only pray their bags may rest in peace.
9
Soe Grumbling ffarmers Still turn up the Earth
So grumbling farmers still turn up the earth,
So grumbling farmers still
Gloss Note
prepare the soil for planting by stirring up and aerating it. Strikingly the grumbling farmers do not till the earth with a plow, the omnipresent symbol of human cultivation (See Frances E. Dolan, Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020], 20). Without a mention of agricultural tools, the farmers appear more like swinish hogs mucking blindly in the dirt.
turn up the earth,
So Grumbling Farmers still turn up the Earth,
10
ffearing that every Shower will cauſ a Dearth
Gloss Note
The misguided farmers (from the line above) plow their fields, but are overly concerned that rain will kill the crops) rather than appreciating the nourishing rain from heaven.
Fearing that every shower will cause a dearth.
Gloss Note
a crop failure that leaves no food to maintain life. While a dearth is perhaps the most fearsome fate for farmers, this line shows how blind these grumblers are to divine providence, just like the hogs. While too much rain certainly can harm crops, it’s more often the case that rain is a figure for refreshment and the promise of bounty. These farmers are receiving even God-sent showers with anxious suspicion rather than gratitude.
Fearing that every shower will cause a dearth.
Fearing that every Shower will cause a
Gloss Note
Pulter’s farmers are forever working, constantly plowing (“turn[ing] up the Earth”) so that the rain won’t wash away their seeds. Rather than seeing the rain as a blessing falling from above (like the acorns falling from the tree in line 3), the farmers live in perpetual fear that rain will impair their crops and cause a “dearth,” or shortage.
Dearth.
11
Even Soe voluptius Gallants dance along
Even so
Gloss Note
“gallants” are men and women of fashion and pleasure who are inclined to “voluptuous” ease, luxury, and gratification of the senses
voluptuous gallants dance along,
Even so
Gloss Note
fashionable people committed to sensuous pleasure.
voluptuous gallants dance along,
Even so voluptuous
Gloss Note
“Gallants” is a multi-valent term in Pulter’s poetry, having both positive connotations (e.g., On those Two Unparalleled Friends [Poem 7], ll. 14, 24) and negative (e.g., Emblem 8 [Poem 74], ll. 12, 22). Here the term refers pejoratively to young men of fashion and pleasure (see OED n.1, 3), whose “voluptuous[ness]” marks them as more interested in sensual pleasures than morality.
Gallants dance along,
12
Their meetings ending in A drunken Song
Their meetings ending in a drunken song.
Their meetings ending in a drunken song.
Their meetings ending in a drunken Song.
13
When Like the Chast & conſtant turtle Dove
When, like the chaste and constant turtledove,
When like the chaste and constant
Gloss Note
a bird that mates for life, emblematizing constancy and devotion. See This Poor Turtle Dove (Emblem 20) [Poem 85], Pardon Me, My Dearest Love [Poem 42], Of A Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43], Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57].
turtledove,
When like the
Gloss Note
The turtledove is frequently associated with marital chastity because it mates for life. See, for instance, Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the turtledove epitomizes “married chastity” (61). Henry Peacham similarly celebrates turtledoves as an emblem of “love of Matrimony” in Minerva Britanna, 92.
Chaste and constant
Gloss Note
A favorite image of Pulter’s. See The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], and Emblem 36 [Poem 101].
Turtle Dove,
14
Which takes a Sip then throws her eyes above
Which takes a sip then throws her eyes above,
Which takes a sip then throws her eyes above,
Which takes a Sip then
Gloss Note

Pulter’s depiction of the turtle dove as constantly gazing heavenward actually contradicts her most likely source, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (from which Pulter frequently draws). According to Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation, Pliny describes doves as “drinking not to hold up their bills between-whiles, and draw their necks backe, but to take a large draught at once, as horses and kine do.” Pliny, Historie of the World, 1:290. Pulter’s turtledoves, however, look up, in direct contrast to the hogs “rooting” in the ground.

Henry Peacham similarly aligns the turtledove with piety in Minerva Britanna, comparing it to a “godly wight, whome no delight of Sinne, Doth with vaine pleasure draw: or worldly care,” esteeming “these fleeting joies a pinne” (110).

throws her eyes above,
15
Gods Children here but Sip of Terren Toys
God’s children here but sip of
Gloss Note
“toys” are amorous sports; trumpery, rubbish, playthings, amusements; “terrene” can mean earthly, secular, temporal, material, or human
terrene toys,
God’s children here but sip of
Gloss Note
frivolous playthings defined by being earthly. “Terrene,” from the same root as “terrestrial,” creates a sense of these “toys” as akin to the hogs’ acorns, rooted and sourced from the soil rather than the heavens.
terrene toys,
Gloss Note
Picking up on the metaphor of Christians as God’s “children,” Pulter compares things we know on Earth, things that are “terrene”—that is, “of the earth; worldly, secular, temporal, material, human” (OED, a.1)—to the insignificant, infantile “toys” children play with. In doing so, Pulter draws a contrast between two different types of children: one childish only in relation to God the father, and the other childish by virtue of their earthly perspective.
God’s Children here but Sip of Terrene toys,
16
Then turn their thoughts to true Celestiall Joys
Then turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,
Then turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,
Then turn their thoughts to true Celestial Joys.
17
Like Innocent Doves they often victims die
Like innocent doves, they often victims die,
Gloss Note
Turtledoves were among the prescribed sacrificial animals in Jewish ritual (Leviticus: 1:14-17).
Like innocent doves they often victims die.
Gloss Note
Jews unable to afford a lamb or bull often sacrificed doves at the biblical temple as an offering to God (see Leviticus 1:14, Leviticus 12:8, Luke 2:24).
Like Innocent Doves they often victims die,
18
When Hogs his Sacred Alter come not Nie
When
Critical Note
Eardley notes the biblical allusions in this line and the one above: “Isa. 66:3 states that the sacrificing of swine pollutes the sacred church and is therefore an abomination. Here this is compared with the sacrifice of the doves in Luke 2:24, which provides a prefiguration of the death of Christ.”
hogs His sacred altar come not nigh.
Gloss Note
By contrast to doves, swine could not be brought near the temple because their sacrifice would pollute it (Isaiah 66:3).
When hogs His sacred altar come not nigh,
Gloss Note
Pigs, declared unclean by God in Leviticus 11:7, were utterly forbidden to Jews, and therefore banned from approaching God’s “sacred Altar.” Isaiah 66:3 references the killing of swine as epitomizing people’s wickedness, an identification emblematized in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblems (1635), 38. But it is the evil of the hogs themselves, not the people using them, that seems the focus of Pulter’s ire here. Pulter draws a clear contrast between the hogs, which must remain distant from the temple, and the doves, which are willingly, sacrificially at the center of the temple’s activity.
When Hogs his Sacred Altar come not Nigh.
19
Then let the Reader trie, which best hee loves
Then let the reader
Gloss Note
sift or distinguish; ascertain, find out (i.e., by effort or experiment, effort, experience); test, put to proof
try which best he loves
Then let the reader try which best he loves
Then let the Reader try, which best he loves
20
To imitate, baſe Hogs or Turtle Doves
To imitate: base hogs or turtledoves.
To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.
To imitate,
Gloss Note
Pulter’s rhetorical presentation of the reader’s choice here is typical of the poem as a whole, which clearly favors one side. Hogs are “base”—that is, distant from God in their depravity (see OED, adj. A.II.10)—while doves stand alone in their heavenly virtue. “Base,” indicating the pigs’ low position relative to the ground, also reinforces the animals’ physical distinction, between the mobile, transcendent dove and the earth-bound swine (see OED “base,” adj. A.I.2a).
base Hogs or Turtle Doves.
21
But as for mee ’tis my Souls Sole deſire
But as for me, ’tis my soul’s sole desire
But as for me, ’tis
Critical Note
Pulter returned to this phrase, for instance, “my soul’s sole joy” in To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield [Poem 38]; “my soul’s sole choice” in The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]; and especially in the title of My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29].
my soul’s sole desire,
But as for me, ’tis my Soul’s Sole desire
22
Like Spotles Doves to live and Soe expire.
Like
Gloss Note
innocent, free from sin, pure
spotless doves to live and so expire.
Like spotless doves to live and so expire.
Gloss Note
The poem’s concluding focus on the speaker, rather than the reader, occurs in the majority of Pulter’s emblems, but is almost without precedence in other emblem books. In this case, the return effectively underscores the poem’s emblematic moral while highlighting the personal sacrifice involved in living out that moral.
Like Spotless Doves to live and so Expire.
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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 A

 Editorial note

To make the poem accessible for all readers, I have modernized the text of Pulter’s manuscript by updating spelling, expanding contractions, and standardizing capitalization. The only exceptions are cases where the form or the sense of the poem would be lost by modernizing, particularly the elision of syllables to preserve meter. I have also supplied punctuation because, as was typical for seventeenth-century poetry manuscripts, Pulter’s poems contained almost no punctuation. There are both benefits and liabilities to this approach. While the introduction of punctuation improves the sense of grammatical structures for modern readers, it loses the productive ambiguities of the manuscript, where clauses might connect to each other in multiple ways. So I would invite readers to proceed by comparing the edition to the images of the manuscript and the transcription supplied by The Pulter Project. Do you agree with the punctuation that I’ve introduced? How might the meaning of the poem change without it?
Amplified Edition B

 Editorial note

The rich complexity of this poem is best appreciated with reference both to Pulter’s other poems and to poems by other emblem writers. Accordingly, I’ve tried to contextualize the many images and concepts in this poem within the world of Pulter’s manuscript as well as the world of early modern English emblem books, sometimes by referencing an analogous poem or image, and sometimes an opposing one.
With an eye to the contemporary reader, I have modernized spelling, and inserted additional punctuation as needed to aid in understanding. As seventeenth-century writers often used capitalization for emphasis, though, I have tried to retain the manuscript’s original capitalization. The capitalization of some letters (e.g., “s”) is difficult to determine; in these cases, I have made individual determinations in line with Pulter’s style.
Abbreviations: AE—Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (Toronto: Iter, Inc. and the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2014).
Elemental Edition

 Headnote

Which would you rather be: hog or dove? Pulter makes the choice even easier than it might first seem with her contrasting portraits of the dietary habits of each creature. Grunting hogs root for nuts with their snouts in the dirt, never even thinking to thank those who made them fall to the ground in the first place, while turtledoves alternate between dainty sips, grateful prayers, and thoughts of still higher things than mere food and drink. But then comes the twist: doves, though innocent, are often sacrificial victims, while hogs, through no virtue of their own, have the good fortune to be banned from the altar. This is the moral quandary on which Pulter’s final invocation turns: knowing all this, now which would you rather be? She claims the choice remains clear.
Amplified Edition A

 Headnote

Like all of Pulter’s emblems, this is a poem that draws moral lessons out of a visual scenario, even though there are no images present in the manuscript. The effect is to require readers to “see” the scenes with their spiritual “eye,” placing them ahead of common readers, who (like the hogs) require physically visible emblems. The emblem begins with a command to pay attention to a group of swine greedily devouring acorns. As the pigs root about in the dirt, they gaze resolutely down at the earth, oblivious to the oak trees and the farmers who provide this bounty by shaking the nuts loose from the branches.
In four further scenes of “thankless people” who repeat the pigs’ behavior, the poem illustrates the limits of a sight that is bound to the earth. This repeated scenario is strikingly kinetic. Instead of a static image, Pulter’s emblem is a series of tiny pantomimes or dumbshows that, over and over again, convey their truth through behavior. Each example depicts the common crudeness of humans who never lift their eyes from earthly concerns. In all four scenes, the swinish figures are criticized not just for their innate flaws but also for how their actions mire them in an earthly filth they cannot see past or beyond. Each example begins with “So” or “Even so,” a rhetorical gesture that keeps referring back to the initial behavior of the hogs.
Pulter’s hogs thus offer a negative example for the emblem’s implied reader, who is meant to learn, from this visual poem, how to see beyond the limits of her own circumstances. The agricultural imagery plays a significant part in this lesson. Pulter may have been drawing here on the tradition connecting land management and poetic craft. Thomas Tusser’s husbandry manuals, which offered versified advice to farmers and poets alike, were so tremendously popular that they were actively published for more than a century, from 1557 to 1672. Unearthing the trope of the pig in early modern literature, Jessica Rosenberg has explained how swine were often used as figures for bad readers who are inattentive to the virtues of the texts they devour.
Gloss Note
Jessica Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2022).
1 In Pulter’s emblem, the agricultural context is explored most pointedly in the example of the “grumbling farmers,” who are doubly ungrateful because they both complain about laboring in their fields and fail to trust in the divine providence that will provide for their harvest.
The second stanza takes an abrupt turn, offering the turtledove as a counterexample to the worldly obsessions of the hogs. A bird that mates for life, the turtledove was a common image of constancy and fidelity. Here the turtledove is also an emblem of temperance, since she is able to “sip” from the earthly pleasures that so wholly absorbed the figures earlier in the poem and “then thro[w] her eyes above.” Like the first stanza, the second develops a repeated rhetorical pattern, but this time it conveys spiritual transcendence, not stasis. In two pairs of “when” and “then” scenarios, Pulter describes how the godly partake moderately, for instance, moving from “terrene toys” to a proper appreciation of “celestial joys.”
Pulter proposes that the lessons of the emblem require an active embrace of self-sacrifice. The final “then” extends these lessons directly to the reader, who is offered the choice to follow either the pattern of the first stanza or of the second. The stanza’s only enjambment (a grammatical continuation across the break between lines) invites “the reader” to “try, which best he loves / To imitate, base hogs or turtledoves.” The gap between the lines actually sets up two decisions for the reader, making him pick first which animal he prefers, and then which he wishes to imitate. The male gendering of the reader is striking here. Pulter actively invokes a reader in other emblems, including British Brennus (Emblem 51) [Poem 116], Aristomenes (Emblem 45) [Poem 110], and The Ostrich (Emblem 41) [Poem 106]. But pronouns are not used in those poems and the identity of the reader is left more open. Specifying that this reader is male is particularly interesting because he is asked to assume the example of the turtledove, frequently an image of female chastity. The speaker also enters the poem at this moment (“But as for me”) and declares her own mind in a homonym: “’tis my soul’s sole desire” to live and die like the chaste dove. The pairing of “soul/sole” toys with the stated singularity of the desire, perhaps undercutting it, or perhaps amplifying it through the reiterated sound.
Amplified Edition B

 Headnote

Emblem 34 is a stellar example both of Pulter’s love for antithesis, and of her innovative approach toward emblems. The poem is structurally divided into two parts: the first twelve lines elaborating upon a “thankless” hog as an emblem of worldliness, and the concluding ten lines interpreting a “Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” as an emblem of people rightly focused on “Celestial Joys.” This contrapuntal structure—unusual, though not unknown, for emblem poems—would seem to suggest a relatively even-handed depiction of two contrasting spiritual perspectives. But lines 19-20, asking the reader to choose between “base Hogs or Turtle Doves” (emphasis added), are representative of the poem as the whole in clearly indicating the doves’ superiority (even if that means contradicting Pulter’s likely source).
In so presenting the contrast between these two animals, Emblem 34 is the structural opposite of Emblem 36 [Poem 101], which begins lauding constant turtledoves, and ends castigating the “swine” who profane God’s temple. The poems are best read in conjunction, and together demonstrate competing, yet equally valid attitudes toward earthly chaos. By its conclusion, Emblem 36 becomes mired in political diatribe—as stuck in the mire of the civil wars, one could say, as pigs in a mudpit. Emblem 34, however, avoids explicit political commentary. It exhibits precisely the transcendence of earthly concerns represented by the turtledove, focusing on future promises that obviate earthly pain and suffering.
Hogs are an appropriate antithesis to this faithful turtledove, for they have a long biblical and polemical association with immoral behavior in emblem and non-emblem literature.
Gloss Note
I distinguish between “hogs,” domesticated animals like those Pulter depicts, and “boars,” which are almost always invoked so as to privilege their wildness (see the definitions and examples given in OED “hog,” n.1 vs. “boar,” n.). This association with wildness means that boars have their own complex biblical, moral, and polemical history, which is not examined here.
1 George Wither’s Collection of Emblems (1635), for instance, implicitly references Matthew 7:6’s famous injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Wither emphasizes the socioeconomic implications of this injunction, depicting a hog with a pearl ring balanced on its nose in order to critique those who misuse the privileges given to them by fortune (224).
If hogs are commonplace in emblem literature, though, Pulter’s choice of the turtledove itself is not. Constancy, a notoriously multifaceted concept, is typically an immobile virtue.
Gloss Note
Consider, for instance, the Son in Milton’s Paradise Regained: Satan describes his battle against the Son as “try[ing] / his constancy,” and the Son achieves victory simply by standing still (2.225-6). For more on constancy and its literary representations, see Rachel Zhang, “The Constant Paradox: Constancy, Genre, and Literary Tradition in the English Civil Wars” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018).
2 Often defined as remaining faithful to a person or idea despite inducements to the contrary (see OED, n.1, n.2), constancy is usually depicted in emblems as a person or animal actively refusing to move. For example, Geoffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) explains that Aesculapius’ “sittinge, shewes he must be setled still / With constant minde” (212).
Gloss Note
Similarly, in another poem, Whitney presents fishermen who “constant stande[s], abyding sweete or sower, / Untill the Lord appoynte an happie hower” (Choice of Emblemes, 97).
3 Indeed, where constancy is immobile, it is inconstancy which moves, as demonstrated by Henry Peacham’s emblem of “Inconstancia” in Minerva Britanna (1612): “never at a stay,” like the zodiac Cancer, who “Forward, and backward,…keepes his pace” (147).
Pulter’s depiction of “the Chaste and constant Turtle Dove” is then exceedingly unusual in emblem literature, although widespread in her own poetry (The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], Emblem 36).
Gloss Note
The turtledove also embodies constancy in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the death of the birds also means the death of “Love and constancy” (22).
4 Pulter’s depictions often highlight the bird’s mobility, despite it being anathema to typical representations of constancy. In “Why must I be forever thus confined,” for instance, Pulter writes, “Though she resolves to have no second mate / Yet she her flight about the air doth take,” contrasting the dove’s “freedom [to] freely both enjoy and love” to the poet’s own confinement (67-8, 76-9). This avian transcendence is precisely the picture of constancy we see in Emblem 34. Just as the dove flies upward in Pulter’s lyric, the emblem’s turtledoves “turn their thoughts to true celestial joys,” thereby transcending the evils of this world. This transcendent mobility once again contrasts with the hogs, who are so stubbornly rooted to the earth that they cannot get their snouts out of the muck.
This transcendence is muted, though, by the poem’s acknowledgement of pain and suffering. The poem’s final lines, which repeat Pulter’s nearly unprecedented tendency to end her emblem poems focusing on herself, underscore the possibility of martyrdom (another situation commonly associated with constancy in emblem books).
Gloss Note
For Pulter’s self-focused endings, see Rachel Dunn [Zhang], "Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book," The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015): 55-73. For constancy’s association with martyrdom, see George Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 81.
5 True joy, Pulter suggests, is a party to suffering, and transcendence often comes by one’s own sacrifice. The return to the speaker personalizes this message, and suggests that she has already accepted suffering for her own life.
Transcription
Line number 1

 Gloss note

A determiner indicating “that.”
Elemental Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Consider only, or just notice
Elemental Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

that (implying something within view)
Amplified Edition A
Line number 1

 Gloss note

attend to; watch. This command becomes explicitly visual at the end of line 2, where readers are told they “may see” the scene that the speaker is conjuring verbally.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 1

 Gloss note

A favorite image of emblematists, almost universally deplored. See, for example, Wither, A Collection of Emblems (1635), 224, a variation of the biblical warning not to cast pearls before swine.
Elemental Edition
Line number 2

 Gloss note

digging or rooting up with the snout
Amplified Edition A
Line number 2

 Gloss note

digging with the nose; an animalistic approach to turning over the soil. This action of grubbing repeats across the first stanza.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 2

 Gloss note

“To burrow or dig with the nose; to poke or push with the nose or snout” (OED v.1. 2a. and b.). This use of “nuzzling” may echo Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Pulter’s hogs are similar to Venus’ description of the boar, “[w]hose downward eye still looketh for a grave” (1106), and the boar kills Adonis by “nuzzling in his flank” (1115).
Elemental Edition
Line number 3

 Gloss note

Eardley notes that the shaking of acorns from trees was a common practice among swine farmers.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 3

 Gloss note

The hogs are blind to the efforts of the farmers who tend to them. The pigs’ eyes are so resolutely trained on the ground that they never realize the providence of those who loosen and drop the acorns from the branches of the oak trees.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 3

 Gloss note

AE notes that it was common practice for farmers to shake acorns out of trees to feed their pigs.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 6

 Gloss note

The animal qualities of the hogs are attributed to people who do not properly acknowledge God’s care. The “thankless people” dig in the ground, perhaps with their snouts as the pigs do above, and make incomprehensible sounds instead of properly celebrating divine blessings.
Elemental Edition
Line number 7

 Gloss note

someone who is grasping or greedy and dedicated to earthly (instead of heavenly) pleasures and interests
Amplified Edition A
Line number 7

 Gloss note

people greedy for earthly pleasures. They are described as wholly of this earth, “worldings” who never cast their minds beyond their worldly affairs, in the same way the hogs do not look beyond their hunt for acorns.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 7

 Gloss note

“Grasping, usurious, avaricious” (OED adj.1).
Amplified Edition B
Line number 7
People devoted to the pleasures of this world (as opposed to life in heaven after death).
Elemental Edition
Line number 8

 Gloss note

money bags
Amplified Edition A
Line number 8

 Gloss note

money bags. The worldings care only for the eternal peace of their wealth, not their souls.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 8

 Gloss note


Pulter’s “griping Worldlings” have nothing to ensure that their “bags”—i.e., moneybags—will remain secure after they die; they can “only pray” that their wealth will “rest in peace.” Pulter’s warning against greed and addiction to earthly treasures has numerous biblical echoes, contrasting the transience of earthly possessions with the eternal treasures of heaven. Matthew 6:19-21, for instance, reminds readers, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

See also Luke 12:16-21’s parable of the rich man who tears down his barns in order to build bigger ones.

Amplified Edition A
Line number 9

 Gloss note

prepare the soil for planting by stirring up and aerating it. Strikingly the grumbling farmers do not till the earth with a plow, the omnipresent symbol of human cultivation (See Frances E. Dolan, Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020], 20). Without a mention of agricultural tools, the farmers appear more like swinish hogs mucking blindly in the dirt.
Elemental Edition
Line number 10

 Gloss note

The misguided farmers (from the line above) plow their fields, but are overly concerned that rain will kill the crops) rather than appreciating the nourishing rain from heaven.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 10

 Gloss note

a crop failure that leaves no food to maintain life. While a dearth is perhaps the most fearsome fate for farmers, this line shows how blind these grumblers are to divine providence, just like the hogs. While too much rain certainly can harm crops, it’s more often the case that rain is a figure for refreshment and the promise of bounty. These farmers are receiving even God-sent showers with anxious suspicion rather than gratitude.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 10

 Gloss note

Pulter’s farmers are forever working, constantly plowing (“turn[ing] up the Earth”) so that the rain won’t wash away their seeds. Rather than seeing the rain as a blessing falling from above (like the acorns falling from the tree in line 3), the farmers live in perpetual fear that rain will impair their crops and cause a “dearth,” or shortage.
Elemental Edition
Line number 11

 Gloss note

“gallants” are men and women of fashion and pleasure who are inclined to “voluptuous” ease, luxury, and gratification of the senses
Amplified Edition A
Line number 11

 Gloss note

fashionable people committed to sensuous pleasure.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 11

 Gloss note

“Gallants” is a multi-valent term in Pulter’s poetry, having both positive connotations (e.g., On those Two Unparalleled Friends [Poem 7], ll. 14, 24) and negative (e.g., Emblem 8 [Poem 74], ll. 12, 22). Here the term refers pejoratively to young men of fashion and pleasure (see OED n.1, 3), whose “voluptuous[ness]” marks them as more interested in sensual pleasures than morality.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 13

 Gloss note

a bird that mates for life, emblematizing constancy and devotion. See This Poor Turtle Dove (Emblem 20) [Poem 85], Pardon Me, My Dearest Love [Poem 42], Of A Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 [Poem 43], Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57].
Amplified Edition B
Line number 13

 Gloss note

The turtledove is frequently associated with marital chastity because it mates for life. See, for instance, Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” where the turtledove epitomizes “married chastity” (61). Henry Peacham similarly celebrates turtledoves as an emblem of “love of Matrimony” in Minerva Britanna, 92.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 13

 Gloss note

A favorite image of Pulter’s. See The Lark [Poem 46], Why must I be forever thus confined [Poem 57], Emblem 20 [Poem 85], and Emblem 36 [Poem 101].
Amplified Edition B
Line number 14

 Gloss note


Pulter’s depiction of the turtle dove as constantly gazing heavenward actually contradicts her most likely source, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (from which Pulter frequently draws). According to Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation, Pliny describes doves as “drinking not to hold up their bills between-whiles, and draw their necks backe, but to take a large draught at once, as horses and kine do.” Pliny, Historie of the World, 1:290. Pulter’s turtledoves, however, look up, in direct contrast to the hogs “rooting” in the ground.

Henry Peacham similarly aligns the turtledove with piety in Minerva Britanna, comparing it to a “godly wight, whome no delight of Sinne, Doth with vaine pleasure draw: or worldly care,” esteeming “these fleeting joies a pinne” (110).

Elemental Edition
Line number 15

 Gloss note

“toys” are amorous sports; trumpery, rubbish, playthings, amusements; “terrene” can mean earthly, secular, temporal, material, or human
Amplified Edition A
Line number 15

 Gloss note

frivolous playthings defined by being earthly. “Terrene,” from the same root as “terrestrial,” creates a sense of these “toys” as akin to the hogs’ acorns, rooted and sourced from the soil rather than the heavens.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 15

 Gloss note

Picking up on the metaphor of Christians as God’s “children,” Pulter compares things we know on Earth, things that are “terrene”—that is, “of the earth; worldly, secular, temporal, material, human” (OED, a.1)—to the insignificant, infantile “toys” children play with. In doing so, Pulter draws a contrast between two different types of children: one childish only in relation to God the father, and the other childish by virtue of their earthly perspective.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Turtledoves were among the prescribed sacrificial animals in Jewish ritual (Leviticus: 1:14-17).
Amplified Edition B
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Jews unable to afford a lamb or bull often sacrificed doves at the biblical temple as an offering to God (see Leviticus 1:14, Leviticus 12:8, Luke 2:24).
Elemental Edition
Line number 18

 Critical note

Eardley notes the biblical allusions in this line and the one above: “Isa. 66:3 states that the sacrificing of swine pollutes the sacred church and is therefore an abomination. Here this is compared with the sacrifice of the doves in Luke 2:24, which provides a prefiguration of the death of Christ.”
Amplified Edition A
Line number 18

 Gloss note

By contrast to doves, swine could not be brought near the temple because their sacrifice would pollute it (Isaiah 66:3).
Amplified Edition B
Line number 18

 Gloss note

Pigs, declared unclean by God in Leviticus 11:7, were utterly forbidden to Jews, and therefore banned from approaching God’s “sacred Altar.” Isaiah 66:3 references the killing of swine as epitomizing people’s wickedness, an identification emblematized in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblems (1635), 38. But it is the evil of the hogs themselves, not the people using them, that seems the focus of Pulter’s ire here. Pulter draws a clear contrast between the hogs, which must remain distant from the temple, and the doves, which are willingly, sacrificially at the center of the temple’s activity.
Elemental Edition
Line number 19

 Gloss note

sift or distinguish; ascertain, find out (i.e., by effort or experiment, effort, experience); test, put to proof
Amplified Edition B
Line number 20

 Gloss note

Pulter’s rhetorical presentation of the reader’s choice here is typical of the poem as a whole, which clearly favors one side. Hogs are “base”—that is, distant from God in their depravity (see OED, adj. A.II.10)—while doves stand alone in their heavenly virtue. “Base,” indicating the pigs’ low position relative to the ground, also reinforces the animals’ physical distinction, between the mobile, transcendent dove and the earth-bound swine (see OED “base,” adj. A.I.2a).
Amplified Edition A
Line number 21

 Critical note

Pulter returned to this phrase, for instance, “my soul’s sole joy” in To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield [Poem 38]; “my soul’s sole choice” in The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]; and especially in the title of My Soul’s Sole Desire [Poem 29].
Elemental Edition
Line number 22

 Gloss note

innocent, free from sin, pure
Amplified Edition B
Line number 22

 Gloss note

The poem’s concluding focus on the speaker, rather than the reader, occurs in the majority of Pulter’s emblems, but is almost without precedence in other emblem books. In this case, the return effectively underscores the poem’s emblematic moral while highlighting the personal sacrifice involved in living out that moral.
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