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My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble?

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My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble?

Poem #40

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 Nikolina Hatton.

How to cite these versions

Conventions for these editions

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making

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Project sponsored by Northwestern University, Brock University, and University of Leeds

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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 3

  Physical note 

imperfectly erased apostrophe between the “d” and “s”

Line number 12

  Physical note 

“ſ” possibly added later; “p” written over imperfectly erased letter with ascender

Line number 13

  Physical note 

horizontal line above; this line is not separated by a gap from the line above

Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.

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Transcription

Transcription

[Untitled]

My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble?

[Untitled]

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

In order to provide another perspective on Pulter’s poem and situate it within the period, the original spelling and—perhaps more significantly—punctuation has been preserved in this edition. Despite the fact that early modern spelling, punctuation and capitalization rules were non-standardized in the period, Stefan Christian (2012: 82) notes that Pulter’s punctuation was probably chosen by a scribe in consultation with the poet.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

How do you comfort a troubled soul? Here, the answer rests in the promise of a future radical change, in metamorphosis as both a religious and poetic principle. While in neighboring poems, the speaker urges the soul to be patient until the glories of the afterlife, or to freely let go of its earthly body, here she offers reassurance that habitation on earth is merely temporary. The consolation offered is superficially cast in terms of a standard Christian duality of body versus soul. But, in fact, Pulter complicates the matter by warning the soul that its “mortal nature” will corrode to ashes and disintegrate to the fundamental Aristotelian elements. The body and soul emerge less as distinctive entities than fungible elements making up a being. This disruption of Christian orthodoxy continues when the speaker conditionally credits the Pythagorean theory that the soul transmigrates at death into the body of another creature. If Pythagoras is right, she reassures her anxious soul, it surely will evolve into a lamb or dove (Christian icons) rather than a lowly toad. Although the poem ends with the comforting finale in which the soul is swallowed into heaven with amnesia about its earthly existence, the core principle celebrated by the poem is the vitality of transmutation, registered in the poem’s content, in its uncertain shifts between first-and second-person address (which confuse soul and body), and in its formal rhyme words: “Then whether dissolution, / Or transmigration, / Or rolling revolution, / All ends in thy salvation.” The final twist is Pulter’s decision to write in what was known as “common measure,” a popular ballad form of writing. The move away from rhymed couplets to quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter performs Pulter’s investment in revolutions of form.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

In this poem, the speaker addresses her own soul and, in so doing, engages with a number of devotional and poetic traditions without letting those traditions confine her. On the one hand, Pulter’s poem can be read in relation to the body and soul dialogue poem, a tradition rooted in medieval literature but still popular in the seventeenth century, as attested by Anne Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit” and Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body.” Alternatively, her poem could also be read within the devotional tradition of the apostrophe to the soul and be compared to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146, which begins, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.”

Gloss Note

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146. Poetry Foundation, l. 1.

1 Line 15 likely points to John Donne’s famous apostrophe to death in his holy sonnet “Death be not proud”: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

Gloss Note

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 10, “Death, be not proud.” Luminarium.org, ll. 13–14.

2 These somewhat diverse devotional traditions share underlying assumptions about the body/soul dichotomy and the need to vocally and actively repent. Such poems frequently use imagery of violence to articulate the soul’s need to be brought back into submission to God.

Gloss Note

Nikolina Hatton, Curation Metaphors of Violence in Devotional Poetry.

3 This devotional poetic tradition often, as Abe Davies has pointed out, functions as a means of disciplining the speaker and the reader.

Gloss Note

See Abe Davies, Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 121–162.

4 Pulter’s use of the apostrophe to the soul in this and other poems (O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul [Poem 28], The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge [Poem 39], Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47]) intervenes in this tradition of addressing the soul and offers an alternative approach: instead of admonishing the soul (or body) to repentance, she uses the devotional form to provide comfort and consolation to her soul as she meditates on the promise of the resurrection.

The speaker’s consolatory tone and poetic stance in this poem bear similarities to her tone in another subset of her poems that are modeled on the biblical psalms, such as The Desire [Poem 18] and How Long Shall My Dejected Soul [Poem 24].

Gloss Note

See Hatton, Nikolina, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): pp. 364–83.

5 Although not addressed to God, this poem itself has a number of features that align it with the psalms, not the least of which is her opening (ll. 1-2) which bears a striking similarity to Ps. 43: 5: “Why art thou cast downe, O my soule? and why art thou disquieted within me?”

Gloss Note

Psalms 43:5. The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, (London, 1611). EEBO. This is a refrain that echoes similar verses in Psalms 42:5 and 11. For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to focus on only one. See also Nikolina Hatton, Curation Pulter’s Psalmic Intertexts.

6 Additionally, the poem’s meter, quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming abab, link it with The Whole Book of Psalms, i.e., the “Sternhold and Hopkins” metrical psalter, a psalter often used in English church services for singing psalms to popular tunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Gloss Note

Beth Quitslund, “The Psalm Book” in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, eds. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 203–11.

7 Poem 40 is the only instance in her manuscript in which she turns to this ‘common meter.’ But here too, as with her consolatory apostrophe to the soul, the speaker destabilizes the expectations of her reader.

The first four stanzas contain references to the psalms and Donne, and the poem continues to the end in a rough version of this popular meter, but Pulter’s content engages with more heterodox ideas about the body and soul than these formal allusions suggest. In castigating the world in these opening stanzas, Pulter at first seems to be endorsing a material/spiritual dichotomy in which the soul must endure a “terrene” (l. 9) existence before being liberated to heaven, but the poem also presents alternatives to this view. In line 13, she points to the soul’s “Mortall Nature,” potentially signaling an unorthodox belief that the soul dies with the body.

Gloss Note

See Kenneth Graham’s Curation Christian Mortalism from the Bible to Pulter.

8 In stanzas five through seven, she continues this heterodox exploration by discussing a number of theories of the afterlife that have their sources outside the Christian tradition. From the impersonal yet oddly gendered “black Oblivion’s womb” in line 20 to references to Empedoclean physics (ll. 21–22) or even Pythagorian reincarnation (ll. 25–28), the speaker never settles on one solution. Perhaps these ideas allow the poet to imagine alternatives to the body/soul/self problem with which so much Christian devotional poetry is plagued, a supposition attested by the subtle shift in pronouns from “thou” to “I,” beginning in line 23.

Gloss Note

For more on the body/soul problem, see Liza Blake’s Curation Body, Soul, Dust.

9 Pulter’s use of conjunctions further hints at her attitude toward all these possibilities. Her reiteration of “or” suggests her openness to other heterodox possibilities, while “whether” and “if” are always followed by assurances that even should these theories be true, she is assured of Christian resurrection: “All ends in thy Salvation” (l. 32). Establishing this belief early on (see ll. 7–8) and reiterating it throughout provides a firm foundation from which she can contemplate less traditional understandings of the body and soul without anxiety.

In the last three stanzas, the poem looks to a future—with a reiteration of “then” (ll. 29, 33, 37)—in which Pulter’s pain will have been erased. Here, the speaker returns to a mode recognizable in the biblical psalms, one that is consolatory, even elegiac, an attempt to offer her soul comfort in its distress. Both Psalms 42 and 43 end on such a note, with the speaker imagining a future state of thanksgiving. Rather than thematizing penitence, both of these psalms are more concerned with the speaker lamenting the lack of justice in her situation and articulating a longing to be returned to a state of community. In fact, Pulter’s entire poem may be an expanded meditation on Ps. 43:5, the second part of which continues: “hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” Similarly to the biblical psalmist in this verse, the poet opens her poem with an apostrophe to the soul, asking why she despairs, writes an extended meditation on her hope of resurrection (whatever form it takes) and finishes with an expression of faith in future joy in these final stanzas. This latter upward movement towards imagining future hope, although arguably inspired by the psalms, is another hallmark of devotional poetry, particularly that of the poems of George Herbert, once again signaling Pulter’s knowledge of and engagement with the devotional form.

Gloss Note

See Ross, Sarah C. E., “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then Will I Hallelujahs Ever Sing’” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): pp. 99–119.

10

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

1

My Soul! why art though full of trouble?

My soul, why art thou full of trouble

My soul! why art thou full of trouble?

2

And overwhelm’d with griefe:

And overwhelmed with grief?

Gloss Note

Along with l. 1, see Ps. 43:5.

And overwhelm’d with griefe:

3

Dost thou not know this

Physical Note

imperfectly erased apostrophe between the “d” and “s”

World’s a bubble?

Dost thou not know this world’s a bubble

Dost thou not know this Worlds a

Critical Note

Punning on both figurative (fragile and transitory) and literal meanings (earth’s hemisphere as a gas-filled cavity), see Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum. Possible literary reference to Bacon’s “The life of man”: “The World’s a bubble, and the life of man / Less than a span, / In his conception wretched, from the womb, / So to the tomb;” (ll. 1–4 in Sixteenth Century Verse. Ed. Emrys Jones. Oxford, 1991, p. 697).

bubble?

4

And cannot Yield Relief.

And cannot yield relief?

And cannot Yield relief.

5

This life’s a Dream, of Mirth, or Sorrow;

This life’s a dream of mirth or sorrow

This life’s a Dream, of Mirth, or Sorrow;

6

Inveloped in Night:

Envelopéd in night;

Gloss Note

Enveloped

Inveloped in Night:

7

The Resurrection’s like the Morrow,

The

Gloss Note

in Christianity, the rising to life of all dead people at the Last Judgment, the time when souls rejoin bodies

Resurrection’s like the morrow,

The Resurrection’s like the

Gloss Note

Tomorrow

Morrow,

8

As full of Life as Light.

As full of life as light.

As full of Life as

Critical Note

See Ps. 30:5: “weeping may endure for a night, but ioy commeth in the morning.”

Light.

9

Then Sleight theſe Terren hopes, as toyes;

Then slight these

Gloss Note

earthly

terrene hopes, as

Gloss Note

trivial things

toys;

Then sleight these

Gloss Note

Earthly

Terren hopes, as

Gloss Note

Something trivial, having little value; but also used to refer specifically to speech, writing or songs

toyes;

10

Think thou of better things:

Think thou of better things.

Think thou of better things:

11

ffrom all her Pleaſures, and her Joyes,

From all

Gloss Note

the Earth’s

her pleasures and her joys,

From all her Pleasures, and her Joyes,

12

Nought but Repentance

Physical Note

“ſ” possibly added later; “p” written over imperfectly erased letter with ascender

ſprings.

Nought but repentance springs.

Naught but repentance springs.

13

Physical Note

horizontal line above; this line is not separated by a gap from the line above

Thy Mortall Nature nere deplore,

Thy mortal nature ne’er deplore,

Thy Mortall Nature ne’re deplore,

14

Let Death work all her Spight:

Let Death work all her spite;

Let Death work all her spight:

15

ffor thou shalt live, when Deaths noe more

For thou shalt live, when Death’s no more,

For thou shalt live, when

Gloss Note

A reference to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X “Death, Be Not Proud”; see also Hosea 13:14

Deaths noe more

16

In everlasting Light.

In

Gloss Note

Heaven

everlasting light.

In everlasting Light.

17

What though thou into Aſhes turn,

What, though thou into ashes turn,

What though thou into Ashes turn,

18

Thy Dust will find A Tomb:

Thy dust will find a tomb

Thy Dust will find A Tomb:

19

Within Some (ſafe and) Silent Urn:

Within some safe and silent urn

Within some (safe and) silent Urn:

20

In black Oblivians Womb.

In black Oblivion’s womb.

In black Oblivians Womb.

whether

21

Whether thou, Water, dos’t increaſe,

Whether thou water dost increase,

Whether thou, Water, dost increase,

22

Or ffier, or Ayer, or Earth:

Or

Critical Note

in classical tradition, the four constitutive elements of the world and body; here Pulter understands her own death as contributing to the expansion and imbalance of one of these elements

fire, or air, or earth;

Gloss Note

Water, Fire, Air and Earth are the four classical elements of Empedoclean physics.

Or Fier, or Ayer, or Earth:

23

Yet am I Sure, to Rest in Peace;

Yet am I sure to rest in peace;

Yet am I sure to rest in Peace;

24

My Soul aſſumes her Birth.

My soul

Gloss Note

adopts; receives; takes upon oneself; puts on (a garb, aspect, form, or character)

assumes her birth.

My soul assumes her Birth.

25

And if Pythagoras Saw Clear,

And if

Gloss Note

Greek philosopher known for his theory of the transmigration of souls at death (the word “transmigration” appears in the next stanza). In this theory, souls could transfer across life forms, from human to animal. Pulter assures her soul that it will not take the low form of a frog, even if Pythagoras is right in principle about transmigration.

Pythagoras saw clear,

And if Pythagoras saw Clear,

26

Of this thou mayest Reſolve;

Of this thou mayest resolve:

Of this thou Mayest resolve;

27

Som Lamb, or Dove, then to apear,

Some lamb, or dove, then to appear,

Som

Gloss Note

Animals that symbolize purity and peace in Judeo-Christian imagery

Lamb, or Dove then to apear,

28

Noe Toad Shall thee Involve:

No toad shall thee

Gloss Note

entangle, envelop

involve.

Noe

Gloss Note

Since the 16th century, symbolizing something loathsome

Toad shall thee Involve:

29

Then whether Diſſolution,

Then whether

Critical Note

For the meter to be consistent in the first three lines of this stanza, the word “dissolution” as well as “transmigration,” and “revolution” (in the next lines) may have been pronounced each with five syllables (“tion” stretching into two syllables in each).

dissolution,

Then whether Dissolution,

30

Or Tranſmigration:

Or transmigration,

Or

Gloss Note

May refer simply to the transition from life to death, but can also refer to the transmigration of the soul or metempsychosis, in which the soul passes into a different body.

Transmigration:

31

Or rowling Revolution,

Or rolling revolution,

Or

Gloss Note

Compare to The Revolution [Poem 16] and Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47].

rowling Revolution,

32

All ends in thy Salvation.

All ends in thy salvation.

All ends in thy salvation.

33

Nothing Shall then aflict my Soul,

Nothing shall then afflict my soul

Nothing shall then aflict my soul,

34

That paſſeth here below:

That passeth here below;

That passeth here below:

35

ffor I above, (the Highest Pole

For I above the highest

Gloss Note

point of reference in the sky around which stars appear to revolve, or the point at which the earth’s axis meets heavens (derived from Ptolemy)

pole

For I above, (the Highest Pole

36

Or Star) er’e long shall Goe.

Or star

Gloss Note

before

ere long shall go.

Or Star,) er’e long shall Goe.

37

fforget I Shall then my Sad Story,

Forget I shall, then, my

Gloss Note

life, narrative

sad story;

Forget I shall then my sad story,

38

And all my past annoys:

And all my past annoys

And all my past annoys:

39

Shall Swallow’d bee of infinite Glory,

Shall swallowed be

Gloss Note

in

of infinite glory

Shall swallow’d bee of infinite Glory,

40

And Crownd with endleſ Joys.

And

Critical Note

glorified, blessed; adorned with; rewarded. See Revelation 2:10: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”

crowned with endless joys.

And Crownd with endles Joys.

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 

How do you comfort a troubled soul? Here, the answer rests in the promise of a future radical change, in metamorphosis as both a religious and poetic principle. While in neighboring poems, the speaker urges the soul to be patient until the glories of the afterlife, or to freely let go of its earthly body, here she offers reassurance that habitation on earth is merely temporary. The consolation offered is superficially cast in terms of a standard Christian duality of body versus soul. But, in fact, Pulter complicates the matter by warning the soul that its “mortal nature” will corrode to ashes and disintegrate to the fundamental Aristotelian elements. The body and soul emerge less as distinctive entities than fungible elements making up a being. This disruption of Christian orthodoxy continues when the speaker conditionally credits the Pythagorean theory that the soul transmigrates at death into the body of another creature. If Pythagoras is right, she reassures her anxious soul, it surely will evolve into a lamb or dove (Christian icons) rather than a lowly toad. Although the poem ends with the comforting finale in which the soul is swallowed into heaven with amnesia about its earthly existence, the core principle celebrated by the poem is the vitality of transmutation, registered in the poem’s content, in its uncertain shifts between first-and second-person address (which confuse soul and body), and in its formal rhyme words: “Then whether dissolution, / Or transmigration, / Or rolling revolution, / All ends in thy salvation.” The final twist is Pulter’s decision to write in what was known as “common measure,” a popular ballad form of writing. The move away from rhymed couplets to quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter performs Pulter’s investment in revolutions of form.

Line number 7

  Gloss note 

in Christianity, the rising to life of all dead people at the Last Judgment, the time when souls rejoin bodies

Line number 9

  Gloss note 

earthly

Line number 9

  Gloss note 

trivial things

Line number 11

  Gloss note 

the Earth’s

Line number 16

  Gloss note 

Heaven

Line number 22

  Critical note 

in classical tradition, the four constitutive elements of the world and body; here Pulter understands her own death as contributing to the expansion and imbalance of one of these elements

Line number 24

  Gloss note 

adopts; receives; takes upon oneself; puts on (a garb, aspect, form, or character)

Line number 25

  Gloss note 

Greek philosopher known for his theory of the transmigration of souls at death (the word “transmigration” appears in the next stanza). In this theory, souls could transfer across life forms, from human to animal. Pulter assures her soul that it will not take the low form of a frog, even if Pythagoras is right in principle about transmigration.

Line number 28

  Gloss note 

entangle, envelop

Line number 29

  Critical note 

For the meter to be consistent in the first three lines of this stanza, the word “dissolution” as well as “transmigration,” and “revolution” (in the next lines) may have been pronounced each with five syllables (“tion” stretching into two syllables in each).

Line number 35

  Gloss note 

point of reference in the sky around which stars appear to revolve, or the point at which the earth’s axis meets heavens (derived from Ptolemy)

Line number 36

  Gloss note 

before

Line number 37

  Gloss note 

life, narrative

Line number 39

  Gloss note 

in

Line number 40

  Critical note 

glorified, blessed; adorned with; rewarded. See Revelation 2:10: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”

Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.

X (Close panel)

Elemental Edition

Elemental Edition

[Untitled]

My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble?

[Untitled]

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

In order to provide another perspective on Pulter’s poem and situate it within the period, the original spelling and—perhaps more significantly—punctuation has been preserved in this edition. Despite the fact that early modern spelling, punctuation and capitalization rules were non-standardized in the period, Stefan Christian (2012: 82) notes that Pulter’s punctuation was probably chosen by a scribe in consultation with the poet.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

How do you comfort a troubled soul? Here, the answer rests in the promise of a future radical change, in metamorphosis as both a religious and poetic principle. While in neighboring poems, the speaker urges the soul to be patient until the glories of the afterlife, or to freely let go of its earthly body, here she offers reassurance that habitation on earth is merely temporary. The consolation offered is superficially cast in terms of a standard Christian duality of body versus soul. But, in fact, Pulter complicates the matter by warning the soul that its “mortal nature” will corrode to ashes and disintegrate to the fundamental Aristotelian elements. The body and soul emerge less as distinctive entities than fungible elements making up a being. This disruption of Christian orthodoxy continues when the speaker conditionally credits the Pythagorean theory that the soul transmigrates at death into the body of another creature. If Pythagoras is right, she reassures her anxious soul, it surely will evolve into a lamb or dove (Christian icons) rather than a lowly toad. Although the poem ends with the comforting finale in which the soul is swallowed into heaven with amnesia about its earthly existence, the core principle celebrated by the poem is the vitality of transmutation, registered in the poem’s content, in its uncertain shifts between first-and second-person address (which confuse soul and body), and in its formal rhyme words: “Then whether dissolution, / Or transmigration, / Or rolling revolution, / All ends in thy salvation.” The final twist is Pulter’s decision to write in what was known as “common measure,” a popular ballad form of writing. The move away from rhymed couplets to quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter performs Pulter’s investment in revolutions of form.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

In this poem, the speaker addresses her own soul and, in so doing, engages with a number of devotional and poetic traditions without letting those traditions confine her. On the one hand, Pulter’s poem can be read in relation to the body and soul dialogue poem, a tradition rooted in medieval literature but still popular in the seventeenth century, as attested by Anne Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit” and Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body.” Alternatively, her poem could also be read within the devotional tradition of the apostrophe to the soul and be compared to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146, which begins, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.”

Gloss Note

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146. Poetry Foundation, l. 1.

1 Line 15 likely points to John Donne’s famous apostrophe to death in his holy sonnet “Death be not proud”: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

Gloss Note

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 10, “Death, be not proud.” Luminarium.org, ll. 13–14.

2 These somewhat diverse devotional traditions share underlying assumptions about the body/soul dichotomy and the need to vocally and actively repent. Such poems frequently use imagery of violence to articulate the soul’s need to be brought back into submission to God.

Gloss Note

Nikolina Hatton, Curation Metaphors of Violence in Devotional Poetry.

3 This devotional poetic tradition often, as Abe Davies has pointed out, functions as a means of disciplining the speaker and the reader.

Gloss Note

See Abe Davies, Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 121–162.

4 Pulter’s use of the apostrophe to the soul in this and other poems (O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul [Poem 28], The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge [Poem 39], Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47]) intervenes in this tradition of addressing the soul and offers an alternative approach: instead of admonishing the soul (or body) to repentance, she uses the devotional form to provide comfort and consolation to her soul as she meditates on the promise of the resurrection.

The speaker’s consolatory tone and poetic stance in this poem bear similarities to her tone in another subset of her poems that are modeled on the biblical psalms, such as The Desire [Poem 18] and How Long Shall My Dejected Soul [Poem 24].

Gloss Note

See Hatton, Nikolina, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): pp. 364–83.

5 Although not addressed to God, this poem itself has a number of features that align it with the psalms, not the least of which is her opening (ll. 1-2) which bears a striking similarity to Ps. 43: 5: “Why art thou cast downe, O my soule? and why art thou disquieted within me?”

Gloss Note

Psalms 43:5. The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, (London, 1611). EEBO. This is a refrain that echoes similar verses in Psalms 42:5 and 11. For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to focus on only one. See also Nikolina Hatton, Curation Pulter’s Psalmic Intertexts.

6 Additionally, the poem’s meter, quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming abab, link it with The Whole Book of Psalms, i.e., the “Sternhold and Hopkins” metrical psalter, a psalter often used in English church services for singing psalms to popular tunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Gloss Note

Beth Quitslund, “The Psalm Book” in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, eds. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 203–11.

7 Poem 40 is the only instance in her manuscript in which she turns to this ‘common meter.’ But here too, as with her consolatory apostrophe to the soul, the speaker destabilizes the expectations of her reader.

The first four stanzas contain references to the psalms and Donne, and the poem continues to the end in a rough version of this popular meter, but Pulter’s content engages with more heterodox ideas about the body and soul than these formal allusions suggest. In castigating the world in these opening stanzas, Pulter at first seems to be endorsing a material/spiritual dichotomy in which the soul must endure a “terrene” (l. 9) existence before being liberated to heaven, but the poem also presents alternatives to this view. In line 13, she points to the soul’s “Mortall Nature,” potentially signaling an unorthodox belief that the soul dies with the body.

Gloss Note

See Kenneth Graham’s Curation Christian Mortalism from the Bible to Pulter.

8 In stanzas five through seven, she continues this heterodox exploration by discussing a number of theories of the afterlife that have their sources outside the Christian tradition. From the impersonal yet oddly gendered “black Oblivion’s womb” in line 20 to references to Empedoclean physics (ll. 21–22) or even Pythagorian reincarnation (ll. 25–28), the speaker never settles on one solution. Perhaps these ideas allow the poet to imagine alternatives to the body/soul/self problem with which so much Christian devotional poetry is plagued, a supposition attested by the subtle shift in pronouns from “thou” to “I,” beginning in line 23.

Gloss Note

For more on the body/soul problem, see Liza Blake’s Curation Body, Soul, Dust.

9 Pulter’s use of conjunctions further hints at her attitude toward all these possibilities. Her reiteration of “or” suggests her openness to other heterodox possibilities, while “whether” and “if” are always followed by assurances that even should these theories be true, she is assured of Christian resurrection: “All ends in thy Salvation” (l. 32). Establishing this belief early on (see ll. 7–8) and reiterating it throughout provides a firm foundation from which she can contemplate less traditional understandings of the body and soul without anxiety.

In the last three stanzas, the poem looks to a future—with a reiteration of “then” (ll. 29, 33, 37)—in which Pulter’s pain will have been erased. Here, the speaker returns to a mode recognizable in the biblical psalms, one that is consolatory, even elegiac, an attempt to offer her soul comfort in its distress. Both Psalms 42 and 43 end on such a note, with the speaker imagining a future state of thanksgiving. Rather than thematizing penitence, both of these psalms are more concerned with the speaker lamenting the lack of justice in her situation and articulating a longing to be returned to a state of community. In fact, Pulter’s entire poem may be an expanded meditation on Ps. 43:5, the second part of which continues: “hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” Similarly to the biblical psalmist in this verse, the poet opens her poem with an apostrophe to the soul, asking why she despairs, writes an extended meditation on her hope of resurrection (whatever form it takes) and finishes with an expression of faith in future joy in these final stanzas. This latter upward movement towards imagining future hope, although arguably inspired by the psalms, is another hallmark of devotional poetry, particularly that of the poems of George Herbert, once again signaling Pulter’s knowledge of and engagement with the devotional form.

Gloss Note

See Ross, Sarah C. E., “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then Will I Hallelujahs Ever Sing’” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): pp. 99–119.

10

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

1

My Soul! why art though full of trouble?

My soul, why art thou full of trouble

My soul! why art thou full of trouble?

2

And overwhelm’d with griefe:

And overwhelmed with grief?

Gloss Note

Along with l. 1, see Ps. 43:5.

And overwhelm’d with griefe:

3

Dost thou not know this

Physical Note

imperfectly erased apostrophe between the “d” and “s”

World’s a bubble?

Dost thou not know this world’s a bubble

Dost thou not know this Worlds a

Critical Note

Punning on both figurative (fragile and transitory) and literal meanings (earth’s hemisphere as a gas-filled cavity), see Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum. Possible literary reference to Bacon’s “The life of man”: “The World’s a bubble, and the life of man / Less than a span, / In his conception wretched, from the womb, / So to the tomb;” (ll. 1–4 in Sixteenth Century Verse. Ed. Emrys Jones. Oxford, 1991, p. 697).

bubble?

4

And cannot Yield Relief.

And cannot yield relief?

And cannot Yield relief.

5

This life’s a Dream, of Mirth, or Sorrow;

This life’s a dream of mirth or sorrow

This life’s a Dream, of Mirth, or Sorrow;

6

Inveloped in Night:

Envelopéd in night;

Gloss Note

Enveloped

Inveloped in Night:

7

The Resurrection’s like the Morrow,

The

Gloss Note

in Christianity, the rising to life of all dead people at the Last Judgment, the time when souls rejoin bodies

Resurrection’s like the morrow,

The Resurrection’s like the

Gloss Note

Tomorrow

Morrow,

8

As full of Life as Light.

As full of life as light.

As full of Life as

Critical Note

See Ps. 30:5: “weeping may endure for a night, but ioy commeth in the morning.”

Light.

9

Then Sleight theſe Terren hopes, as toyes;

Then slight these

Gloss Note

earthly

terrene hopes, as

Gloss Note

trivial things

toys;

Then sleight these

Gloss Note

Earthly

Terren hopes, as

Gloss Note

Something trivial, having little value; but also used to refer specifically to speech, writing or songs

toyes;

10

Think thou of better things:

Think thou of better things.

Think thou of better things:

11

ffrom all her Pleaſures, and her Joyes,

From all

Gloss Note

the Earth’s

her pleasures and her joys,

From all her Pleasures, and her Joyes,

12

Nought but Repentance

Physical Note

“ſ” possibly added later; “p” written over imperfectly erased letter with ascender

ſprings.

Nought but repentance springs.

Naught but repentance springs.

13

Physical Note

horizontal line above; this line is not separated by a gap from the line above

Thy Mortall Nature nere deplore,

Thy mortal nature ne’er deplore,

Thy Mortall Nature ne’re deplore,

14

Let Death work all her Spight:

Let Death work all her spite;

Let Death work all her spight:

15

ffor thou shalt live, when Deaths noe more

For thou shalt live, when Death’s no more,

For thou shalt live, when

Gloss Note

A reference to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X “Death, Be Not Proud”; see also Hosea 13:14

Deaths noe more

16

In everlasting Light.

In

Gloss Note

Heaven

everlasting light.

In everlasting Light.

17

What though thou into Aſhes turn,

What, though thou into ashes turn,

What though thou into Ashes turn,

18

Thy Dust will find A Tomb:

Thy dust will find a tomb

Thy Dust will find A Tomb:

19

Within Some (ſafe and) Silent Urn:

Within some safe and silent urn

Within some (safe and) silent Urn:

20

In black Oblivians Womb.

In black Oblivion’s womb.

In black Oblivians Womb.

whether

21

Whether thou, Water, dos’t increaſe,

Whether thou water dost increase,

Whether thou, Water, dost increase,

22

Or ffier, or Ayer, or Earth:

Or

Critical Note

in classical tradition, the four constitutive elements of the world and body; here Pulter understands her own death as contributing to the expansion and imbalance of one of these elements

fire, or air, or earth;

Gloss Note

Water, Fire, Air and Earth are the four classical elements of Empedoclean physics.

Or Fier, or Ayer, or Earth:

23

Yet am I Sure, to Rest in Peace;

Yet am I sure to rest in peace;

Yet am I sure to rest in Peace;

24

My Soul aſſumes her Birth.

My soul

Gloss Note

adopts; receives; takes upon oneself; puts on (a garb, aspect, form, or character)

assumes her birth.

My soul assumes her Birth.

25

And if Pythagoras Saw Clear,

And if

Gloss Note

Greek philosopher known for his theory of the transmigration of souls at death (the word “transmigration” appears in the next stanza). In this theory, souls could transfer across life forms, from human to animal. Pulter assures her soul that it will not take the low form of a frog, even if Pythagoras is right in principle about transmigration.

Pythagoras saw clear,

And if Pythagoras saw Clear,

26

Of this thou mayest Reſolve;

Of this thou mayest resolve:

Of this thou Mayest resolve;

27

Som Lamb, or Dove, then to apear,

Some lamb, or dove, then to appear,

Som

Gloss Note

Animals that symbolize purity and peace in Judeo-Christian imagery

Lamb, or Dove then to apear,

28

Noe Toad Shall thee Involve:

No toad shall thee

Gloss Note

entangle, envelop

involve.

Noe

Gloss Note

Since the 16th century, symbolizing something loathsome

Toad shall thee Involve:

29

Then whether Diſſolution,

Then whether

Critical Note

For the meter to be consistent in the first three lines of this stanza, the word “dissolution” as well as “transmigration,” and “revolution” (in the next lines) may have been pronounced each with five syllables (“tion” stretching into two syllables in each).

dissolution,

Then whether Dissolution,

30

Or Tranſmigration:

Or transmigration,

Or

Gloss Note

May refer simply to the transition from life to death, but can also refer to the transmigration of the soul or metempsychosis, in which the soul passes into a different body.

Transmigration:

31

Or rowling Revolution,

Or rolling revolution,

Or

Gloss Note

Compare to The Revolution [Poem 16] and Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47].

rowling Revolution,

32

All ends in thy Salvation.

All ends in thy salvation.

All ends in thy salvation.

33

Nothing Shall then aflict my Soul,

Nothing shall then afflict my soul

Nothing shall then aflict my soul,

34

That paſſeth here below:

That passeth here below;

That passeth here below:

35

ffor I above, (the Highest Pole

For I above the highest

Gloss Note

point of reference in the sky around which stars appear to revolve, or the point at which the earth’s axis meets heavens (derived from Ptolemy)

pole

For I above, (the Highest Pole

36

Or Star) er’e long shall Goe.

Or star

Gloss Note

before

ere long shall go.

Or Star,) er’e long shall Goe.

37

fforget I Shall then my Sad Story,

Forget I shall, then, my

Gloss Note

life, narrative

sad story;

Forget I shall then my sad story,

38

And all my past annoys:

And all my past annoys

And all my past annoys:

39

Shall Swallow’d bee of infinite Glory,

Shall swallowed be

Gloss Note

in

of infinite glory

Shall swallow’d bee of infinite Glory,

40

And Crownd with endleſ Joys.

And

Critical Note

glorified, blessed; adorned with; rewarded. See Revelation 2:10: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”

crowned with endless joys.

And Crownd with endles Joys.

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Notes: Amplified Edition

  Editorial note 

In order to provide another perspective on Pulter’s poem and situate it within the period, the original spelling and—perhaps more significantly—punctuation has been preserved in this edition. Despite the fact that early modern spelling, punctuation and capitalization rules were non-standardized in the period, Stefan Christian (2012: 82) notes that Pulter’s punctuation was probably chosen by a scribe in consultation with the poet.

  Headnote 

In this poem, the speaker addresses her own soul and, in so doing, engages with a number of devotional and poetic traditions without letting those traditions confine her. On the one hand, Pulter’s poem can be read in relation to the body and soul dialogue poem, a tradition rooted in medieval literature but still popular in the seventeenth century, as attested by Anne Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit” and Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body.” Alternatively, her poem could also be read within the devotional tradition of the apostrophe to the soul and be compared to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146, which begins, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.”

Gloss Note

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146. Poetry Foundation, l. 1.

1 Line 15 likely points to John Donne’s famous apostrophe to death in his holy sonnet “Death be not proud”: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

Gloss Note

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 10, “Death, be not proud.” Luminarium.org, ll. 13–14.

2 These somewhat diverse devotional traditions share underlying assumptions about the body/soul dichotomy and the need to vocally and actively repent. Such poems frequently use imagery of violence to articulate the soul’s need to be brought back into submission to God.

Gloss Note

Nikolina Hatton, Curation Metaphors of Violence in Devotional Poetry.

3 This devotional poetic tradition often, as Abe Davies has pointed out, functions as a means of disciplining the speaker and the reader.

Gloss Note

See Abe Davies, Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 121–162.

4 Pulter’s use of the apostrophe to the soul in this and other poems (O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul [Poem 28], The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge [Poem 39], Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47]) intervenes in this tradition of addressing the soul and offers an alternative approach: instead of admonishing the soul (or body) to repentance, she uses the devotional form to provide comfort and consolation to her soul as she meditates on the promise of the resurrection.

The speaker’s consolatory tone and poetic stance in this poem bear similarities to her tone in another subset of her poems that are modeled on the biblical psalms, such as The Desire [Poem 18] and How Long Shall My Dejected Soul [Poem 24].

Gloss Note

See Hatton, Nikolina, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): pp. 364–83.

5 Although not addressed to God, this poem itself has a number of features that align it with the psalms, not the least of which is her opening (ll. 1-2) which bears a striking similarity to Ps. 43: 5: “Why art thou cast downe, O my soule? and why art thou disquieted within me?”

Gloss Note

Psalms 43:5. The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, (London, 1611). EEBO. This is a refrain that echoes similar verses in Psalms 42:5 and 11. For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to focus on only one. See also Nikolina Hatton, Curation Pulter’s Psalmic Intertexts.

6 Additionally, the poem’s meter, quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming abab, link it with The Whole Book of Psalms, i.e., the “Sternhold and Hopkins” metrical psalter, a psalter often used in English church services for singing psalms to popular tunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Gloss Note

Beth Quitslund, “The Psalm Book” in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, eds. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 203–11.

7 Poem 40 is the only instance in her manuscript in which she turns to this ‘common meter.’ But here too, as with her consolatory apostrophe to the soul, the speaker destabilizes the expectations of her reader.

The first four stanzas contain references to the psalms and Donne, and the poem continues to the end in a rough version of this popular meter, but Pulter’s content engages with more heterodox ideas about the body and soul than these formal allusions suggest. In castigating the world in these opening stanzas, Pulter at first seems to be endorsing a material/spiritual dichotomy in which the soul must endure a “terrene” (l. 9) existence before being liberated to heaven, but the poem also presents alternatives to this view. In line 13, she points to the soul’s “Mortall Nature,” potentially signaling an unorthodox belief that the soul dies with the body.

Gloss Note

See Kenneth Graham’s Curation Christian Mortalism from the Bible to Pulter.

8 In stanzas five through seven, she continues this heterodox exploration by discussing a number of theories of the afterlife that have their sources outside the Christian tradition. From the impersonal yet oddly gendered “black Oblivion’s womb” in line 20 to references to Empedoclean physics (ll. 21–22) or even Pythagorian reincarnation (ll. 25–28), the speaker never settles on one solution. Perhaps these ideas allow the poet to imagine alternatives to the body/soul/self problem with which so much Christian devotional poetry is plagued, a supposition attested by the subtle shift in pronouns from “thou” to “I,” beginning in line 23.

Gloss Note

For more on the body/soul problem, see Liza Blake’s Curation Body, Soul, Dust.

9 Pulter’s use of conjunctions further hints at her attitude toward all these possibilities. Her reiteration of “or” suggests her openness to other heterodox possibilities, while “whether” and “if” are always followed by assurances that even should these theories be true, she is assured of Christian resurrection: “All ends in thy Salvation” (l. 32). Establishing this belief early on (see ll. 7–8) and reiterating it throughout provides a firm foundation from which she can contemplate less traditional understandings of the body and soul without anxiety.

In the last three stanzas, the poem looks to a future—with a reiteration of “then” (ll. 29, 33, 37)—in which Pulter’s pain will have been erased. Here, the speaker returns to a mode recognizable in the biblical psalms, one that is consolatory, even elegiac, an attempt to offer her soul comfort in its distress. Both Psalms 42 and 43 end on such a note, with the speaker imagining a future state of thanksgiving. Rather than thematizing penitence, both of these psalms are more concerned with the speaker lamenting the lack of justice in her situation and articulating a longing to be returned to a state of community. In fact, Pulter’s entire poem may be an expanded meditation on Ps. 43:5, the second part of which continues: “hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” Similarly to the biblical psalmist in this verse, the poet opens her poem with an apostrophe to the soul, asking why she despairs, writes an extended meditation on her hope of resurrection (whatever form it takes) and finishes with an expression of faith in future joy in these final stanzas. This latter upward movement towards imagining future hope, although arguably inspired by the psalms, is another hallmark of devotional poetry, particularly that of the poems of George Herbert, once again signaling Pulter’s knowledge of and engagement with the devotional form.

Gloss Note

See Ross, Sarah C. E., “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then Will I Hallelujahs Ever Sing’” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): pp. 99–119.

10

Line number 2

  Gloss note 

Along with l. 1, see Ps. 43:5.

Line number 3

  Critical note 

Punning on both figurative (fragile and transitory) and literal meanings (earth’s hemisphere as a gas-filled cavity), see Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum. Possible literary reference to Bacon’s “The life of man”: “The World’s a bubble, and the life of man / Less than a span, / In his conception wretched, from the womb, / So to the tomb;” (ll. 1–4 in Sixteenth Century Verse. Ed. Emrys Jones. Oxford, 1991, p. 697).

Line number 6

  Gloss note 

Enveloped

Line number 7

  Gloss note 

Tomorrow

Line number 8

  Critical note 

See Ps. 30:5: “weeping may endure for a night, but ioy commeth in the morning.”

Line number 9

  Gloss note 

Earthly

Line number 9

  Gloss note 

Something trivial, having little value; but also used to refer specifically to speech, writing or songs

Line number 15

  Gloss note 

A reference to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X “Death, Be Not Proud”; see also Hosea 13:14

Line number 22

  Gloss note 

Water, Fire, Air and Earth are the four classical elements of Empedoclean physics.

Line number 27

  Gloss note 

Animals that symbolize purity and peace in Judeo-Christian imagery

Line number 28

  Gloss note 

Since the 16th century, symbolizing something loathsome

Line number 30

  Gloss note 

May refer simply to the transition from life to death, but can also refer to the transmigration of the soul or metempsychosis, in which the soul passes into a different body.

Line number 31

  Gloss note 

Compare to The Revolution [Poem 16] and Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47].

Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.

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Amplified Edition

Amplified Edition

[Untitled]

My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble?

[Untitled]

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.

— Nikolina Hatton

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.

— Nikolina Hatton

In order to provide another perspective on Pulter’s poem and situate it within the period, the original spelling and—perhaps more significantly—punctuation has been preserved in this edition. Despite the fact that early modern spelling, punctuation and capitalization rules were non-standardized in the period, Stefan Christian (2012: 82) notes that Pulter’s punctuation was probably chosen by a scribe in consultation with the poet.

— Nikolina Hatton

How do you comfort a troubled soul? Here, the answer rests in the promise of a future radical change, in metamorphosis as both a religious and poetic principle. While in neighboring poems, the speaker urges the soul to be patient until the glories of the afterlife, or to freely let go of its earthly body, here she offers reassurance that habitation on earth is merely temporary. The consolation offered is superficially cast in terms of a standard Christian duality of body versus soul. But, in fact, Pulter complicates the matter by warning the soul that its “mortal nature” will corrode to ashes and disintegrate to the fundamental Aristotelian elements. The body and soul emerge less as distinctive entities than fungible elements making up a being. This disruption of Christian orthodoxy continues when the speaker conditionally credits the Pythagorean theory that the soul transmigrates at death into the body of another creature. If Pythagoras is right, she reassures her anxious soul, it surely will evolve into a lamb or dove (Christian icons) rather than a lowly toad. Although the poem ends with the comforting finale in which the soul is swallowed into heaven with amnesia about its earthly existence, the core principle celebrated by the poem is the vitality of transmutation, registered in the poem’s content, in its uncertain shifts between first-and second-person address (which confuse soul and body), and in its formal rhyme words: “Then whether dissolution, / Or transmigration, / Or rolling revolution, / All ends in thy salvation.” The final twist is Pulter’s decision to write in what was known as “common measure,” a popular ballad form of writing. The move away from rhymed couplets to quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter performs Pulter’s investment in revolutions of form.

— Nikolina Hatton

In this poem, the speaker addresses her own soul and, in so doing, engages with a number of devotional and poetic traditions without letting those traditions confine her. On the one hand, Pulter’s poem can be read in relation to the body and soul dialogue poem, a tradition rooted in medieval literature but still popular in the seventeenth century, as attested by Anne Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit” and Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body.” Alternatively, her poem could also be read within the devotional tradition of the apostrophe to the soul and be compared to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146, which begins, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.”

Gloss Note

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146. Poetry Foundation, l. 1.

1 Line 15 likely points to John Donne’s famous apostrophe to death in his holy sonnet “Death be not proud”: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

Gloss Note

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 10, “Death, be not proud.” Luminarium.org, ll. 13–14.

2 These somewhat diverse devotional traditions share underlying assumptions about the body/soul dichotomy and the need to vocally and actively repent. Such poems frequently use imagery of violence to articulate the soul’s need to be brought back into submission to God.

Gloss Note

Nikolina Hatton, Curation Metaphors of Violence in Devotional Poetry.

3 This devotional poetic tradition often, as Abe Davies has pointed out, functions as a means of disciplining the speaker and the reader.

Gloss Note

See Abe Davies, Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 121–162.

4 Pulter’s use of the apostrophe to the soul in this and other poems (O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul [Poem 28], The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge [Poem 39], Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47]) intervenes in this tradition of addressing the soul and offers an alternative approach: instead of admonishing the soul (or body) to repentance, she uses the devotional form to provide comfort and consolation to her soul as she meditates on the promise of the resurrection.

The speaker’s consolatory tone and poetic stance in this poem bear similarities to her tone in another subset of her poems that are modeled on the biblical psalms, such as The Desire [Poem 18] and How Long Shall My Dejected Soul [Poem 24].

Gloss Note

See Hatton, Nikolina, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): pp. 364–83.

5 Although not addressed to God, this poem itself has a number of features that align it with the psalms, not the least of which is her opening (ll. 1-2) which bears a striking similarity to Ps. 43: 5: “Why art thou cast downe, O my soule? and why art thou disquieted within me?”

Gloss Note

Psalms 43:5. The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, (London, 1611). EEBO. This is a refrain that echoes similar verses in Psalms 42:5 and 11. For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to focus on only one. See also Nikolina Hatton, Curation Pulter’s Psalmic Intertexts.

6 Additionally, the poem’s meter, quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming abab, link it with The Whole Book of Psalms, i.e., the “Sternhold and Hopkins” metrical psalter, a psalter often used in English church services for singing psalms to popular tunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Gloss Note

Beth Quitslund, “The Psalm Book” in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, eds. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 203–11.

7 Poem 40 is the only instance in her manuscript in which she turns to this ‘common meter.’ But here too, as with her consolatory apostrophe to the soul, the speaker destabilizes the expectations of her reader.

The first four stanzas contain references to the psalms and Donne, and the poem continues to the end in a rough version of this popular meter, but Pulter’s content engages with more heterodox ideas about the body and soul than these formal allusions suggest. In castigating the world in these opening stanzas, Pulter at first seems to be endorsing a material/spiritual dichotomy in which the soul must endure a “terrene” (l. 9) existence before being liberated to heaven, but the poem also presents alternatives to this view. In line 13, she points to the soul’s “Mortall Nature,” potentially signaling an unorthodox belief that the soul dies with the body.

Gloss Note

See Kenneth Graham’s Curation Christian Mortalism from the Bible to Pulter.

8 In stanzas five through seven, she continues this heterodox exploration by discussing a number of theories of the afterlife that have their sources outside the Christian tradition. From the impersonal yet oddly gendered “black Oblivion’s womb” in line 20 to references to Empedoclean physics (ll. 21–22) or even Pythagorian reincarnation (ll. 25–28), the speaker never settles on one solution. Perhaps these ideas allow the poet to imagine alternatives to the body/soul/self problem with which so much Christian devotional poetry is plagued, a supposition attested by the subtle shift in pronouns from “thou” to “I,” beginning in line 23.

Gloss Note

For more on the body/soul problem, see Liza Blake’s Curation Body, Soul, Dust.

9 Pulter’s use of conjunctions further hints at her attitude toward all these possibilities. Her reiteration of “or” suggests her openness to other heterodox possibilities, while “whether” and “if” are always followed by assurances that even should these theories be true, she is assured of Christian resurrection: “All ends in thy Salvation” (l. 32). Establishing this belief early on (see ll. 7–8) and reiterating it throughout provides a firm foundation from which she can contemplate less traditional understandings of the body and soul without anxiety.

In the last three stanzas, the poem looks to a future—with a reiteration of “then” (ll. 29, 33, 37)—in which Pulter’s pain will have been erased. Here, the speaker returns to a mode recognizable in the biblical psalms, one that is consolatory, even elegiac, an attempt to offer her soul comfort in its distress. Both Psalms 42 and 43 end on such a note, with the speaker imagining a future state of thanksgiving. Rather than thematizing penitence, both of these psalms are more concerned with the speaker lamenting the lack of justice in her situation and articulating a longing to be returned to a state of community. In fact, Pulter’s entire poem may be an expanded meditation on Ps. 43:5, the second part of which continues: “hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” Similarly to the biblical psalmist in this verse, the poet opens her poem with an apostrophe to the soul, asking why she despairs, writes an extended meditation on her hope of resurrection (whatever form it takes) and finishes with an expression of faith in future joy in these final stanzas. This latter upward movement towards imagining future hope, although arguably inspired by the psalms, is another hallmark of devotional poetry, particularly that of the poems of George Herbert, once again signaling Pulter’s knowledge of and engagement with the devotional form.

Gloss Note

See Ross, Sarah C. E., “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then Will I Hallelujahs Ever Sing’” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): pp. 99–119.

10

— Nikolina Hatton

1

My Soul! why art though full of trouble?

My soul, why art thou full of trouble

My soul! why art thou full of trouble?

2

And overwhelm’d with griefe:

And overwhelmed with grief?

Gloss Note

Along with l. 1, see Ps. 43:5.

And overwhelm’d with griefe:

3

Dost thou not know this

Physical Note

imperfectly erased apostrophe between the “d” and “s”

World’s a bubble?

Dost thou not know this world’s a bubble

Dost thou not know this Worlds a

Critical Note

Punning on both figurative (fragile and transitory) and literal meanings (earth’s hemisphere as a gas-filled cavity), see Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum. Possible literary reference to Bacon’s “The life of man”: “The World’s a bubble, and the life of man / Less than a span, / In his conception wretched, from the womb, / So to the tomb;” (ll. 1–4 in Sixteenth Century Verse. Ed. Emrys Jones. Oxford, 1991, p. 697).

bubble?

4

And cannot Yield Relief.

And cannot yield relief?

And cannot Yield relief.

5

This life’s a Dream, of Mirth, or Sorrow;

This life’s a dream of mirth or sorrow

This life’s a Dream, of Mirth, or Sorrow;

6

Inveloped in Night:

Envelopéd in night;

Gloss Note

Enveloped

Inveloped in Night:

7

The Resurrection’s like the Morrow,

The

Gloss Note

in Christianity, the rising to life of all dead people at the Last Judgment, the time when souls rejoin bodies

Resurrection’s like the morrow,

The Resurrection’s like the

Gloss Note

Tomorrow

Morrow,

8

As full of Life as Light.

As full of life as light.

As full of Life as

Critical Note

See Ps. 30:5: “weeping may endure for a night, but ioy commeth in the morning.”

Light.

9

Then Sleight theſe Terren hopes, as toyes;

Then slight these

Gloss Note

earthly

terrene hopes, as

Gloss Note

trivial things

toys;

Then sleight these

Gloss Note

Earthly

Terren hopes, as

Gloss Note

Something trivial, having little value; but also used to refer specifically to speech, writing or songs

toyes;

10

Think thou of better things:

Think thou of better things.

Think thou of better things:

11

ffrom all her Pleaſures, and her Joyes,

From all

Gloss Note

the Earth’s

her pleasures and her joys,

From all her Pleasures, and her Joyes,

12

Nought but Repentance

Physical Note

“ſ” possibly added later; “p” written over imperfectly erased letter with ascender

ſprings.

Nought but repentance springs.

Naught but repentance springs.

13

Physical Note

horizontal line above; this line is not separated by a gap from the line above

Thy Mortall Nature nere deplore,

Thy mortal nature ne’er deplore,

Thy Mortall Nature ne’re deplore,

14

Let Death work all her Spight:

Let Death work all her spite;

Let Death work all her spight:

15

ffor thou shalt live, when Deaths noe more

For thou shalt live, when Death’s no more,

For thou shalt live, when

Gloss Note

A reference to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X “Death, Be Not Proud”; see also Hosea 13:14

Deaths noe more

16

In everlasting Light.

In

Gloss Note

Heaven

everlasting light.

In everlasting Light.

17

What though thou into Aſhes turn,

What, though thou into ashes turn,

What though thou into Ashes turn,

18

Thy Dust will find A Tomb:

Thy dust will find a tomb

Thy Dust will find A Tomb:

19

Within Some (ſafe and) Silent Urn:

Within some safe and silent urn

Within some (safe and) silent Urn:

20

In black Oblivians Womb.

In black Oblivion’s womb.

In black Oblivians Womb.

whether

21

Whether thou, Water, dos’t increaſe,

Whether thou water dost increase,

Whether thou, Water, dost increase,

22

Or ffier, or Ayer, or Earth:

Or

Critical Note

in classical tradition, the four constitutive elements of the world and body; here Pulter understands her own death as contributing to the expansion and imbalance of one of these elements

fire, or air, or earth;

Gloss Note

Water, Fire, Air and Earth are the four classical elements of Empedoclean physics.

Or Fier, or Ayer, or Earth:

23

Yet am I Sure, to Rest in Peace;

Yet am I sure to rest in peace;

Yet am I sure to rest in Peace;

24

My Soul aſſumes her Birth.

My soul

Gloss Note

adopts; receives; takes upon oneself; puts on (a garb, aspect, form, or character)

assumes her birth.

My soul assumes her Birth.

25

And if Pythagoras Saw Clear,

And if

Gloss Note

Greek philosopher known for his theory of the transmigration of souls at death (the word “transmigration” appears in the next stanza). In this theory, souls could transfer across life forms, from human to animal. Pulter assures her soul that it will not take the low form of a frog, even if Pythagoras is right in principle about transmigration.

Pythagoras saw clear,

And if Pythagoras saw Clear,

26

Of this thou mayest Reſolve;

Of this thou mayest resolve:

Of this thou Mayest resolve;

27

Som Lamb, or Dove, then to apear,

Some lamb, or dove, then to appear,

Som

Gloss Note

Animals that symbolize purity and peace in Judeo-Christian imagery

Lamb, or Dove then to apear,

28

Noe Toad Shall thee Involve:

No toad shall thee

Gloss Note

entangle, envelop

involve.

Noe

Gloss Note

Since the 16th century, symbolizing something loathsome

Toad shall thee Involve:

29

Then whether Diſſolution,

Then whether

Critical Note

For the meter to be consistent in the first three lines of this stanza, the word “dissolution” as well as “transmigration,” and “revolution” (in the next lines) may have been pronounced each with five syllables (“tion” stretching into two syllables in each).

dissolution,

Then whether Dissolution,

30

Or Tranſmigration:

Or transmigration,

Or

Gloss Note

May refer simply to the transition from life to death, but can also refer to the transmigration of the soul or metempsychosis, in which the soul passes into a different body.

Transmigration:

31

Or rowling Revolution,

Or rolling revolution,

Or

Gloss Note

Compare to The Revolution [Poem 16] and Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47].

rowling Revolution,

32

All ends in thy Salvation.

All ends in thy salvation.

All ends in thy salvation.

33

Nothing Shall then aflict my Soul,

Nothing shall then afflict my soul

Nothing shall then aflict my soul,

34

That paſſeth here below:

That passeth here below;

That passeth here below:

35

ffor I above, (the Highest Pole

For I above the highest

Gloss Note

point of reference in the sky around which stars appear to revolve, or the point at which the earth’s axis meets heavens (derived from Ptolemy)

pole

For I above, (the Highest Pole

36

Or Star) er’e long shall Goe.

Or star

Gloss Note

before

ere long shall go.

Or Star,) er’e long shall Goe.

37

fforget I Shall then my Sad Story,

Forget I shall, then, my

Gloss Note

life, narrative

sad story;

Forget I shall then my sad story,

38

And all my past annoys:

And all my past annoys

And all my past annoys:

39

Shall Swallow’d bee of infinite Glory,

Shall swallowed be

Gloss Note

in

of infinite glory

Shall swallow’d bee of infinite Glory,

40

And Crownd with endleſ Joys.

And

Critical Note

glorified, blessed; adorned with; rewarded. See Revelation 2:10: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”

crowned with endless joys.

And Crownd with endles Joys.

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All 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.

Elemental Edition

  Editorial note 

The aim of the elemental edition is to make the poems accessible to the largest variety of readers, which involves modernizing spelling and punctuation as well as adding basic glosses. Spelling and punctuation reflect current standard American usage; punctuation highlights syntax which might otherwise be obscure. Outmoded but still familiar word forms (“thou,” “‘tis,” “hold’st”) are not modernized, and we do not modernize grammar when the sense remains legible. After a brief headnote aimed at offering a “way in” to the poem’s unique qualities and connections with other verse by Pulter or her contemporaries, the edition features a minimum of notes and interpretative framing to allow more immediate engagement with the poem. Glosses clarify synonyms or showcase various possible meanings in Pulter’s time. Other notes identify named people and places or clarify obscure material. We rely (without citation) primarily on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Reference database, and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. When we rely on Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s work, we cite her text generally (“Eardley”); other sources are cited in full. The result is an edition we consider a springboard for further work on Pulter’s poetry. See full conventions for this edition here.

Amplified Edition

  Editorial note 

In order to provide another perspective on Pulter’s poem and situate it within the period, the original spelling and—perhaps more significantly—punctuation has been preserved in this edition. Despite the fact that early modern spelling, punctuation and capitalization rules were non-standardized in the period, Stefan Christian (2012: 82) notes that Pulter’s punctuation was probably chosen by a scribe in consultation with the poet.

Elemental Edition

  Headnote 

How do you comfort a troubled soul? Here, the answer rests in the promise of a future radical change, in metamorphosis as both a religious and poetic principle. While in neighboring poems, the speaker urges the soul to be patient until the glories of the afterlife, or to freely let go of its earthly body, here she offers reassurance that habitation on earth is merely temporary. The consolation offered is superficially cast in terms of a standard Christian duality of body versus soul. But, in fact, Pulter complicates the matter by warning the soul that its “mortal nature” will corrode to ashes and disintegrate to the fundamental Aristotelian elements. The body and soul emerge less as distinctive entities than fungible elements making up a being. This disruption of Christian orthodoxy continues when the speaker conditionally credits the Pythagorean theory that the soul transmigrates at death into the body of another creature. If Pythagoras is right, she reassures her anxious soul, it surely will evolve into a lamb or dove (Christian icons) rather than a lowly toad. Although the poem ends with the comforting finale in which the soul is swallowed into heaven with amnesia about its earthly existence, the core principle celebrated by the poem is the vitality of transmutation, registered in the poem’s content, in its uncertain shifts between first-and second-person address (which confuse soul and body), and in its formal rhyme words: “Then whether dissolution, / Or transmigration, / Or rolling revolution, / All ends in thy salvation.” The final twist is Pulter’s decision to write in what was known as “common measure,” a popular ballad form of writing. The move away from rhymed couplets to quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter performs Pulter’s investment in revolutions of form.

Amplified Edition

  Headnote 

In this poem, the speaker addresses her own soul and, in so doing, engages with a number of devotional and poetic traditions without letting those traditions confine her. On the one hand, Pulter’s poem can be read in relation to the body and soul dialogue poem, a tradition rooted in medieval literature but still popular in the seventeenth century, as attested by Anne Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit” and Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body.” Alternatively, her poem could also be read within the devotional tradition of the apostrophe to the soul and be compared to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146, which begins, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.”

Gloss Note

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146. Poetry Foundation, l. 1.

1 Line 15 likely points to John Donne’s famous apostrophe to death in his holy sonnet “Death be not proud”: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

Gloss Note

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 10, “Death, be not proud.” Luminarium.org, ll. 13–14.

2 These somewhat diverse devotional traditions share underlying assumptions about the body/soul dichotomy and the need to vocally and actively repent. Such poems frequently use imagery of violence to articulate the soul’s need to be brought back into submission to God.

Gloss Note

Nikolina Hatton, Curation Metaphors of Violence in Devotional Poetry.

3 This devotional poetic tradition often, as Abe Davies has pointed out, functions as a means of disciplining the speaker and the reader.

Gloss Note

See Abe Davies, Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 121–162.

4 Pulter’s use of the apostrophe to the soul in this and other poems (O, My Afflicted Solitary Soul [Poem 28], The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge [Poem 39], Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47]) intervenes in this tradition of addressing the soul and offers an alternative approach: instead of admonishing the soul (or body) to repentance, she uses the devotional form to provide comfort and consolation to her soul as she meditates on the promise of the resurrection.

The speaker’s consolatory tone and poetic stance in this poem bear similarities to her tone in another subset of her poems that are modeled on the biblical psalms, such as The Desire [Poem 18] and How Long Shall My Dejected Soul [Poem 24].

Gloss Note

See Hatton, Nikolina, “Hester Pulter’s Psalmic Poems,” Renaissance Studies 37, no. 3 (2023): pp. 364–83.

5 Although not addressed to God, this poem itself has a number of features that align it with the psalms, not the least of which is her opening (ll. 1-2) which bears a striking similarity to Ps. 43: 5: “Why art thou cast downe, O my soule? and why art thou disquieted within me?”

Gloss Note

Psalms 43:5. The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, (London, 1611). EEBO. This is a refrain that echoes similar verses in Psalms 42:5 and 11. For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to focus on only one. See also Nikolina Hatton, Curation Pulter’s Psalmic Intertexts.

6 Additionally, the poem’s meter, quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming abab, link it with The Whole Book of Psalms, i.e., the “Sternhold and Hopkins” metrical psalter, a psalter often used in English church services for singing psalms to popular tunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Gloss Note

Beth Quitslund, “The Psalm Book” in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, eds. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 203–11.

7 Poem 40 is the only instance in her manuscript in which she turns to this ‘common meter.’ But here too, as with her consolatory apostrophe to the soul, the speaker destabilizes the expectations of her reader.

The first four stanzas contain references to the psalms and Donne, and the poem continues to the end in a rough version of this popular meter, but Pulter’s content engages with more heterodox ideas about the body and soul than these formal allusions suggest. In castigating the world in these opening stanzas, Pulter at first seems to be endorsing a material/spiritual dichotomy in which the soul must endure a “terrene” (l. 9) existence before being liberated to heaven, but the poem also presents alternatives to this view. In line 13, she points to the soul’s “Mortall Nature,” potentially signaling an unorthodox belief that the soul dies with the body.

Gloss Note

See Kenneth Graham’s Curation Christian Mortalism from the Bible to Pulter.

8 In stanzas five through seven, she continues this heterodox exploration by discussing a number of theories of the afterlife that have their sources outside the Christian tradition. From the impersonal yet oddly gendered “black Oblivion’s womb” in line 20 to references to Empedoclean physics (ll. 21–22) or even Pythagorian reincarnation (ll. 25–28), the speaker never settles on one solution. Perhaps these ideas allow the poet to imagine alternatives to the body/soul/self problem with which so much Christian devotional poetry is plagued, a supposition attested by the subtle shift in pronouns from “thou” to “I,” beginning in line 23.

Gloss Note

For more on the body/soul problem, see Liza Blake’s Curation Body, Soul, Dust.

9 Pulter’s use of conjunctions further hints at her attitude toward all these possibilities. Her reiteration of “or” suggests her openness to other heterodox possibilities, while “whether” and “if” are always followed by assurances that even should these theories be true, she is assured of Christian resurrection: “All ends in thy Salvation” (l. 32). Establishing this belief early on (see ll. 7–8) and reiterating it throughout provides a firm foundation from which she can contemplate less traditional understandings of the body and soul without anxiety.

In the last three stanzas, the poem looks to a future—with a reiteration of “then” (ll. 29, 33, 37)—in which Pulter’s pain will have been erased. Here, the speaker returns to a mode recognizable in the biblical psalms, one that is consolatory, even elegiac, an attempt to offer her soul comfort in its distress. Both Psalms 42 and 43 end on such a note, with the speaker imagining a future state of thanksgiving. Rather than thematizing penitence, both of these psalms are more concerned with the speaker lamenting the lack of justice in her situation and articulating a longing to be returned to a state of community. In fact, Pulter’s entire poem may be an expanded meditation on Ps. 43:5, the second part of which continues: “hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” Similarly to the biblical psalmist in this verse, the poet opens her poem with an apostrophe to the soul, asking why she despairs, writes an extended meditation on her hope of resurrection (whatever form it takes) and finishes with an expression of faith in future joy in these final stanzas. This latter upward movement towards imagining future hope, although arguably inspired by the psalms, is another hallmark of devotional poetry, particularly that of the poems of George Herbert, once again signaling Pulter’s knowledge of and engagement with the devotional form.

Gloss Note

See Ross, Sarah C. E., “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then Will I Hallelujahs Ever Sing’” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): pp. 99–119.

10

Amplified Edition

Line number 2

  Gloss note 

Along with l. 1, see Ps. 43:5.

Transcription

Line number 3

  Physical note 

imperfectly erased apostrophe between the “d” and “s”

Amplified Edition

Line number 3

  Critical note 

Punning on both figurative (fragile and transitory) and literal meanings (earth’s hemisphere as a gas-filled cavity), see Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum. Possible literary reference to Bacon’s “The life of man”: “The World’s a bubble, and the life of man / Less than a span, / In his conception wretched, from the womb, / So to the tomb;” (ll. 1–4 in Sixteenth Century Verse. Ed. Emrys Jones. Oxford, 1991, p. 697).

Amplified Edition

Line number 6

  Gloss note 

Enveloped

Elemental Edition

Line number 7

  Gloss note 

in Christianity, the rising to life of all dead people at the Last Judgment, the time when souls rejoin bodies

Amplified Edition

Line number 7

  Gloss note 

Tomorrow

Amplified Edition

Line number 8

  Critical note 

See Ps. 30:5: “weeping may endure for a night, but ioy commeth in the morning.”

Elemental Edition

Line number 9

  Gloss note 

earthly

Elemental Edition

Line number 9

  Gloss note 

trivial things

Amplified Edition

Line number 9

  Gloss note 

Earthly

Amplified Edition

Line number 9

  Gloss note 

Something trivial, having little value; but also used to refer specifically to speech, writing or songs

Elemental Edition

Line number 11

  Gloss note 

the Earth’s

Transcription

Line number 12

  Physical note 

“ſ” possibly added later; “p” written over imperfectly erased letter with ascender

Transcription

Line number 13

  Physical note 

horizontal line above; this line is not separated by a gap from the line above

Amplified Edition

Line number 15

  Gloss note 

A reference to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X “Death, Be Not Proud”; see also Hosea 13:14

Elemental Edition

Line number 16

  Gloss note 

Heaven

Elemental Edition

Line number 22

  Critical note 

in classical tradition, the four constitutive elements of the world and body; here Pulter understands her own death as contributing to the expansion and imbalance of one of these elements

Amplified Edition

Line number 22

  Gloss note 

Water, Fire, Air and Earth are the four classical elements of Empedoclean physics.

Elemental Edition

Line number 24

  Gloss note 

adopts; receives; takes upon oneself; puts on (a garb, aspect, form, or character)

Elemental Edition

Line number 25

  Gloss note 

Greek philosopher known for his theory of the transmigration of souls at death (the word “transmigration” appears in the next stanza). In this theory, souls could transfer across life forms, from human to animal. Pulter assures her soul that it will not take the low form of a frog, even if Pythagoras is right in principle about transmigration.

Amplified Edition

Line number 27

  Gloss note 

Animals that symbolize purity and peace in Judeo-Christian imagery

Elemental Edition

Line number 28

  Gloss note 

entangle, envelop

Amplified Edition

Line number 28

  Gloss note 

Since the 16th century, symbolizing something loathsome

Elemental Edition

Line number 29

  Critical note 

For the meter to be consistent in the first three lines of this stanza, the word “dissolution” as well as “transmigration,” and “revolution” (in the next lines) may have been pronounced each with five syllables (“tion” stretching into two syllables in each).

Amplified Edition

Line number 30

  Gloss note 

May refer simply to the transition from life to death, but can also refer to the transmigration of the soul or metempsychosis, in which the soul passes into a different body.

Amplified Edition

Line number 31

  Gloss note 

Compare to The Revolution [Poem 16] and Why Art Thou Sad at the Approach of Night [Poem 47].

Elemental Edition

Line number 35

  Gloss note 

point of reference in the sky around which stars appear to revolve, or the point at which the earth’s axis meets heavens (derived from Ptolemy)

Elemental Edition

Line number 36

  Gloss note 

before

Elemental Edition

Line number 37

  Gloss note 

life, narrative

Elemental Edition

Line number 39

  Gloss note 

in

Elemental Edition

Line number 40

  Critical note 

glorified, blessed; adorned with; rewarded. See Revelation 2:10: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”

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