Old Aeschylus (Emblem 31)

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Old Aeschylus (Emblem 31)

Poem 96

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 Christine Jacob.

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
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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 15

 Physical note

“r” appears in different hand from main scribe; superscript colon in same hand may represent insertion marks
Line number 16

 Physical note

in different hand from main scribe, directly above doubly struck-through “ffourteen”
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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Transcription
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[Emblem 31]
Old Aeschylus
(Emblem 31)
Old Escalus (Emblem 31)
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
This Amplified Edition seeks a middle ground between the reading texts of previous editions: Alice Eardley’s and Leah Knight and Wendy Wall’s respective modernizations and Stefan Christian’s semi-diplomatic transcription. The aim of this edition is to provide a text that is accessible to the modern reader while also retaining some idiosyncrasies of the original manuscript. In particular, this edition has retained the manuscript’s capitalization, a so-called “accidental” feature of a text (that is, one whose change or modernization does not affect meaning). Retaining the original capitalization in this Amplified Edition defamiliarizes the text without deterring the reader from understanding, and also highlights alliterative patterns that are perhaps more visually conspicuous in the original. One exception is the name “Domitian,” which is not capitalized in the original but is capitalized in this edition in order to clarify that the word is a proper noun. More broadly, spelling has been modernized according to Canadian standard usage. The names of biblical and classical figures have been regularized with one notable exception: the variant spelling of “Escalus,” preserving the capital E which is prominent in the early lines of the poem. All manuscript corrections have been silently incorporated, and contractions have been silently expanded, except where they might influence metre: for example, “Towring” is retained as “Tow’ring” whereas “Sacrifis’d” has been changed to “Sacrificed.” Punctuation has been modernized in order to clarify the sense, tone, and interrelationship of clauses.
The explanatory notes for this edition expand on those provided in the editions specified above. Given the abundance of biblical and classical allusions in this poem, the notes frequently draw directly on source material in order to highlight significant parallels that may be latent between Pulter’s allusions. The notes provide readers with avenues for further research, and biblical references correspond with the King James Bible (1611).
The editor thanks Liza Blake, Leah Knight, Wendy Wall, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous and illuminating feedback, and Sam Nguyen for encoding this Amplified Edition.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
It is a mistake to want to know your fate, Pulter argues here. Once you do, you’ll want to change it, and you can’t; a destiny foreknown is not forestalled. Her first exhibit is a fellow poet, whose attempt to outwit the prediction that he’d die from something falling from above only brings about such a death: he goes to an open field, where a plummeting turtle smashes in his skull. This seemingly unexpected death was, of course, expected, indeed predicted—as are all deaths, or as they should be, this memento mori poem reminds us: while each of us will die, we cannot and should not inquire about the details, Pulter opines. Yet she herself is awfully tempted, if we can judge by how urgently (in the poem’s late-breaking, self-reflective turn) she implores that she should “never know [her] destiny,” and “not here anticipate [her] grave.” To do so, she frets, is to be buried alive: a paradoxical state reflecting a certain ambivalence, in this poem as in others, toward life and death on (and in) earth, and perhaps what follows too. Her projected solution is devotion to God’s purpose, which might reframe consciousness of mortality.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Derived from a Latin word meaning “that which has been spoken,” fate in this poem is conflated with death and intertwined with the prognostications of astrologers, prophets, and soothsayers. The biblical and classical figures referenced in this poem learn the details of their demise beforehand, yet not one of these figures escapes the universal fate nor—with one important exception—the promised particulars. The poem makes a lesson out of those who flout fate, from Jezebel who elevates herself in royal resplendence only to be defenestrated, to Caesar who mocks his soothsayer shortly before being stabbed. The irony that imbues these stories implicates pride as a kind of intrinsically fatal folly that underlies not only the presumption that one can evade fate but also the very desire to “Curiously pry” into one’s death, a desire with which the speaker grapples.
The sharp, moralizing contrast drawn between ideal Christian and typical pagan responses to mortality is exemplified foremost by the poem’s augmentation of the emblem conventionally associated with Aeschylus. As Eardley notes, emblems traditionally consist of three parts: “a motto (inscriptio), a printed image (pictura), and a short epigrammatic verse (subscriptio)” (27). While Pulter foregoes the formal elements of inscriptio and pictura, her emblematic verse exhibits didactic and ekphrastic tendencies. The spectacle in this case is the bizarre death of the tragedian Aeschylus, as recounted in Pliny’s Naturalis historia, translated by Philemon Holland: when warned by divinators that he will die on a certain day by means of a falling object, Aeschylus ventures into an open field, “far from house or tree, presuming vpon the securitie of the clear and open skie” (The Historie of the World [London, 1634], 271). As if on cue, an eagle, seeking a hard surface on which to shell her prey, spots the poet’s shiny pate and drops a tortoise on his head. Pulter’s wry tone in these lines and her tongue-in-cheek aside on baldness accentuate the comic outlandishness of the situation. Though this particular emblem seems absent from the popular English collections of Whitney, Peacham, Quarles, and Wither, it does appear in a number of continental collections in the same period, and the mottos of this common emblem variously iterate that fate is inevitable and death, all-powerful.
Pulter, however, diverges from these commonplaces in lines 14–16 by suggesting that the fate of death can be crossed by divine intervention. Such a reprieve, moreover, is obtained not via actions of avoidance but by an attitude of contrition: in contrast with the pagan, hell-bound Aeschlyus who presumes he can outwit what is fated, Hezekiah’s humble tears win him a temporary pardon from death. Despite his political missteps and spiritual faults, Hezekiah is memorialized as one of the few righteous Judean kings within the biblical narrative, upheld in early modern sermons and in works like John Donne’s Devotions for his exemplary response to illness and impending death. When warned by the prophet Isaiah that his illness will be fatal, Hezekiah, rather than seeking the aid of physicians or other deities, “turn[s] his face to the wall” and tearfully prays for the Hebrew god’s intervention, invoking his past devotion and good works as cause for mercy (2 Kings 20:2–3; Isaiah 38:2–3). Listed as an ancestor of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew’s genealogy (1:10), the pre-Christian, imperfect, and yet righteous Hezekiah functions as an important analogue for the Christian speaker, who likewise strives to live righteously so that she may die “with comfort.” Like Hezekiah, the speaker ultimately prays for divine intervention into her “Sad Story,” but her request is not for a mere deferral of death but for a post factum reversal, that is, a glorious resurrection and carefree afterlife, and the fortitude to live her precarious, mortal life according to such a hope (thereby rising, too, from doubt and despair).
The speaker’s portrayal of death as a welcome night’s rest for the weary, then, qualifies her aversion to foreknowledge with an underlying desire not shared by the other figures in the poem. Though she characterizes death as alluringly peaceful, the speaker nevertheless prays that she might not “anticipate [her] grave,” the verb anticipate meaning to consider in advance—to foreknow and to fret over—but also, relatedly, to bring about or put into practice prematurely, like Aeschylus seems to do by trying to prevent his death. For the speaker, anticipation is contrary to the life of spiritual devotion upon which a good death is contingent and by which, with divine aid, a good death is possible. Precise foreknowledge is futile, even pernicious, not only if fate is fixed as per tradition but also if, as intimated by the exceptional “Unless” in line 14, fate is in flux, a working out of salvation.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
31 Old Eſculus being told that hee Should die
Old
Gloss Note
Prolific Greek playwright who was told by an oracle that he would die by something from the heavens. According to legend, this prophecy was realized when he was killed by a turtle shell dropped by an eagle.
Aeschylus, being told that he should die
Old
Critical Note
Variant spelling of Aeschylus, the name of the renowned Greek tragedian whose unfortunate yet legendary demise is recounted in the first ten lines of this poem. As Eardley notes, Pulter likely bases her account of Aeschylus’s death on Holland’s translation of Pliny: see The Historie of the World (London, 1634), 272. Christian suggests Montaigne as another possible source: see Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1613), 32.
Escalus, being told that he Should die
2
By the deſcent of Something from on High
By the descent of something from on high,
By the descent of something from on High,
3
Into the field hee went and Satt him down
Into the field he went and sat him down.
Into the field he went and sat him down.
4
The Sun Shone bright upon his glistring Crown
The sun shone bright upon his
Gloss Note
glittering head. Aeschylus is bald (and thus a target for the eagle).
glist’ring crown,
The Sun Shone bright upon his glist’ring Crown,
5
ffor hee to Eriſine had Sacrifis’d
Gloss Note
Aeschylus is devoted to “Erycine,” a name for Venus, the goddess of love, derived from her temple on Mount Eryx. In humoral medicine, it was thought that “one major way to induce coldness, and thus baldness, was too much sexual activity” (Anu Korhonen, “Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 [2010], pp. 371-91 at p. 380).
For he to Erycine had sacrificed;
Critical Note
Anglicization of Erycina, an epiclesis or liturgical epithet for Venus as revered by cult worshippers in Greco-Roman antiquity. According to the Greek historian and geographer Strabo, the name Erycina is derived from the location of the goddess’s temple, the “lofty mountain” Eryx in Sicily (Geography 6.1.7). Two subsidiary temples in Rome were dedicated to Venus Erycina, one on the Capitoline Hill and one near the Porta Collina: see Anna Anguissola, “Note on Aphidruma 2: Strabo on the Transfer of Cults,” Classical Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2006): 643–646. Ariadne Staples contextualizes this cult alongside others devoted to Venus in From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (New York, 1998), 99–126. That Aeschylus was a devotee of Venus Erycina appears to be Pulter’s own invention and a cheeky explanation for the poet’s baldness: in addition to the broader associations of Venus with romantic and sexual entanglement, the Erycine cult was specifically associated with prostitution (Staples, 113, 122). As Knight and Wall note, early modern humoral medicine linked baldness with overindulgence in sexual activity.
For he to Erycine had Sacrificed—
6
Pitty a Poet thus was Stigmatiz’d
Gloss Note
It is a pity
Pity a poet thus was
Gloss Note
scarred, branded, or disgraced. Baldness is here construed as a stigma.
stigmatized.
Pity a Poet thus was
Critical Note
Branded or marked, connoting disgrace, but also perhaps an ironic allusion to the stigmata of devout Christians and saints.
stigmatized.
7
A Towring Eagle let her prey fall down
A tow’ring eagle let her prey fall down
A Tow’ring Eagle let her prey fall down
8
In hope to break the Eſcallup on his Crown
In hope to break
Gloss Note
shell
th’escallop on his crown.
In hope to break the
Gloss Note
Variant of scallop, apparently denoting the shell of the tortoise that the eagle drops on Aeschylus’s head.
Escallop on his Crown.
9
Shee had her wiſh it broke the fatall Shell
She had her wish; it broke the fatal shell,
She had her wish: it broke the
Gloss Note
Referring both to the tortoise’s shell and the poet’s skull.
fatal Shell,
10
And Struck the Poets Ryming Soul to Hell
And struck the poet’s rhyming soul to Hell.
And struck the Poet’s Rhyming Soul to Hell.
11
Then let none Curiouſly prie in their ffate
Then let none curiously pry in their fate,
Then let none Curiously pry in their Fate,
12
ffor none can lengthen or make Short their date
For none can lengthen or make short their date.
For none can lengthen or make short their date.
13
ffor Surely none their ffortune can prevent
For surely none their fortune can prevent,
For surely none their Fortune can prevent,
14
Unleſs a Meſſenger from Heaven bee Sent
Unless a messenger from Heaven be sent
Critical Note
Per the headnote to this poem, this caveat marks a divergence from the mottos and verses conventionally paired with the image of Aeschylus’s death.
Unless a Messenger from Heaven be Sent
15
With a
Physical Note
“r” appears in different hand from main scribe; superscript colon in same hand may represent insertion marks
Repr:.ieve, Soe Hezechias Tears
With a reprieve; so
Gloss Note
See 2 Kings: 20:1-6, which tells of how Hezekiah wept and prayed when the prophet Isaiah told him of Hezekiah’s impending death; in response, God extended his life by fifteen years.
Hezekiah’s tears
With a Reprieve—So
Critical Note
When his looming death is foretold by the prophet Isaiah, the ailing King Hezekiah prays to God in earnest and is said to have “wept sore.” In response, God promises healing and fifteen more years of life, proclaiming “I have seen thy teares” (2 Kings 20:1–6; Isaiah 38:1–6). Tears are a powerful, generative motif in Pulter’s poetry, and line 30 of this poem reiterates their centrality to the speaker’s own response to her mortality: see the note to “Sighs and tears” (l. 30) for examples of this motif elsewhere in the manuscript. Though humble in contrast with the other figures in this poem, Hezekiah notably falls into pride soon after his miraculous recovery (2 Chronicles 32:24–26). Despite his shortcomings, however, he was viewed by early modern readers as an exemplary biblical figure, both in his leadership and his response to what is understood to have been a plague-like illness: see Kevin Killeen, “Hezekiah, the Politics of Municipal Plague and the London Poor,” The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2016), 76–104.
Hezekiah’s Tears
16
A pardon did obtain for ffourteen
Physical Note
in different hand from main scribe, directly above doubly struck-through “ffourteen”
ffifteen Years
A pardon did obtain for fifteen years.
A pardon did obtain for Fifteen years.
17
This Jezabell found true that fatall hour
This
Gloss Note
Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel. She was a worshipper of Baal caught in religious wars; Elijah’s prophecy, that dogs would eat her corpse, came true.
Jezebel found true that fatal hour
This
Gloss Note
Jezebel, along with her husband King Ahab, implemented the worship of Baal in Israel and commanded the execution of many Hebrew prophets. The prophet Elijah foretold her gruesome death, which he figures as an act of divine vengeance. Jezebel’s disdain for the prophecy and her own mortality is implied in the biblical account: as her political enemy approaches, she applies cosmetics, adorns her hair, and greets him with a taunt from a high window. She is almost immediately defenestrated by one of her own attendants, her broken body consumed by stray dogs as prophesied (2 Kings 9:30–37).
Jezebel found true that fatal hour
18
When Dogs her Curſſed Karcas did Devour
When dogs her curséd carcass did devour.
When Dogs her Cursèd Carcass did Devour;
19
Nor could domition Croſs his Prophets fate
Nor could
Gloss Note
Domitian was a Roman emperor who failed to disprove one of the soothsayer Ascletarion’s prophecies. He also tried unsuccessfully to evade a soothsayer’s prediction of his own death.
Domitian cross his prophet’s fate
Nor could
Critical Note
Roman emperor who attempted to challenge fate and was plagued by the premonition of his death. When the astrologer Ascletario foretold the manner of his own death, Domitian tried to have Ascletario killed in a different manner in order to prove the fallibility of divination. It is Domitian, however, who ultimately fails. His aversion to prophecy, moreover, appears to have stemmed from his youth when astrologers foretold both the hour and manner of his death. Even on the portentous day, Domitian sentenced a soothsayer to death for interpreting the city’s ongoing problem of lightning strikes as foreshadowing a change in rulers. Unbeknownst to Domitian, however, his friends had been conspiring to overthrow him and, knowing he feared the fifth hour of the day as the fatal one, they assured him it was the sixth when he inquired. Relieved, he dismissed his attendants, retired to his bedroom, and was promptly slain. For a full account, see Holland’s translation of Suetonius in The Historie of Twelve Caesars (London, 1609), 269.
Domitian Cross his Prophet’s fate
20
Or ad a minute to his own lives date
Or add a minute to his own life’s date.
Or add a minute to his own life’s date.
21
Though Cæſar did the fatall Ides Know
Gloss Note
A soothsayer foretold the death of Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who was stabbed to death on the “Ides” (or fifteenth day) of March.
Though Caesar did the fatal Ides know,
Though Caesar did the
Gloss Note
The soothsayer Spurina forewarned Julius Caesar of a danger that “would not be differred [deferred] after the Ides of March,” that is the fifteenth day of the month. Despite other corroborating portents, dreams, and even a pamphlet warning him of the conspiracy against him, Caesar did not take heed: at the eleventh hour of the appointed day, he “laughed Spurina to scorn” and labelled him a false prophet (Suetonius, The Historie of Twelve Caesars, trans. Holland, 33). Shortly thereafter he was fatally stabbed by members of the Roman senate.
fatal Ides know,
22
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow.
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow;
23
Soe Agrippina was her fate foretold
So Agrippina was her fate foretold,
So
Critical Note
Roman empress who was warned by an astrologer that her son Nero would one day kill her. After many elaborate plans and botched attempts, Nero finally succeeded in orchestrating his mother’s death, casting it as a suicide. As Eardley notes, Nero’s postmortem “dissection” of his mother can be interpreted both literally and figuratively (226n252).
Agrippina was her fate foretold
24
Yet her deſcection Nero did behould
Gloss Note
As Agrippina had been foretold by an astrologer, Roman emperor Nero killed his mother and passionately viewed (“dissected”) each part of her corpse.
Yet her dissection Nero did behold.
Yet her dissection Nero did behold.
then
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25
Then let mee never Know my Destinie
Then let me never know my destiny,
Then let me never Know my Destiny,
26
But every day Soe live that when I die
But every day so live that when I die
But every day So live that when I die,
27
I may with comfort lay theſe Ruins down
I may with comfort lay these ruins down
I may with comfort lay these Ruins down
28
In dust tis ſofter farr then finest Down
In
Gloss Note
the material from which life derives to and to which it will return; see Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
dust; ’tis softer far than finest
Gloss Note
soft feathers
down.
In dust; ’tis softer far than
Critical Note
This line, along with the final couplet, echoes diction in Welcome [2] [Poem 33], a poem that more consistently treats death as a happy prospect.
finest Down,
29
Nor is that Pillow Stuft with Cares or fears
Nor is that pillow stuffed with cares or fears,
Nor is that Pillow Stuffed with Cares or fears,
30
Nor Shall I wake as now to Sighs and tears
Nor shall I wake as now to sighs and tears.
Nor Shall I wake as now to
Critical Note
That sighs and tears are the poems themselves is implied throughout Pulter’s manuscript: she describes her emblems as “the sighs of a sad soul,” and the symbolism of tears expressed along with these sighs is underscored in poems like The Circle [1] [Poem 17] and The Weeping Wish [Poem 61].
Sighs and tears.
31
Yet o my God this Comfort let mee have
Yet O, my God, this comfort let me have:
Yet, O my God, this Comfort let me have:
32
Let mee not here Anticipate my Grave
Let me not here anticipate my grave;
Let me not here
Critical Note
Multiple shades of the verb anticipate are germane to this line. Relevant definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary include “To take into consideration before the appropriate or due time” and “To realize beforehand,” both of which pertain to foreknowledge (def. 7a and def. 8). Another relevant definition is “To observe or practise in advance of the due date; to cause to happen earlier, accelerate,” which captures the futility (and irony) of attempting to prevent fate as demonstrated by the stories of Aeschylus and others in the poem (def. 5). This secondary definition also resonates with the following line’s metaphor of being “buried alive,” a premature enactment of death.
Anticipate my Grave.
33
Yet if I must alive thus buried bee
Yet
Gloss Note
The speaker reads her own anticipation of the grave (see the previous line), through worrying or wondering about her fate, as a form of living death.
if I must alive thus buried be,
Critical Note
Being “buried alive,” thereby enduring a kind of living death, captures the dampening effects of precisely foreknowing one’s death, but it may also or alternatively allude broadly to the speaker’s position of obscurity and confinement. In Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57], the speaker characterizes her geographical and social isolation in identical terms, as being “buried thus alive.”
Yet if I must alive thus buried be,
34
Let mee yet live my gracious God to thee
Let me yet live, my gracious God, to Thee.
Let me yet live my gracious God to thee.
35
Then Soe aſſist my Soul in her Sad Story
Then so assist my soul in her sad story,
Then So assist my Soul in her
Critical Note
“Story” as an epithet for life suggests a sense of progression towards some end(ing) and is used frequently throughout the manuscript: in addition to the poems referenced in footnotes above, see Aletheia’s Pearl [Poem 32], To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], and Come My Dear Children (Emblem 2) [Poem 68], among many others. Notably, the word “story” in the terminal position of Pulter’s poetic lines always and, it would seem, inevitably rhymes with “glory,” a reference to the beatific afterlife in which the speaker hopes her story culminates.
Sad Story—
36
That though I fall yet I may Riſe to Glory.
That though I fall, yet I may rise to glory.
That though I fall yet I may Rise to Glory.
curled 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

It is a mistake to want to know your fate, Pulter argues here. Once you do, you’ll want to change it, and you can’t; a destiny foreknown is not forestalled. Her first exhibit is a fellow poet, whose attempt to outwit the prediction that he’d die from something falling from above only brings about such a death: he goes to an open field, where a plummeting turtle smashes in his skull. This seemingly unexpected death was, of course, expected, indeed predicted—as are all deaths, or as they should be, this memento mori poem reminds us: while each of us will die, we cannot and should not inquire about the details, Pulter opines. Yet she herself is awfully tempted, if we can judge by how urgently (in the poem’s late-breaking, self-reflective turn) she implores that she should “never know [her] destiny,” and “not here anticipate [her] grave.” To do so, she frets, is to be buried alive: a paradoxical state reflecting a certain ambivalence, in this poem as in others, toward life and death on (and in) earth, and perhaps what follows too. Her projected solution is devotion to God’s purpose, which might reframe consciousness of mortality.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Prolific Greek playwright who was told by an oracle that he would die by something from the heavens. According to legend, this prophecy was realized when he was killed by a turtle shell dropped by an eagle.
Line number 4

 Gloss note

glittering head. Aeschylus is bald (and thus a target for the eagle).
Line number 5

 Gloss note

Aeschylus is devoted to “Erycine,” a name for Venus, the goddess of love, derived from her temple on Mount Eryx. In humoral medicine, it was thought that “one major way to induce coldness, and thus baldness, was too much sexual activity” (Anu Korhonen, “Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 [2010], pp. 371-91 at p. 380).
Line number 6

 Gloss note

It is a pity
Line number 6

 Gloss note

scarred, branded, or disgraced. Baldness is here construed as a stigma.
Line number 8

 Gloss note

shell
Line number 15

 Gloss note

See 2 Kings: 20:1-6, which tells of how Hezekiah wept and prayed when the prophet Isaiah told him of Hezekiah’s impending death; in response, God extended his life by fifteen years.
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel. She was a worshipper of Baal caught in religious wars; Elijah’s prophecy, that dogs would eat her corpse, came true.
Line number 19

 Gloss note

Domitian was a Roman emperor who failed to disprove one of the soothsayer Ascletarion’s prophecies. He also tried unsuccessfully to evade a soothsayer’s prediction of his own death.
Line number 21

 Gloss note

A soothsayer foretold the death of Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who was stabbed to death on the “Ides” (or fifteenth day) of March.
Line number 24

 Gloss note

As Agrippina had been foretold by an astrologer, Roman emperor Nero killed his mother and passionately viewed (“dissected”) each part of her corpse.
Line number 28

 Gloss note

the material from which life derives to and to which it will return; see Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Line number 28

 Gloss note

soft feathers
Line number 33

 Gloss note

The speaker reads her own anticipation of the grave (see the previous line), through worrying or wondering about her fate, as a form of living death.
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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Elemental Edition
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[Emblem 31]
Old Aeschylus
(Emblem 31)
Old Escalus (Emblem 31)
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
This Amplified Edition seeks a middle ground between the reading texts of previous editions: Alice Eardley’s and Leah Knight and Wendy Wall’s respective modernizations and Stefan Christian’s semi-diplomatic transcription. The aim of this edition is to provide a text that is accessible to the modern reader while also retaining some idiosyncrasies of the original manuscript. In particular, this edition has retained the manuscript’s capitalization, a so-called “accidental” feature of a text (that is, one whose change or modernization does not affect meaning). Retaining the original capitalization in this Amplified Edition defamiliarizes the text without deterring the reader from understanding, and also highlights alliterative patterns that are perhaps more visually conspicuous in the original. One exception is the name “Domitian,” which is not capitalized in the original but is capitalized in this edition in order to clarify that the word is a proper noun. More broadly, spelling has been modernized according to Canadian standard usage. The names of biblical and classical figures have been regularized with one notable exception: the variant spelling of “Escalus,” preserving the capital E which is prominent in the early lines of the poem. All manuscript corrections have been silently incorporated, and contractions have been silently expanded, except where they might influence metre: for example, “Towring” is retained as “Tow’ring” whereas “Sacrifis’d” has been changed to “Sacrificed.” Punctuation has been modernized in order to clarify the sense, tone, and interrelationship of clauses.
The explanatory notes for this edition expand on those provided in the editions specified above. Given the abundance of biblical and classical allusions in this poem, the notes frequently draw directly on source material in order to highlight significant parallels that may be latent between Pulter’s allusions. The notes provide readers with avenues for further research, and biblical references correspond with the King James Bible (1611).
The editor thanks Liza Blake, Leah Knight, Wendy Wall, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous and illuminating feedback, and Sam Nguyen for encoding this Amplified Edition.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
It is a mistake to want to know your fate, Pulter argues here. Once you do, you’ll want to change it, and you can’t; a destiny foreknown is not forestalled. Her first exhibit is a fellow poet, whose attempt to outwit the prediction that he’d die from something falling from above only brings about such a death: he goes to an open field, where a plummeting turtle smashes in his skull. This seemingly unexpected death was, of course, expected, indeed predicted—as are all deaths, or as they should be, this memento mori poem reminds us: while each of us will die, we cannot and should not inquire about the details, Pulter opines. Yet she herself is awfully tempted, if we can judge by how urgently (in the poem’s late-breaking, self-reflective turn) she implores that she should “never know [her] destiny,” and “not here anticipate [her] grave.” To do so, she frets, is to be buried alive: a paradoxical state reflecting a certain ambivalence, in this poem as in others, toward life and death on (and in) earth, and perhaps what follows too. Her projected solution is devotion to God’s purpose, which might reframe consciousness of mortality.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Derived from a Latin word meaning “that which has been spoken,” fate in this poem is conflated with death and intertwined with the prognostications of astrologers, prophets, and soothsayers. The biblical and classical figures referenced in this poem learn the details of their demise beforehand, yet not one of these figures escapes the universal fate nor—with one important exception—the promised particulars. The poem makes a lesson out of those who flout fate, from Jezebel who elevates herself in royal resplendence only to be defenestrated, to Caesar who mocks his soothsayer shortly before being stabbed. The irony that imbues these stories implicates pride as a kind of intrinsically fatal folly that underlies not only the presumption that one can evade fate but also the very desire to “Curiously pry” into one’s death, a desire with which the speaker grapples.
The sharp, moralizing contrast drawn between ideal Christian and typical pagan responses to mortality is exemplified foremost by the poem’s augmentation of the emblem conventionally associated with Aeschylus. As Eardley notes, emblems traditionally consist of three parts: “a motto (inscriptio), a printed image (pictura), and a short epigrammatic verse (subscriptio)” (27). While Pulter foregoes the formal elements of inscriptio and pictura, her emblematic verse exhibits didactic and ekphrastic tendencies. The spectacle in this case is the bizarre death of the tragedian Aeschylus, as recounted in Pliny’s Naturalis historia, translated by Philemon Holland: when warned by divinators that he will die on a certain day by means of a falling object, Aeschylus ventures into an open field, “far from house or tree, presuming vpon the securitie of the clear and open skie” (The Historie of the World [London, 1634], 271). As if on cue, an eagle, seeking a hard surface on which to shell her prey, spots the poet’s shiny pate and drops a tortoise on his head. Pulter’s wry tone in these lines and her tongue-in-cheek aside on baldness accentuate the comic outlandishness of the situation. Though this particular emblem seems absent from the popular English collections of Whitney, Peacham, Quarles, and Wither, it does appear in a number of continental collections in the same period, and the mottos of this common emblem variously iterate that fate is inevitable and death, all-powerful.
Pulter, however, diverges from these commonplaces in lines 14–16 by suggesting that the fate of death can be crossed by divine intervention. Such a reprieve, moreover, is obtained not via actions of avoidance but by an attitude of contrition: in contrast with the pagan, hell-bound Aeschlyus who presumes he can outwit what is fated, Hezekiah’s humble tears win him a temporary pardon from death. Despite his political missteps and spiritual faults, Hezekiah is memorialized as one of the few righteous Judean kings within the biblical narrative, upheld in early modern sermons and in works like John Donne’s Devotions for his exemplary response to illness and impending death. When warned by the prophet Isaiah that his illness will be fatal, Hezekiah, rather than seeking the aid of physicians or other deities, “turn[s] his face to the wall” and tearfully prays for the Hebrew god’s intervention, invoking his past devotion and good works as cause for mercy (2 Kings 20:2–3; Isaiah 38:2–3). Listed as an ancestor of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew’s genealogy (1:10), the pre-Christian, imperfect, and yet righteous Hezekiah functions as an important analogue for the Christian speaker, who likewise strives to live righteously so that she may die “with comfort.” Like Hezekiah, the speaker ultimately prays for divine intervention into her “Sad Story,” but her request is not for a mere deferral of death but for a post factum reversal, that is, a glorious resurrection and carefree afterlife, and the fortitude to live her precarious, mortal life according to such a hope (thereby rising, too, from doubt and despair).
The speaker’s portrayal of death as a welcome night’s rest for the weary, then, qualifies her aversion to foreknowledge with an underlying desire not shared by the other figures in the poem. Though she characterizes death as alluringly peaceful, the speaker nevertheless prays that she might not “anticipate [her] grave,” the verb anticipate meaning to consider in advance—to foreknow and to fret over—but also, relatedly, to bring about or put into practice prematurely, like Aeschylus seems to do by trying to prevent his death. For the speaker, anticipation is contrary to the life of spiritual devotion upon which a good death is contingent and by which, with divine aid, a good death is possible. Precise foreknowledge is futile, even pernicious, not only if fate is fixed as per tradition but also if, as intimated by the exceptional “Unless” in line 14, fate is in flux, a working out of salvation.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
31 Old Eſculus being told that hee Should die
Old
Gloss Note
Prolific Greek playwright who was told by an oracle that he would die by something from the heavens. According to legend, this prophecy was realized when he was killed by a turtle shell dropped by an eagle.
Aeschylus, being told that he should die
Old
Critical Note
Variant spelling of Aeschylus, the name of the renowned Greek tragedian whose unfortunate yet legendary demise is recounted in the first ten lines of this poem. As Eardley notes, Pulter likely bases her account of Aeschylus’s death on Holland’s translation of Pliny: see The Historie of the World (London, 1634), 272. Christian suggests Montaigne as another possible source: see Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1613), 32.
Escalus, being told that he Should die
2
By the deſcent of Something from on High
By the descent of something from on high,
By the descent of something from on High,
3
Into the field hee went and Satt him down
Into the field he went and sat him down.
Into the field he went and sat him down.
4
The Sun Shone bright upon his glistring Crown
The sun shone bright upon his
Gloss Note
glittering head. Aeschylus is bald (and thus a target for the eagle).
glist’ring crown,
The Sun Shone bright upon his glist’ring Crown,
5
ffor hee to Eriſine had Sacrifis’d
Gloss Note
Aeschylus is devoted to “Erycine,” a name for Venus, the goddess of love, derived from her temple on Mount Eryx. In humoral medicine, it was thought that “one major way to induce coldness, and thus baldness, was too much sexual activity” (Anu Korhonen, “Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 [2010], pp. 371-91 at p. 380).
For he to Erycine had sacrificed;
Critical Note
Anglicization of Erycina, an epiclesis or liturgical epithet for Venus as revered by cult worshippers in Greco-Roman antiquity. According to the Greek historian and geographer Strabo, the name Erycina is derived from the location of the goddess’s temple, the “lofty mountain” Eryx in Sicily (Geography 6.1.7). Two subsidiary temples in Rome were dedicated to Venus Erycina, one on the Capitoline Hill and one near the Porta Collina: see Anna Anguissola, “Note on Aphidruma 2: Strabo on the Transfer of Cults,” Classical Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2006): 643–646. Ariadne Staples contextualizes this cult alongside others devoted to Venus in From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (New York, 1998), 99–126. That Aeschylus was a devotee of Venus Erycina appears to be Pulter’s own invention and a cheeky explanation for the poet’s baldness: in addition to the broader associations of Venus with romantic and sexual entanglement, the Erycine cult was specifically associated with prostitution (Staples, 113, 122). As Knight and Wall note, early modern humoral medicine linked baldness with overindulgence in sexual activity.
For he to Erycine had Sacrificed—
6
Pitty a Poet thus was Stigmatiz’d
Gloss Note
It is a pity
Pity a poet thus was
Gloss Note
scarred, branded, or disgraced. Baldness is here construed as a stigma.
stigmatized.
Pity a Poet thus was
Critical Note
Branded or marked, connoting disgrace, but also perhaps an ironic allusion to the stigmata of devout Christians and saints.
stigmatized.
7
A Towring Eagle let her prey fall down
A tow’ring eagle let her prey fall down
A Tow’ring Eagle let her prey fall down
8
In hope to break the Eſcallup on his Crown
In hope to break
Gloss Note
shell
th’escallop on his crown.
In hope to break the
Gloss Note
Variant of scallop, apparently denoting the shell of the tortoise that the eagle drops on Aeschylus’s head.
Escallop on his Crown.
9
Shee had her wiſh it broke the fatall Shell
She had her wish; it broke the fatal shell,
She had her wish: it broke the
Gloss Note
Referring both to the tortoise’s shell and the poet’s skull.
fatal Shell,
10
And Struck the Poets Ryming Soul to Hell
And struck the poet’s rhyming soul to Hell.
And struck the Poet’s Rhyming Soul to Hell.
11
Then let none Curiouſly prie in their ffate
Then let none curiously pry in their fate,
Then let none Curiously pry in their Fate,
12
ffor none can lengthen or make Short their date
For none can lengthen or make short their date.
For none can lengthen or make short their date.
13
ffor Surely none their ffortune can prevent
For surely none their fortune can prevent,
For surely none their Fortune can prevent,
14
Unleſs a Meſſenger from Heaven bee Sent
Unless a messenger from Heaven be sent
Critical Note
Per the headnote to this poem, this caveat marks a divergence from the mottos and verses conventionally paired with the image of Aeschylus’s death.
Unless a Messenger from Heaven be Sent
15
With a
Physical Note
“r” appears in different hand from main scribe; superscript colon in same hand may represent insertion marks
Repr:.ieve, Soe Hezechias Tears
With a reprieve; so
Gloss Note
See 2 Kings: 20:1-6, which tells of how Hezekiah wept and prayed when the prophet Isaiah told him of Hezekiah’s impending death; in response, God extended his life by fifteen years.
Hezekiah’s tears
With a Reprieve—So
Critical Note
When his looming death is foretold by the prophet Isaiah, the ailing King Hezekiah prays to God in earnest and is said to have “wept sore.” In response, God promises healing and fifteen more years of life, proclaiming “I have seen thy teares” (2 Kings 20:1–6; Isaiah 38:1–6). Tears are a powerful, generative motif in Pulter’s poetry, and line 30 of this poem reiterates their centrality to the speaker’s own response to her mortality: see the note to “Sighs and tears” (l. 30) for examples of this motif elsewhere in the manuscript. Though humble in contrast with the other figures in this poem, Hezekiah notably falls into pride soon after his miraculous recovery (2 Chronicles 32:24–26). Despite his shortcomings, however, he was viewed by early modern readers as an exemplary biblical figure, both in his leadership and his response to what is understood to have been a plague-like illness: see Kevin Killeen, “Hezekiah, the Politics of Municipal Plague and the London Poor,” The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2016), 76–104.
Hezekiah’s Tears
16
A pardon did obtain for ffourteen
Physical Note
in different hand from main scribe, directly above doubly struck-through “ffourteen”
ffifteen Years
A pardon did obtain for fifteen years.
A pardon did obtain for Fifteen years.
17
This Jezabell found true that fatall hour
This
Gloss Note
Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel. She was a worshipper of Baal caught in religious wars; Elijah’s prophecy, that dogs would eat her corpse, came true.
Jezebel found true that fatal hour
This
Gloss Note
Jezebel, along with her husband King Ahab, implemented the worship of Baal in Israel and commanded the execution of many Hebrew prophets. The prophet Elijah foretold her gruesome death, which he figures as an act of divine vengeance. Jezebel’s disdain for the prophecy and her own mortality is implied in the biblical account: as her political enemy approaches, she applies cosmetics, adorns her hair, and greets him with a taunt from a high window. She is almost immediately defenestrated by one of her own attendants, her broken body consumed by stray dogs as prophesied (2 Kings 9:30–37).
Jezebel found true that fatal hour
18
When Dogs her Curſſed Karcas did Devour
When dogs her curséd carcass did devour.
When Dogs her Cursèd Carcass did Devour;
19
Nor could domition Croſs his Prophets fate
Nor could
Gloss Note
Domitian was a Roman emperor who failed to disprove one of the soothsayer Ascletarion’s prophecies. He also tried unsuccessfully to evade a soothsayer’s prediction of his own death.
Domitian cross his prophet’s fate
Nor could
Critical Note
Roman emperor who attempted to challenge fate and was plagued by the premonition of his death. When the astrologer Ascletario foretold the manner of his own death, Domitian tried to have Ascletario killed in a different manner in order to prove the fallibility of divination. It is Domitian, however, who ultimately fails. His aversion to prophecy, moreover, appears to have stemmed from his youth when astrologers foretold both the hour and manner of his death. Even on the portentous day, Domitian sentenced a soothsayer to death for interpreting the city’s ongoing problem of lightning strikes as foreshadowing a change in rulers. Unbeknownst to Domitian, however, his friends had been conspiring to overthrow him and, knowing he feared the fifth hour of the day as the fatal one, they assured him it was the sixth when he inquired. Relieved, he dismissed his attendants, retired to his bedroom, and was promptly slain. For a full account, see Holland’s translation of Suetonius in The Historie of Twelve Caesars (London, 1609), 269.
Domitian Cross his Prophet’s fate
20
Or ad a minute to his own lives date
Or add a minute to his own life’s date.
Or add a minute to his own life’s date.
21
Though Cæſar did the fatall Ides Know
Gloss Note
A soothsayer foretold the death of Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who was stabbed to death on the “Ides” (or fifteenth day) of March.
Though Caesar did the fatal Ides know,
Though Caesar did the
Gloss Note
The soothsayer Spurina forewarned Julius Caesar of a danger that “would not be differred [deferred] after the Ides of March,” that is the fifteenth day of the month. Despite other corroborating portents, dreams, and even a pamphlet warning him of the conspiracy against him, Caesar did not take heed: at the eleventh hour of the appointed day, he “laughed Spurina to scorn” and labelled him a false prophet (Suetonius, The Historie of Twelve Caesars, trans. Holland, 33). Shortly thereafter he was fatally stabbed by members of the Roman senate.
fatal Ides know,
22
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow.
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow;
23
Soe Agrippina was her fate foretold
So Agrippina was her fate foretold,
So
Critical Note
Roman empress who was warned by an astrologer that her son Nero would one day kill her. After many elaborate plans and botched attempts, Nero finally succeeded in orchestrating his mother’s death, casting it as a suicide. As Eardley notes, Nero’s postmortem “dissection” of his mother can be interpreted both literally and figuratively (226n252).
Agrippina was her fate foretold
24
Yet her deſcection Nero did behould
Gloss Note
As Agrippina had been foretold by an astrologer, Roman emperor Nero killed his mother and passionately viewed (“dissected”) each part of her corpse.
Yet her dissection Nero did behold.
Yet her dissection Nero did behold.
then
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25
Then let mee never Know my Destinie
Then let me never know my destiny,
Then let me never Know my Destiny,
26
But every day Soe live that when I die
But every day so live that when I die
But every day So live that when I die,
27
I may with comfort lay theſe Ruins down
I may with comfort lay these ruins down
I may with comfort lay these Ruins down
28
In dust tis ſofter farr then finest Down
In
Gloss Note
the material from which life derives to and to which it will return; see Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
dust; ’tis softer far than finest
Gloss Note
soft feathers
down.
In dust; ’tis softer far than
Critical Note
This line, along with the final couplet, echoes diction in Welcome [2] [Poem 33], a poem that more consistently treats death as a happy prospect.
finest Down,
29
Nor is that Pillow Stuft with Cares or fears
Nor is that pillow stuffed with cares or fears,
Nor is that Pillow Stuffed with Cares or fears,
30
Nor Shall I wake as now to Sighs and tears
Nor shall I wake as now to sighs and tears.
Nor Shall I wake as now to
Critical Note
That sighs and tears are the poems themselves is implied throughout Pulter’s manuscript: she describes her emblems as “the sighs of a sad soul,” and the symbolism of tears expressed along with these sighs is underscored in poems like The Circle [1] [Poem 17] and The Weeping Wish [Poem 61].
Sighs and tears.
31
Yet o my God this Comfort let mee have
Yet O, my God, this comfort let me have:
Yet, O my God, this Comfort let me have:
32
Let mee not here Anticipate my Grave
Let me not here anticipate my grave;
Let me not here
Critical Note
Multiple shades of the verb anticipate are germane to this line. Relevant definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary include “To take into consideration before the appropriate or due time” and “To realize beforehand,” both of which pertain to foreknowledge (def. 7a and def. 8). Another relevant definition is “To observe or practise in advance of the due date; to cause to happen earlier, accelerate,” which captures the futility (and irony) of attempting to prevent fate as demonstrated by the stories of Aeschylus and others in the poem (def. 5). This secondary definition also resonates with the following line’s metaphor of being “buried alive,” a premature enactment of death.
Anticipate my Grave.
33
Yet if I must alive thus buried bee
Yet
Gloss Note
The speaker reads her own anticipation of the grave (see the previous line), through worrying or wondering about her fate, as a form of living death.
if I must alive thus buried be,
Critical Note
Being “buried alive,” thereby enduring a kind of living death, captures the dampening effects of precisely foreknowing one’s death, but it may also or alternatively allude broadly to the speaker’s position of obscurity and confinement. In Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57], the speaker characterizes her geographical and social isolation in identical terms, as being “buried thus alive.”
Yet if I must alive thus buried be,
34
Let mee yet live my gracious God to thee
Let me yet live, my gracious God, to Thee.
Let me yet live my gracious God to thee.
35
Then Soe aſſist my Soul in her Sad Story
Then so assist my soul in her sad story,
Then So assist my Soul in her
Critical Note
“Story” as an epithet for life suggests a sense of progression towards some end(ing) and is used frequently throughout the manuscript: in addition to the poems referenced in footnotes above, see Aletheia’s Pearl [Poem 32], To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], and Come My Dear Children (Emblem 2) [Poem 68], among many others. Notably, the word “story” in the terminal position of Pulter’s poetic lines always and, it would seem, inevitably rhymes with “glory,” a reference to the beatific afterlife in which the speaker hopes her story culminates.
Sad Story—
36
That though I fall yet I may Riſe to Glory.
That though I fall, yet I may rise to glory.
That though I fall yet I may Rise to Glory.
curled line
X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition

 Editorial note

This Amplified Edition seeks a middle ground between the reading texts of previous editions: Alice Eardley’s and Leah Knight and Wendy Wall’s respective modernizations and Stefan Christian’s semi-diplomatic transcription. The aim of this edition is to provide a text that is accessible to the modern reader while also retaining some idiosyncrasies of the original manuscript. In particular, this edition has retained the manuscript’s capitalization, a so-called “accidental” feature of a text (that is, one whose change or modernization does not affect meaning). Retaining the original capitalization in this Amplified Edition defamiliarizes the text without deterring the reader from understanding, and also highlights alliterative patterns that are perhaps more visually conspicuous in the original. One exception is the name “Domitian,” which is not capitalized in the original but is capitalized in this edition in order to clarify that the word is a proper noun. More broadly, spelling has been modernized according to Canadian standard usage. The names of biblical and classical figures have been regularized with one notable exception: the variant spelling of “Escalus,” preserving the capital E which is prominent in the early lines of the poem. All manuscript corrections have been silently incorporated, and contractions have been silently expanded, except where they might influence metre: for example, “Towring” is retained as “Tow’ring” whereas “Sacrifis’d” has been changed to “Sacrificed.” Punctuation has been modernized in order to clarify the sense, tone, and interrelationship of clauses.
The explanatory notes for this edition expand on those provided in the editions specified above. Given the abundance of biblical and classical allusions in this poem, the notes frequently draw directly on source material in order to highlight significant parallels that may be latent between Pulter’s allusions. The notes provide readers with avenues for further research, and biblical references correspond with the King James Bible (1611).
The editor thanks Liza Blake, Leah Knight, Wendy Wall, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous and illuminating feedback, and Sam Nguyen for encoding this Amplified Edition.

 Headnote

Derived from a Latin word meaning “that which has been spoken,” fate in this poem is conflated with death and intertwined with the prognostications of astrologers, prophets, and soothsayers. The biblical and classical figures referenced in this poem learn the details of their demise beforehand, yet not one of these figures escapes the universal fate nor—with one important exception—the promised particulars. The poem makes a lesson out of those who flout fate, from Jezebel who elevates herself in royal resplendence only to be defenestrated, to Caesar who mocks his soothsayer shortly before being stabbed. The irony that imbues these stories implicates pride as a kind of intrinsically fatal folly that underlies not only the presumption that one can evade fate but also the very desire to “Curiously pry” into one’s death, a desire with which the speaker grapples.
The sharp, moralizing contrast drawn between ideal Christian and typical pagan responses to mortality is exemplified foremost by the poem’s augmentation of the emblem conventionally associated with Aeschylus. As Eardley notes, emblems traditionally consist of three parts: “a motto (inscriptio), a printed image (pictura), and a short epigrammatic verse (subscriptio)” (27). While Pulter foregoes the formal elements of inscriptio and pictura, her emblematic verse exhibits didactic and ekphrastic tendencies. The spectacle in this case is the bizarre death of the tragedian Aeschylus, as recounted in Pliny’s Naturalis historia, translated by Philemon Holland: when warned by divinators that he will die on a certain day by means of a falling object, Aeschylus ventures into an open field, “far from house or tree, presuming vpon the securitie of the clear and open skie” (The Historie of the World [London, 1634], 271). As if on cue, an eagle, seeking a hard surface on which to shell her prey, spots the poet’s shiny pate and drops a tortoise on his head. Pulter’s wry tone in these lines and her tongue-in-cheek aside on baldness accentuate the comic outlandishness of the situation. Though this particular emblem seems absent from the popular English collections of Whitney, Peacham, Quarles, and Wither, it does appear in a number of continental collections in the same period, and the mottos of this common emblem variously iterate that fate is inevitable and death, all-powerful.
Pulter, however, diverges from these commonplaces in lines 14–16 by suggesting that the fate of death can be crossed by divine intervention. Such a reprieve, moreover, is obtained not via actions of avoidance but by an attitude of contrition: in contrast with the pagan, hell-bound Aeschlyus who presumes he can outwit what is fated, Hezekiah’s humble tears win him a temporary pardon from death. Despite his political missteps and spiritual faults, Hezekiah is memorialized as one of the few righteous Judean kings within the biblical narrative, upheld in early modern sermons and in works like John Donne’s Devotions for his exemplary response to illness and impending death. When warned by the prophet Isaiah that his illness will be fatal, Hezekiah, rather than seeking the aid of physicians or other deities, “turn[s] his face to the wall” and tearfully prays for the Hebrew god’s intervention, invoking his past devotion and good works as cause for mercy (2 Kings 20:2–3; Isaiah 38:2–3). Listed as an ancestor of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew’s genealogy (1:10), the pre-Christian, imperfect, and yet righteous Hezekiah functions as an important analogue for the Christian speaker, who likewise strives to live righteously so that she may die “with comfort.” Like Hezekiah, the speaker ultimately prays for divine intervention into her “Sad Story,” but her request is not for a mere deferral of death but for a post factum reversal, that is, a glorious resurrection and carefree afterlife, and the fortitude to live her precarious, mortal life according to such a hope (thereby rising, too, from doubt and despair).
The speaker’s portrayal of death as a welcome night’s rest for the weary, then, qualifies her aversion to foreknowledge with an underlying desire not shared by the other figures in the poem. Though she characterizes death as alluringly peaceful, the speaker nevertheless prays that she might not “anticipate [her] grave,” the verb anticipate meaning to consider in advance—to foreknow and to fret over—but also, relatedly, to bring about or put into practice prematurely, like Aeschylus seems to do by trying to prevent his death. For the speaker, anticipation is contrary to the life of spiritual devotion upon which a good death is contingent and by which, with divine aid, a good death is possible. Precise foreknowledge is futile, even pernicious, not only if fate is fixed as per tradition but also if, as intimated by the exceptional “Unless” in line 14, fate is in flux, a working out of salvation.
Line number 1

 Critical note

Variant spelling of Aeschylus, the name of the renowned Greek tragedian whose unfortunate yet legendary demise is recounted in the first ten lines of this poem. As Eardley notes, Pulter likely bases her account of Aeschylus’s death on Holland’s translation of Pliny: see The Historie of the World (London, 1634), 272. Christian suggests Montaigne as another possible source: see Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1613), 32.
Line number 5

 Critical note

Anglicization of Erycina, an epiclesis or liturgical epithet for Venus as revered by cult worshippers in Greco-Roman antiquity. According to the Greek historian and geographer Strabo, the name Erycina is derived from the location of the goddess’s temple, the “lofty mountain” Eryx in Sicily (Geography 6.1.7). Two subsidiary temples in Rome were dedicated to Venus Erycina, one on the Capitoline Hill and one near the Porta Collina: see Anna Anguissola, “Note on Aphidruma 2: Strabo on the Transfer of Cults,” Classical Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2006): 643–646. Ariadne Staples contextualizes this cult alongside others devoted to Venus in From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (New York, 1998), 99–126. That Aeschylus was a devotee of Venus Erycina appears to be Pulter’s own invention and a cheeky explanation for the poet’s baldness: in addition to the broader associations of Venus with romantic and sexual entanglement, the Erycine cult was specifically associated with prostitution (Staples, 113, 122). As Knight and Wall note, early modern humoral medicine linked baldness with overindulgence in sexual activity.
Line number 6

 Critical note

Branded or marked, connoting disgrace, but also perhaps an ironic allusion to the stigmata of devout Christians and saints.
Line number 8

 Gloss note

Variant of scallop, apparently denoting the shell of the tortoise that the eagle drops on Aeschylus’s head.
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Referring both to the tortoise’s shell and the poet’s skull.
Line number 14

 Critical note

Per the headnote to this poem, this caveat marks a divergence from the mottos and verses conventionally paired with the image of Aeschylus’s death.
Line number 15

 Critical note

When his looming death is foretold by the prophet Isaiah, the ailing King Hezekiah prays to God in earnest and is said to have “wept sore.” In response, God promises healing and fifteen more years of life, proclaiming “I have seen thy teares” (2 Kings 20:1–6; Isaiah 38:1–6). Tears are a powerful, generative motif in Pulter’s poetry, and line 30 of this poem reiterates their centrality to the speaker’s own response to her mortality: see the note to “Sighs and tears” (l. 30) for examples of this motif elsewhere in the manuscript. Though humble in contrast with the other figures in this poem, Hezekiah notably falls into pride soon after his miraculous recovery (2 Chronicles 32:24–26). Despite his shortcomings, however, he was viewed by early modern readers as an exemplary biblical figure, both in his leadership and his response to what is understood to have been a plague-like illness: see Kevin Killeen, “Hezekiah, the Politics of Municipal Plague and the London Poor,” The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2016), 76–104.
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Jezebel, along with her husband King Ahab, implemented the worship of Baal in Israel and commanded the execution of many Hebrew prophets. The prophet Elijah foretold her gruesome death, which he figures as an act of divine vengeance. Jezebel’s disdain for the prophecy and her own mortality is implied in the biblical account: as her political enemy approaches, she applies cosmetics, adorns her hair, and greets him with a taunt from a high window. She is almost immediately defenestrated by one of her own attendants, her broken body consumed by stray dogs as prophesied (2 Kings 9:30–37).
Line number 19

 Critical note

Roman emperor who attempted to challenge fate and was plagued by the premonition of his death. When the astrologer Ascletario foretold the manner of his own death, Domitian tried to have Ascletario killed in a different manner in order to prove the fallibility of divination. It is Domitian, however, who ultimately fails. His aversion to prophecy, moreover, appears to have stemmed from his youth when astrologers foretold both the hour and manner of his death. Even on the portentous day, Domitian sentenced a soothsayer to death for interpreting the city’s ongoing problem of lightning strikes as foreshadowing a change in rulers. Unbeknownst to Domitian, however, his friends had been conspiring to overthrow him and, knowing he feared the fifth hour of the day as the fatal one, they assured him it was the sixth when he inquired. Relieved, he dismissed his attendants, retired to his bedroom, and was promptly slain. For a full account, see Holland’s translation of Suetonius in The Historie of Twelve Caesars (London, 1609), 269.
Line number 21

 Gloss note

The soothsayer Spurina forewarned Julius Caesar of a danger that “would not be differred [deferred] after the Ides of March,” that is the fifteenth day of the month. Despite other corroborating portents, dreams, and even a pamphlet warning him of the conspiracy against him, Caesar did not take heed: at the eleventh hour of the appointed day, he “laughed Spurina to scorn” and labelled him a false prophet (Suetonius, The Historie of Twelve Caesars, trans. Holland, 33). Shortly thereafter he was fatally stabbed by members of the Roman senate.
Line number 23

 Critical note

Roman empress who was warned by an astrologer that her son Nero would one day kill her. After many elaborate plans and botched attempts, Nero finally succeeded in orchestrating his mother’s death, casting it as a suicide. As Eardley notes, Nero’s postmortem “dissection” of his mother can be interpreted both literally and figuratively (226n252).
Line number 28

 Critical note

This line, along with the final couplet, echoes diction in Welcome [2] [Poem 33], a poem that more consistently treats death as a happy prospect.
Line number 30

 Critical note

That sighs and tears are the poems themselves is implied throughout Pulter’s manuscript: she describes her emblems as “the sighs of a sad soul,” and the symbolism of tears expressed along with these sighs is underscored in poems like The Circle [1] [Poem 17] and The Weeping Wish [Poem 61].
Line number 32

 Critical note

Multiple shades of the verb anticipate are germane to this line. Relevant definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary include “To take into consideration before the appropriate or due time” and “To realize beforehand,” both of which pertain to foreknowledge (def. 7a and def. 8). Another relevant definition is “To observe or practise in advance of the due date; to cause to happen earlier, accelerate,” which captures the futility (and irony) of attempting to prevent fate as demonstrated by the stories of Aeschylus and others in the poem (def. 5). This secondary definition also resonates with the following line’s metaphor of being “buried alive,” a premature enactment of death.
Line number 33

 Critical note

Being “buried alive,” thereby enduring a kind of living death, captures the dampening effects of precisely foreknowing one’s death, but it may also or alternatively allude broadly to the speaker’s position of obscurity and confinement. In Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57], the speaker characterizes her geographical and social isolation in identical terms, as being “buried thus alive.”
Line number 35

 Critical note

“Story” as an epithet for life suggests a sense of progression towards some end(ing) and is used frequently throughout the manuscript: in addition to the poems referenced in footnotes above, see Aletheia’s Pearl [Poem 32], To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], and Come My Dear Children (Emblem 2) [Poem 68], among many others. Notably, the word “story” in the terminal position of Pulter’s poetic lines always and, it would seem, inevitably rhymes with “glory,” a reference to the beatific afterlife in which the speaker hopes her story culminates.
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Amplified Edition
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[Emblem 31]
Old Aeschylus
(Emblem 31)
Old Escalus (Emblem 31)
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.

— Christine Jacob
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.

— Christine Jacob
This Amplified Edition seeks a middle ground between the reading texts of previous editions: Alice Eardley’s and Leah Knight and Wendy Wall’s respective modernizations and Stefan Christian’s semi-diplomatic transcription. The aim of this edition is to provide a text that is accessible to the modern reader while also retaining some idiosyncrasies of the original manuscript. In particular, this edition has retained the manuscript’s capitalization, a so-called “accidental” feature of a text (that is, one whose change or modernization does not affect meaning). Retaining the original capitalization in this Amplified Edition defamiliarizes the text without deterring the reader from understanding, and also highlights alliterative patterns that are perhaps more visually conspicuous in the original. One exception is the name “Domitian,” which is not capitalized in the original but is capitalized in this edition in order to clarify that the word is a proper noun. More broadly, spelling has been modernized according to Canadian standard usage. The names of biblical and classical figures have been regularized with one notable exception: the variant spelling of “Escalus,” preserving the capital E which is prominent in the early lines of the poem. All manuscript corrections have been silently incorporated, and contractions have been silently expanded, except where they might influence metre: for example, “Towring” is retained as “Tow’ring” whereas “Sacrifis’d” has been changed to “Sacrificed.” Punctuation has been modernized in order to clarify the sense, tone, and interrelationship of clauses.
The explanatory notes for this edition expand on those provided in the editions specified above. Given the abundance of biblical and classical allusions in this poem, the notes frequently draw directly on source material in order to highlight significant parallels that may be latent between Pulter’s allusions. The notes provide readers with avenues for further research, and biblical references correspond with the King James Bible (1611).
The editor thanks Liza Blake, Leah Knight, Wendy Wall, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous and illuminating feedback, and Sam Nguyen for encoding this Amplified Edition.


— Christine Jacob
It is a mistake to want to know your fate, Pulter argues here. Once you do, you’ll want to change it, and you can’t; a destiny foreknown is not forestalled. Her first exhibit is a fellow poet, whose attempt to outwit the prediction that he’d die from something falling from above only brings about such a death: he goes to an open field, where a plummeting turtle smashes in his skull. This seemingly unexpected death was, of course, expected, indeed predicted—as are all deaths, or as they should be, this memento mori poem reminds us: while each of us will die, we cannot and should not inquire about the details, Pulter opines. Yet she herself is awfully tempted, if we can judge by how urgently (in the poem’s late-breaking, self-reflective turn) she implores that she should “never know [her] destiny,” and “not here anticipate [her] grave.” To do so, she frets, is to be buried alive: a paradoxical state reflecting a certain ambivalence, in this poem as in others, toward life and death on (and in) earth, and perhaps what follows too. Her projected solution is devotion to God’s purpose, which might reframe consciousness of mortality.

— Christine Jacob
Derived from a Latin word meaning “that which has been spoken,” fate in this poem is conflated with death and intertwined with the prognostications of astrologers, prophets, and soothsayers. The biblical and classical figures referenced in this poem learn the details of their demise beforehand, yet not one of these figures escapes the universal fate nor—with one important exception—the promised particulars. The poem makes a lesson out of those who flout fate, from Jezebel who elevates herself in royal resplendence only to be defenestrated, to Caesar who mocks his soothsayer shortly before being stabbed. The irony that imbues these stories implicates pride as a kind of intrinsically fatal folly that underlies not only the presumption that one can evade fate but also the very desire to “Curiously pry” into one’s death, a desire with which the speaker grapples.
The sharp, moralizing contrast drawn between ideal Christian and typical pagan responses to mortality is exemplified foremost by the poem’s augmentation of the emblem conventionally associated with Aeschylus. As Eardley notes, emblems traditionally consist of three parts: “a motto (inscriptio), a printed image (pictura), and a short epigrammatic verse (subscriptio)” (27). While Pulter foregoes the formal elements of inscriptio and pictura, her emblematic verse exhibits didactic and ekphrastic tendencies. The spectacle in this case is the bizarre death of the tragedian Aeschylus, as recounted in Pliny’s Naturalis historia, translated by Philemon Holland: when warned by divinators that he will die on a certain day by means of a falling object, Aeschylus ventures into an open field, “far from house or tree, presuming vpon the securitie of the clear and open skie” (The Historie of the World [London, 1634], 271). As if on cue, an eagle, seeking a hard surface on which to shell her prey, spots the poet’s shiny pate and drops a tortoise on his head. Pulter’s wry tone in these lines and her tongue-in-cheek aside on baldness accentuate the comic outlandishness of the situation. Though this particular emblem seems absent from the popular English collections of Whitney, Peacham, Quarles, and Wither, it does appear in a number of continental collections in the same period, and the mottos of this common emblem variously iterate that fate is inevitable and death, all-powerful.
Pulter, however, diverges from these commonplaces in lines 14–16 by suggesting that the fate of death can be crossed by divine intervention. Such a reprieve, moreover, is obtained not via actions of avoidance but by an attitude of contrition: in contrast with the pagan, hell-bound Aeschlyus who presumes he can outwit what is fated, Hezekiah’s humble tears win him a temporary pardon from death. Despite his political missteps and spiritual faults, Hezekiah is memorialized as one of the few righteous Judean kings within the biblical narrative, upheld in early modern sermons and in works like John Donne’s Devotions for his exemplary response to illness and impending death. When warned by the prophet Isaiah that his illness will be fatal, Hezekiah, rather than seeking the aid of physicians or other deities, “turn[s] his face to the wall” and tearfully prays for the Hebrew god’s intervention, invoking his past devotion and good works as cause for mercy (2 Kings 20:2–3; Isaiah 38:2–3). Listed as an ancestor of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew’s genealogy (1:10), the pre-Christian, imperfect, and yet righteous Hezekiah functions as an important analogue for the Christian speaker, who likewise strives to live righteously so that she may die “with comfort.” Like Hezekiah, the speaker ultimately prays for divine intervention into her “Sad Story,” but her request is not for a mere deferral of death but for a post factum reversal, that is, a glorious resurrection and carefree afterlife, and the fortitude to live her precarious, mortal life according to such a hope (thereby rising, too, from doubt and despair).
The speaker’s portrayal of death as a welcome night’s rest for the weary, then, qualifies her aversion to foreknowledge with an underlying desire not shared by the other figures in the poem. Though she characterizes death as alluringly peaceful, the speaker nevertheless prays that she might not “anticipate [her] grave,” the verb anticipate meaning to consider in advance—to foreknow and to fret over—but also, relatedly, to bring about or put into practice prematurely, like Aeschylus seems to do by trying to prevent his death. For the speaker, anticipation is contrary to the life of spiritual devotion upon which a good death is contingent and by which, with divine aid, a good death is possible. Precise foreknowledge is futile, even pernicious, not only if fate is fixed as per tradition but also if, as intimated by the exceptional “Unless” in line 14, fate is in flux, a working out of salvation.


— Christine Jacob
1
31 Old Eſculus being told that hee Should die
Old
Gloss Note
Prolific Greek playwright who was told by an oracle that he would die by something from the heavens. According to legend, this prophecy was realized when he was killed by a turtle shell dropped by an eagle.
Aeschylus, being told that he should die
Old
Critical Note
Variant spelling of Aeschylus, the name of the renowned Greek tragedian whose unfortunate yet legendary demise is recounted in the first ten lines of this poem. As Eardley notes, Pulter likely bases her account of Aeschylus’s death on Holland’s translation of Pliny: see The Historie of the World (London, 1634), 272. Christian suggests Montaigne as another possible source: see Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1613), 32.
Escalus, being told that he Should die
2
By the deſcent of Something from on High
By the descent of something from on high,
By the descent of something from on High,
3
Into the field hee went and Satt him down
Into the field he went and sat him down.
Into the field he went and sat him down.
4
The Sun Shone bright upon his glistring Crown
The sun shone bright upon his
Gloss Note
glittering head. Aeschylus is bald (and thus a target for the eagle).
glist’ring crown,
The Sun Shone bright upon his glist’ring Crown,
5
ffor hee to Eriſine had Sacrifis’d
Gloss Note
Aeschylus is devoted to “Erycine,” a name for Venus, the goddess of love, derived from her temple on Mount Eryx. In humoral medicine, it was thought that “one major way to induce coldness, and thus baldness, was too much sexual activity” (Anu Korhonen, “Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 [2010], pp. 371-91 at p. 380).
For he to Erycine had sacrificed;
Critical Note
Anglicization of Erycina, an epiclesis or liturgical epithet for Venus as revered by cult worshippers in Greco-Roman antiquity. According to the Greek historian and geographer Strabo, the name Erycina is derived from the location of the goddess’s temple, the “lofty mountain” Eryx in Sicily (Geography 6.1.7). Two subsidiary temples in Rome were dedicated to Venus Erycina, one on the Capitoline Hill and one near the Porta Collina: see Anna Anguissola, “Note on Aphidruma 2: Strabo on the Transfer of Cults,” Classical Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2006): 643–646. Ariadne Staples contextualizes this cult alongside others devoted to Venus in From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (New York, 1998), 99–126. That Aeschylus was a devotee of Venus Erycina appears to be Pulter’s own invention and a cheeky explanation for the poet’s baldness: in addition to the broader associations of Venus with romantic and sexual entanglement, the Erycine cult was specifically associated with prostitution (Staples, 113, 122). As Knight and Wall note, early modern humoral medicine linked baldness with overindulgence in sexual activity.
For he to Erycine had Sacrificed—
6
Pitty a Poet thus was Stigmatiz’d
Gloss Note
It is a pity
Pity a poet thus was
Gloss Note
scarred, branded, or disgraced. Baldness is here construed as a stigma.
stigmatized.
Pity a Poet thus was
Critical Note
Branded or marked, connoting disgrace, but also perhaps an ironic allusion to the stigmata of devout Christians and saints.
stigmatized.
7
A Towring Eagle let her prey fall down
A tow’ring eagle let her prey fall down
A Tow’ring Eagle let her prey fall down
8
In hope to break the Eſcallup on his Crown
In hope to break
Gloss Note
shell
th’escallop on his crown.
In hope to break the
Gloss Note
Variant of scallop, apparently denoting the shell of the tortoise that the eagle drops on Aeschylus’s head.
Escallop on his Crown.
9
Shee had her wiſh it broke the fatall Shell
She had her wish; it broke the fatal shell,
She had her wish: it broke the
Gloss Note
Referring both to the tortoise’s shell and the poet’s skull.
fatal Shell,
10
And Struck the Poets Ryming Soul to Hell
And struck the poet’s rhyming soul to Hell.
And struck the Poet’s Rhyming Soul to Hell.
11
Then let none Curiouſly prie in their ffate
Then let none curiously pry in their fate,
Then let none Curiously pry in their Fate,
12
ffor none can lengthen or make Short their date
For none can lengthen or make short their date.
For none can lengthen or make short their date.
13
ffor Surely none their ffortune can prevent
For surely none their fortune can prevent,
For surely none their Fortune can prevent,
14
Unleſs a Meſſenger from Heaven bee Sent
Unless a messenger from Heaven be sent
Critical Note
Per the headnote to this poem, this caveat marks a divergence from the mottos and verses conventionally paired with the image of Aeschylus’s death.
Unless a Messenger from Heaven be Sent
15
With a
Physical Note
“r” appears in different hand from main scribe; superscript colon in same hand may represent insertion marks
Repr:.ieve, Soe Hezechias Tears
With a reprieve; so
Gloss Note
See 2 Kings: 20:1-6, which tells of how Hezekiah wept and prayed when the prophet Isaiah told him of Hezekiah’s impending death; in response, God extended his life by fifteen years.
Hezekiah’s tears
With a Reprieve—So
Critical Note
When his looming death is foretold by the prophet Isaiah, the ailing King Hezekiah prays to God in earnest and is said to have “wept sore.” In response, God promises healing and fifteen more years of life, proclaiming “I have seen thy teares” (2 Kings 20:1–6; Isaiah 38:1–6). Tears are a powerful, generative motif in Pulter’s poetry, and line 30 of this poem reiterates their centrality to the speaker’s own response to her mortality: see the note to “Sighs and tears” (l. 30) for examples of this motif elsewhere in the manuscript. Though humble in contrast with the other figures in this poem, Hezekiah notably falls into pride soon after his miraculous recovery (2 Chronicles 32:24–26). Despite his shortcomings, however, he was viewed by early modern readers as an exemplary biblical figure, both in his leadership and his response to what is understood to have been a plague-like illness: see Kevin Killeen, “Hezekiah, the Politics of Municipal Plague and the London Poor,” The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2016), 76–104.
Hezekiah’s Tears
16
A pardon did obtain for ffourteen
Physical Note
in different hand from main scribe, directly above doubly struck-through “ffourteen”
ffifteen Years
A pardon did obtain for fifteen years.
A pardon did obtain for Fifteen years.
17
This Jezabell found true that fatall hour
This
Gloss Note
Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel. She was a worshipper of Baal caught in religious wars; Elijah’s prophecy, that dogs would eat her corpse, came true.
Jezebel found true that fatal hour
This
Gloss Note
Jezebel, along with her husband King Ahab, implemented the worship of Baal in Israel and commanded the execution of many Hebrew prophets. The prophet Elijah foretold her gruesome death, which he figures as an act of divine vengeance. Jezebel’s disdain for the prophecy and her own mortality is implied in the biblical account: as her political enemy approaches, she applies cosmetics, adorns her hair, and greets him with a taunt from a high window. She is almost immediately defenestrated by one of her own attendants, her broken body consumed by stray dogs as prophesied (2 Kings 9:30–37).
Jezebel found true that fatal hour
18
When Dogs her Curſſed Karcas did Devour
When dogs her curséd carcass did devour.
When Dogs her Cursèd Carcass did Devour;
19
Nor could domition Croſs his Prophets fate
Nor could
Gloss Note
Domitian was a Roman emperor who failed to disprove one of the soothsayer Ascletarion’s prophecies. He also tried unsuccessfully to evade a soothsayer’s prediction of his own death.
Domitian cross his prophet’s fate
Nor could
Critical Note
Roman emperor who attempted to challenge fate and was plagued by the premonition of his death. When the astrologer Ascletario foretold the manner of his own death, Domitian tried to have Ascletario killed in a different manner in order to prove the fallibility of divination. It is Domitian, however, who ultimately fails. His aversion to prophecy, moreover, appears to have stemmed from his youth when astrologers foretold both the hour and manner of his death. Even on the portentous day, Domitian sentenced a soothsayer to death for interpreting the city’s ongoing problem of lightning strikes as foreshadowing a change in rulers. Unbeknownst to Domitian, however, his friends had been conspiring to overthrow him and, knowing he feared the fifth hour of the day as the fatal one, they assured him it was the sixth when he inquired. Relieved, he dismissed his attendants, retired to his bedroom, and was promptly slain. For a full account, see Holland’s translation of Suetonius in The Historie of Twelve Caesars (London, 1609), 269.
Domitian Cross his Prophet’s fate
20
Or ad a minute to his own lives date
Or add a minute to his own life’s date.
Or add a minute to his own life’s date.
21
Though Cæſar did the fatall Ides Know
Gloss Note
A soothsayer foretold the death of Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who was stabbed to death on the “Ides” (or fifteenth day) of March.
Though Caesar did the fatal Ides know,
Though Caesar did the
Gloss Note
The soothsayer Spurina forewarned Julius Caesar of a danger that “would not be differred [deferred] after the Ides of March,” that is the fifteenth day of the month. Despite other corroborating portents, dreams, and even a pamphlet warning him of the conspiracy against him, Caesar did not take heed: at the eleventh hour of the appointed day, he “laughed Spurina to scorn” and labelled him a false prophet (Suetonius, The Historie of Twelve Caesars, trans. Holland, 33). Shortly thereafter he was fatally stabbed by members of the Roman senate.
fatal Ides know,
22
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow.
At twenty and three wounds his blood did flow;
23
Soe Agrippina was her fate foretold
So Agrippina was her fate foretold,
So
Critical Note
Roman empress who was warned by an astrologer that her son Nero would one day kill her. After many elaborate plans and botched attempts, Nero finally succeeded in orchestrating his mother’s death, casting it as a suicide. As Eardley notes, Nero’s postmortem “dissection” of his mother can be interpreted both literally and figuratively (226n252).
Agrippina was her fate foretold
24
Yet her deſcection Nero did behould
Gloss Note
As Agrippina had been foretold by an astrologer, Roman emperor Nero killed his mother and passionately viewed (“dissected”) each part of her corpse.
Yet her dissection Nero did behold.
Yet her dissection Nero did behold.
then
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25
Then let mee never Know my Destinie
Then let me never know my destiny,
Then let me never Know my Destiny,
26
But every day Soe live that when I die
But every day so live that when I die
But every day So live that when I die,
27
I may with comfort lay theſe Ruins down
I may with comfort lay these ruins down
I may with comfort lay these Ruins down
28
In dust tis ſofter farr then finest Down
In
Gloss Note
the material from which life derives to and to which it will return; see Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
dust; ’tis softer far than finest
Gloss Note
soft feathers
down.
In dust; ’tis softer far than
Critical Note
This line, along with the final couplet, echoes diction in Welcome [2] [Poem 33], a poem that more consistently treats death as a happy prospect.
finest Down,
29
Nor is that Pillow Stuft with Cares or fears
Nor is that pillow stuffed with cares or fears,
Nor is that Pillow Stuffed with Cares or fears,
30
Nor Shall I wake as now to Sighs and tears
Nor shall I wake as now to sighs and tears.
Nor Shall I wake as now to
Critical Note
That sighs and tears are the poems themselves is implied throughout Pulter’s manuscript: she describes her emblems as “the sighs of a sad soul,” and the symbolism of tears expressed along with these sighs is underscored in poems like The Circle [1] [Poem 17] and The Weeping Wish [Poem 61].
Sighs and tears.
31
Yet o my God this Comfort let mee have
Yet O, my God, this comfort let me have:
Yet, O my God, this Comfort let me have:
32
Let mee not here Anticipate my Grave
Let me not here anticipate my grave;
Let me not here
Critical Note
Multiple shades of the verb anticipate are germane to this line. Relevant definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary include “To take into consideration before the appropriate or due time” and “To realize beforehand,” both of which pertain to foreknowledge (def. 7a and def. 8). Another relevant definition is “To observe or practise in advance of the due date; to cause to happen earlier, accelerate,” which captures the futility (and irony) of attempting to prevent fate as demonstrated by the stories of Aeschylus and others in the poem (def. 5). This secondary definition also resonates with the following line’s metaphor of being “buried alive,” a premature enactment of death.
Anticipate my Grave.
33
Yet if I must alive thus buried bee
Yet
Gloss Note
The speaker reads her own anticipation of the grave (see the previous line), through worrying or wondering about her fate, as a form of living death.
if I must alive thus buried be,
Critical Note
Being “buried alive,” thereby enduring a kind of living death, captures the dampening effects of precisely foreknowing one’s death, but it may also or alternatively allude broadly to the speaker’s position of obscurity and confinement. In Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57], the speaker characterizes her geographical and social isolation in identical terms, as being “buried thus alive.”
Yet if I must alive thus buried be,
34
Let mee yet live my gracious God to thee
Let me yet live, my gracious God, to Thee.
Let me yet live my gracious God to thee.
35
Then Soe aſſist my Soul in her Sad Story
Then so assist my soul in her sad story,
Then So assist my Soul in her
Critical Note
“Story” as an epithet for life suggests a sense of progression towards some end(ing) and is used frequently throughout the manuscript: in addition to the poems referenced in footnotes above, see Aletheia’s Pearl [Poem 32], To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], and Come My Dear Children (Emblem 2) [Poem 68], among many others. Notably, the word “story” in the terminal position of Pulter’s poetic lines always and, it would seem, inevitably rhymes with “glory,” a reference to the beatific afterlife in which the speaker hopes her story culminates.
Sad Story—
36
That though I fall yet I may Riſe to Glory.
That though I fall, yet I may rise to glory.
That though I fall yet I may Rise to Glory.
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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

 Editorial note

This Amplified Edition seeks a middle ground between the reading texts of previous editions: Alice Eardley’s and Leah Knight and Wendy Wall’s respective modernizations and Stefan Christian’s semi-diplomatic transcription. The aim of this edition is to provide a text that is accessible to the modern reader while also retaining some idiosyncrasies of the original manuscript. In particular, this edition has retained the manuscript’s capitalization, a so-called “accidental” feature of a text (that is, one whose change or modernization does not affect meaning). Retaining the original capitalization in this Amplified Edition defamiliarizes the text without deterring the reader from understanding, and also highlights alliterative patterns that are perhaps more visually conspicuous in the original. One exception is the name “Domitian,” which is not capitalized in the original but is capitalized in this edition in order to clarify that the word is a proper noun. More broadly, spelling has been modernized according to Canadian standard usage. The names of biblical and classical figures have been regularized with one notable exception: the variant spelling of “Escalus,” preserving the capital E which is prominent in the early lines of the poem. All manuscript corrections have been silently incorporated, and contractions have been silently expanded, except where they might influence metre: for example, “Towring” is retained as “Tow’ring” whereas “Sacrifis’d” has been changed to “Sacrificed.” Punctuation has been modernized in order to clarify the sense, tone, and interrelationship of clauses.
The explanatory notes for this edition expand on those provided in the editions specified above. Given the abundance of biblical and classical allusions in this poem, the notes frequently draw directly on source material in order to highlight significant parallels that may be latent between Pulter’s allusions. The notes provide readers with avenues for further research, and biblical references correspond with the King James Bible (1611).
The editor thanks Liza Blake, Leah Knight, Wendy Wall, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous and illuminating feedback, and Sam Nguyen for encoding this Amplified Edition.
Elemental Edition

 Headnote

It is a mistake to want to know your fate, Pulter argues here. Once you do, you’ll want to change it, and you can’t; a destiny foreknown is not forestalled. Her first exhibit is a fellow poet, whose attempt to outwit the prediction that he’d die from something falling from above only brings about such a death: he goes to an open field, where a plummeting turtle smashes in his skull. This seemingly unexpected death was, of course, expected, indeed predicted—as are all deaths, or as they should be, this memento mori poem reminds us: while each of us will die, we cannot and should not inquire about the details, Pulter opines. Yet she herself is awfully tempted, if we can judge by how urgently (in the poem’s late-breaking, self-reflective turn) she implores that she should “never know [her] destiny,” and “not here anticipate [her] grave.” To do so, she frets, is to be buried alive: a paradoxical state reflecting a certain ambivalence, in this poem as in others, toward life and death on (and in) earth, and perhaps what follows too. Her projected solution is devotion to God’s purpose, which might reframe consciousness of mortality.
Amplified Edition

 Headnote

Derived from a Latin word meaning “that which has been spoken,” fate in this poem is conflated with death and intertwined with the prognostications of astrologers, prophets, and soothsayers. The biblical and classical figures referenced in this poem learn the details of their demise beforehand, yet not one of these figures escapes the universal fate nor—with one important exception—the promised particulars. The poem makes a lesson out of those who flout fate, from Jezebel who elevates herself in royal resplendence only to be defenestrated, to Caesar who mocks his soothsayer shortly before being stabbed. The irony that imbues these stories implicates pride as a kind of intrinsically fatal folly that underlies not only the presumption that one can evade fate but also the very desire to “Curiously pry” into one’s death, a desire with which the speaker grapples.
The sharp, moralizing contrast drawn between ideal Christian and typical pagan responses to mortality is exemplified foremost by the poem’s augmentation of the emblem conventionally associated with Aeschylus. As Eardley notes, emblems traditionally consist of three parts: “a motto (inscriptio), a printed image (pictura), and a short epigrammatic verse (subscriptio)” (27). While Pulter foregoes the formal elements of inscriptio and pictura, her emblematic verse exhibits didactic and ekphrastic tendencies. The spectacle in this case is the bizarre death of the tragedian Aeschylus, as recounted in Pliny’s Naturalis historia, translated by Philemon Holland: when warned by divinators that he will die on a certain day by means of a falling object, Aeschylus ventures into an open field, “far from house or tree, presuming vpon the securitie of the clear and open skie” (The Historie of the World [London, 1634], 271). As if on cue, an eagle, seeking a hard surface on which to shell her prey, spots the poet’s shiny pate and drops a tortoise on his head. Pulter’s wry tone in these lines and her tongue-in-cheek aside on baldness accentuate the comic outlandishness of the situation. Though this particular emblem seems absent from the popular English collections of Whitney, Peacham, Quarles, and Wither, it does appear in a number of continental collections in the same period, and the mottos of this common emblem variously iterate that fate is inevitable and death, all-powerful.
Pulter, however, diverges from these commonplaces in lines 14–16 by suggesting that the fate of death can be crossed by divine intervention. Such a reprieve, moreover, is obtained not via actions of avoidance but by an attitude of contrition: in contrast with the pagan, hell-bound Aeschlyus who presumes he can outwit what is fated, Hezekiah’s humble tears win him a temporary pardon from death. Despite his political missteps and spiritual faults, Hezekiah is memorialized as one of the few righteous Judean kings within the biblical narrative, upheld in early modern sermons and in works like John Donne’s Devotions for his exemplary response to illness and impending death. When warned by the prophet Isaiah that his illness will be fatal, Hezekiah, rather than seeking the aid of physicians or other deities, “turn[s] his face to the wall” and tearfully prays for the Hebrew god’s intervention, invoking his past devotion and good works as cause for mercy (2 Kings 20:2–3; Isaiah 38:2–3). Listed as an ancestor of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew’s genealogy (1:10), the pre-Christian, imperfect, and yet righteous Hezekiah functions as an important analogue for the Christian speaker, who likewise strives to live righteously so that she may die “with comfort.” Like Hezekiah, the speaker ultimately prays for divine intervention into her “Sad Story,” but her request is not for a mere deferral of death but for a post factum reversal, that is, a glorious resurrection and carefree afterlife, and the fortitude to live her precarious, mortal life according to such a hope (thereby rising, too, from doubt and despair).
The speaker’s portrayal of death as a welcome night’s rest for the weary, then, qualifies her aversion to foreknowledge with an underlying desire not shared by the other figures in the poem. Though she characterizes death as alluringly peaceful, the speaker nevertheless prays that she might not “anticipate [her] grave,” the verb anticipate meaning to consider in advance—to foreknow and to fret over—but also, relatedly, to bring about or put into practice prematurely, like Aeschylus seems to do by trying to prevent his death. For the speaker, anticipation is contrary to the life of spiritual devotion upon which a good death is contingent and by which, with divine aid, a good death is possible. Precise foreknowledge is futile, even pernicious, not only if fate is fixed as per tradition but also if, as intimated by the exceptional “Unless” in line 14, fate is in flux, a working out of salvation.
Elemental Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Prolific Greek playwright who was told by an oracle that he would die by something from the heavens. According to legend, this prophecy was realized when he was killed by a turtle shell dropped by an eagle.
Amplified Edition
Line number 1

 Critical note

Variant spelling of Aeschylus, the name of the renowned Greek tragedian whose unfortunate yet legendary demise is recounted in the first ten lines of this poem. As Eardley notes, Pulter likely bases her account of Aeschylus’s death on Holland’s translation of Pliny: see The Historie of the World (London, 1634), 272. Christian suggests Montaigne as another possible source: see Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1613), 32.
Elemental Edition
Line number 4

 Gloss note

glittering head. Aeschylus is bald (and thus a target for the eagle).
Elemental Edition
Line number 5

 Gloss note

Aeschylus is devoted to “Erycine,” a name for Venus, the goddess of love, derived from her temple on Mount Eryx. In humoral medicine, it was thought that “one major way to induce coldness, and thus baldness, was too much sexual activity” (Anu Korhonen, “Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 [2010], pp. 371-91 at p. 380).
Amplified Edition
Line number 5

 Critical note

Anglicization of Erycina, an epiclesis or liturgical epithet for Venus as revered by cult worshippers in Greco-Roman antiquity. According to the Greek historian and geographer Strabo, the name Erycina is derived from the location of the goddess’s temple, the “lofty mountain” Eryx in Sicily (Geography 6.1.7). Two subsidiary temples in Rome were dedicated to Venus Erycina, one on the Capitoline Hill and one near the Porta Collina: see Anna Anguissola, “Note on Aphidruma 2: Strabo on the Transfer of Cults,” Classical Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2006): 643–646. Ariadne Staples contextualizes this cult alongside others devoted to Venus in From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (New York, 1998), 99–126. That Aeschylus was a devotee of Venus Erycina appears to be Pulter’s own invention and a cheeky explanation for the poet’s baldness: in addition to the broader associations of Venus with romantic and sexual entanglement, the Erycine cult was specifically associated with prostitution (Staples, 113, 122). As Knight and Wall note, early modern humoral medicine linked baldness with overindulgence in sexual activity.
Elemental Edition
Line number 6

 Gloss note

It is a pity
Elemental Edition
Line number 6

 Gloss note

scarred, branded, or disgraced. Baldness is here construed as a stigma.
Amplified Edition
Line number 6

 Critical note

Branded or marked, connoting disgrace, but also perhaps an ironic allusion to the stigmata of devout Christians and saints.
Elemental Edition
Line number 8

 Gloss note

shell
Amplified Edition
Line number 8

 Gloss note

Variant of scallop, apparently denoting the shell of the tortoise that the eagle drops on Aeschylus’s head.
Amplified Edition
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Referring both to the tortoise’s shell and the poet’s skull.
Amplified Edition
Line number 14

 Critical note

Per the headnote to this poem, this caveat marks a divergence from the mottos and verses conventionally paired with the image of Aeschylus’s death.
Transcription
Line number 15

 Physical note

“r” appears in different hand from main scribe; superscript colon in same hand may represent insertion marks
Elemental Edition
Line number 15

 Gloss note

See 2 Kings: 20:1-6, which tells of how Hezekiah wept and prayed when the prophet Isaiah told him of Hezekiah’s impending death; in response, God extended his life by fifteen years.
Amplified Edition
Line number 15

 Critical note

When his looming death is foretold by the prophet Isaiah, the ailing King Hezekiah prays to God in earnest and is said to have “wept sore.” In response, God promises healing and fifteen more years of life, proclaiming “I have seen thy teares” (2 Kings 20:1–6; Isaiah 38:1–6). Tears are a powerful, generative motif in Pulter’s poetry, and line 30 of this poem reiterates their centrality to the speaker’s own response to her mortality: see the note to “Sighs and tears” (l. 30) for examples of this motif elsewhere in the manuscript. Though humble in contrast with the other figures in this poem, Hezekiah notably falls into pride soon after his miraculous recovery (2 Chronicles 32:24–26). Despite his shortcomings, however, he was viewed by early modern readers as an exemplary biblical figure, both in his leadership and his response to what is understood to have been a plague-like illness: see Kevin Killeen, “Hezekiah, the Politics of Municipal Plague and the London Poor,” The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2016), 76–104.
Transcription
Line number 16

 Physical note

in different hand from main scribe, directly above doubly struck-through “ffourteen”
Elemental Edition
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel. She was a worshipper of Baal caught in religious wars; Elijah’s prophecy, that dogs would eat her corpse, came true.
Amplified Edition
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Jezebel, along with her husband King Ahab, implemented the worship of Baal in Israel and commanded the execution of many Hebrew prophets. The prophet Elijah foretold her gruesome death, which he figures as an act of divine vengeance. Jezebel’s disdain for the prophecy and her own mortality is implied in the biblical account: as her political enemy approaches, she applies cosmetics, adorns her hair, and greets him with a taunt from a high window. She is almost immediately defenestrated by one of her own attendants, her broken body consumed by stray dogs as prophesied (2 Kings 9:30–37).
Elemental Edition
Line number 19

 Gloss note

Domitian was a Roman emperor who failed to disprove one of the soothsayer Ascletarion’s prophecies. He also tried unsuccessfully to evade a soothsayer’s prediction of his own death.
Amplified Edition
Line number 19

 Critical note

Roman emperor who attempted to challenge fate and was plagued by the premonition of his death. When the astrologer Ascletario foretold the manner of his own death, Domitian tried to have Ascletario killed in a different manner in order to prove the fallibility of divination. It is Domitian, however, who ultimately fails. His aversion to prophecy, moreover, appears to have stemmed from his youth when astrologers foretold both the hour and manner of his death. Even on the portentous day, Domitian sentenced a soothsayer to death for interpreting the city’s ongoing problem of lightning strikes as foreshadowing a change in rulers. Unbeknownst to Domitian, however, his friends had been conspiring to overthrow him and, knowing he feared the fifth hour of the day as the fatal one, they assured him it was the sixth when he inquired. Relieved, he dismissed his attendants, retired to his bedroom, and was promptly slain. For a full account, see Holland’s translation of Suetonius in The Historie of Twelve Caesars (London, 1609), 269.
Elemental Edition
Line number 21

 Gloss note

A soothsayer foretold the death of Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who was stabbed to death on the “Ides” (or fifteenth day) of March.
Amplified Edition
Line number 21

 Gloss note

The soothsayer Spurina forewarned Julius Caesar of a danger that “would not be differred [deferred] after the Ides of March,” that is the fifteenth day of the month. Despite other corroborating portents, dreams, and even a pamphlet warning him of the conspiracy against him, Caesar did not take heed: at the eleventh hour of the appointed day, he “laughed Spurina to scorn” and labelled him a false prophet (Suetonius, The Historie of Twelve Caesars, trans. Holland, 33). Shortly thereafter he was fatally stabbed by members of the Roman senate.
Amplified Edition
Line number 23

 Critical note

Roman empress who was warned by an astrologer that her son Nero would one day kill her. After many elaborate plans and botched attempts, Nero finally succeeded in orchestrating his mother’s death, casting it as a suicide. As Eardley notes, Nero’s postmortem “dissection” of his mother can be interpreted both literally and figuratively (226n252).
Elemental Edition
Line number 24

 Gloss note

As Agrippina had been foretold by an astrologer, Roman emperor Nero killed his mother and passionately viewed (“dissected”) each part of her corpse.
Elemental Edition
Line number 28

 Gloss note

the material from which life derives to and to which it will return; see Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Elemental Edition
Line number 28

 Gloss note

soft feathers
Amplified Edition
Line number 28

 Critical note

This line, along with the final couplet, echoes diction in Welcome [2] [Poem 33], a poem that more consistently treats death as a happy prospect.
Amplified Edition
Line number 30

 Critical note

That sighs and tears are the poems themselves is implied throughout Pulter’s manuscript: she describes her emblems as “the sighs of a sad soul,” and the symbolism of tears expressed along with these sighs is underscored in poems like The Circle [1] [Poem 17] and The Weeping Wish [Poem 61].
Amplified Edition
Line number 32

 Critical note

Multiple shades of the verb anticipate are germane to this line. Relevant definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary include “To take into consideration before the appropriate or due time” and “To realize beforehand,” both of which pertain to foreknowledge (def. 7a and def. 8). Another relevant definition is “To observe or practise in advance of the due date; to cause to happen earlier, accelerate,” which captures the futility (and irony) of attempting to prevent fate as demonstrated by the stories of Aeschylus and others in the poem (def. 5). This secondary definition also resonates with the following line’s metaphor of being “buried alive,” a premature enactment of death.
Elemental Edition
Line number 33

 Gloss note

The speaker reads her own anticipation of the grave (see the previous line), through worrying or wondering about her fate, as a form of living death.
Amplified Edition
Line number 33

 Critical note

Being “buried alive,” thereby enduring a kind of living death, captures the dampening effects of precisely foreknowing one’s death, but it may also or alternatively allude broadly to the speaker’s position of obscurity and confinement. In Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57], the speaker characterizes her geographical and social isolation in identical terms, as being “buried thus alive.”
Amplified Edition
Line number 35

 Critical note

“Story” as an epithet for life suggests a sense of progression towards some end(ing) and is used frequently throughout the manuscript: in addition to the poems referenced in footnotes above, see Aletheia’s Pearl [Poem 32], To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], and Come My Dear Children (Emblem 2) [Poem 68], among many others. Notably, the word “story” in the terminal position of Pulter’s poetic lines always and, it would seem, inevitably rhymes with “glory,” a reference to the beatific afterlife in which the speaker hopes her story culminates.
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