“Pardon Me, My Dearest Love” is about the limits of love and fidelity. This is Pulter’s only poem addressed to a lover, who seems likely to be her husband; no other earthly lover is named or introduced. In fact, the problem that animates the poem is the poet’s tenuous investment in her relationship. Even though the speaker owes the addressee her body, he cannot constrain the movement of her soul. She acknowledges that “What’s subsolary is yours”—literally that he owns what is below the sun—for as long as “life endures,” but then immediately concedes that her mind seeks a joy that cannot be found among the muck and dust of “this dirty dunghill earth.” What follows is a story about both the past and the future of her lively soul, which is personified to an unusual degree. Born in a “sparkle” of the light of eternal salvation, her “aspiring mind” yearns—or more basically, breathes towards, from the Latin root spirare–the highest good of heaven.
This poem explores marital love by exposing the partial and insufficient satisfaction of erotic commitment. The speaker’s earthly condition is temporary. Death is inevitable, and her body, the “due debt” that she owes her husband, will soon be dissolved back into the elements out of which it is made. When that division takes place, body and soul will be cleaved just as traitors are drawn and quartered in punishment for their rebellion. But in an unexpected turn, this image of violent dismemberment becomes a moment of liberation that will set her “enfranchis’d spirit” free, dissolving the bonds of earthly commitment.
Pulter develops this ambiguous account of marriage through a conceit common to seventeenth-century poetics: the uneasy and mutable tethering together of body and soul. In “Church-Monuments,” George Herbert describes life on earth as a fleshly tomb, a “school” for the body in which it “may learn / To spell his elements, and find his birth / Written in dusty heraldry” (ll. 6-8). George Herbert, The Complete Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 58-59.
In a concluding gesture, the poem makes a surprising return to the opening concession, but the plea for a pardon now rings more hollow. The final three lines are a rhyming triplet that add “turtledove,” the bird that famously mates for life, to the pairing of “love” and “above,” a rhyme that appears twice previously in the poem. While triplets are unusual in seventeenth-century poetry, Pulter uses them often. The Revolution [Poem 16] is written entirely in triplet stanzas, and Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)] [Poem 15] is also in couplets with a concluding triplet. In “Pardon Me, My Dearest Love,” the effect of the final triplet is to propose that the poem’s exploration of “endless joy and love” cannot be contained by the established couplet rhymes. It offers a concluding “anticouple” that works against the heteroerotic terms of the preceding couplets. The final two lines show the speaker’s mind once again beginning to whirl “above,” away from the “confinement” that currently holds her soul in captivity. With the near repetition of the beginning, we are left to anticipate the poem starting over again, as if the speaker’s lively mind will continually resist the confinement of her dusty body. — Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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