Editorial note
Though the syntax, diction, capitalization, and spelling of Pulter’s poems may not conform to modern standards, it is analytically productive for the modern reader to consider these elements as they appear in the manuscript; they may, for instance, create links between different parts of the text, emphasize particular words, or create syntactical slippage that encourages multiple interpretations. In order to retain Pulter’s unique poetic voice, as well as maintain the possibility of multiple interpretations created by her text, I take a conservative editorial approach. I have chosen not to modernize grammar, capitalization, or punctuation, and adhere to the original spelling in cases where doing so retains a particular tone or analytical complexity that would be lost in modernization (e.g., “groan” in line 5, which conveys a physical utterance that would be lost if modernized to “grown”).
Headnote
This emblem poem is unusual in multiple respects. First, like The Ugly Spider [Poem 102], it complicates the analogy between animals and humans that the poem initially suggests. Pulter’s presentation of the cuckoo, viper, wolf, and spider in the first section of the poem leads us to expect her comparison of these matricidal animals to humans; such a comparison–conventional in emblem books–would allow readers to apply the moral embodied by the animals to their own lives. Instead, however, Pulter declares that “Man is worse” than these matricidal animals.
This poem is also unusual in taking matricide as an emblematic theme. Many emblem books urge proper care of one’s parents; George Wither’s A Collection of Emblems (1635) even warns against children “consum[ing]” their parents, as part of a larger warning against wasting one’s resources. See Book 1, Emblem XIV in Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, 14. For taking care of one’s parents, see for example Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), 163.
James I repeatedly compared monarchs to parents, writing in The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598), “as fathers the good Princes, & magistrates of the people of God acknowledge themselves to their subjects” (sig. 3r). Henry Peacham used James’ Basilikon Doron (1599)–another expression of James’ patriarchal view of kingship–as the direct inspiration for his emblem book manuscripts, as well as the later printed Minerva Britanna (1612); in the latter, he cites a passage from Basilikon Doron for an emblem in which he writes, “We doe adore by nature, Princes good, / And gladly as our Parents, them obey.” Minerva Britanna, 144. For discussion of the king-parent comparison in relation to political theory, see Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, which was written in manuscript around 1628 but was not published until 1680. See also Deborah Shuger’s discussion of the representation of kings as nursing fathers in “Nursing Fathers: Patriarchy as a Cultural Ideal,” in Deborah Shuger, ed., Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 218-249.
The suggestion of Herbert’s influence on Pulter’s choice of topic is consistent with the influence of devotional lyric on Pulter’s emblems more broadly. See discussion of Pulter’s incorporation of devotional lyric into her emblems in Dunn [Zhang], “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book,” The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015): 55-73.
Line number 1
Critical note
The cuckoo’s “cold[ness]” may refer to the theory of the four bodily humors, an imbalance of which was believed to cause illness; excessive coldness was associated with being melancholic (cold and dry) or phlegmatic (cold and wet). Galen considered coldness and wetness particularly feminine qualities, associated with weakness, narrow chests, and cowardice, as opposed to hot and dry masculine qualities (Susan B. Mattern, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008], 103). Given Pulter’s comparison of the cuckoo to Nero a few lines later, though, “cold” may not connote a gendered reading of the humors; it more likely refers to the cuckoo’s hard-heartedness towards its victims.Line number 3
Critical note
This image derives from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which describes the cuckoo’s practice of laying eggs in other birds’ nests; the cuckoo chick subsequently eats the other bird’s young and its adopted mother (X.IX).Line number 4
Critical note
Emblem books frequently reproach children’s overindulgence by parents, e.g., Emblem 46 of Thomas Palmer’s Two Hundred Poosees (c. 1565), p. 155 of Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586), and Emblem XIV in Book 1 of George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635). Pulter’s poem, though, chooses not to critique the sparrow’s “indulgen[ce],”a quality she encourages parents to have in Emblems 5, 10, and 41. Instead, she censures the actions of the children.Line number 9
Critical note
Pliny notes (in Philemon Holland’s translation) that when a viper delivers one baby, “the rest (impatient of so long delay) eat through their dams sides, and kil her.” Natural History (1634), 302. Unlike Pulter, who uses this image to condemn the viper’s young, Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna critiques the actions of the viper mother, analogizing it to the “Beastly lust” bred within which consumes the mind (152).Line number 10
Critical note
Alice Eardley points to Nicholas Cox’s The Gentlemen’s Recreation (1686) for an explanation of this line. Cox describes rival wolves’ practice of setting upon the male who successfully mates with the female; the revenge, he notes, “verifies the proverb: Never Wolf yet ever saw his Sire” (123). “An Edition of Lady Hester Pulter’s Book of ‘Emblemes’” (Ph.D. diss, University of Warwick, 2008), 2:92-3.Line number 11
Critical note
The spider, or “phalangium.” Edward Topsell notes that phalangies’ eggs hatch three hundred at a time, and “do lay their Egges in a net or web, ... and sit upon them in very great number, and when their brood is increased to some growth, they kill their dam by their hard embracements, and fling her clean away.” Historie of Serpents (1658), 770.Line number 16
Critical note
For reasons that remain obscure, the Roman emperor Nero (37–68 CE) decided to kill his mother Agrippina five years into his reign, an episode often considered the harbinger of Nero’s subsequent tyranny. As Edward Bolton recounts in Nero Caesar (1624), some versions of Agrippina’s death describe that Nero “saw her body opened to behold the place of his conception” (43). Many accounts, however, describe only Nero’s handling or commenting upon Agrippina’s body (see, for example, Tacitus, Annals XIV.9). Henry Peacham decries Nero’s tyranny in Minerva Britanna, 144, without mentioning matricide. Pulter, though, seems fascinated with the rumor that Nero dissected Agrippina’s body after death; Old Aeschylus (Emblem 31) [Poem 96] similarly describes Nero’s dissection of her body.Line number 18
Critical note
Pulter likely alludes here to the execution of Charles I and other “impieties” committed by Parliament, such as those described in Doves and Pearls (Emblem 36) [Poem 101]. This latter emblem depicts the parliamentarian army’s occupation of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the imprisonment of royalist soldiers in the royal stables at Charing Cross as “profan[ations]” of “a sacred fane [temple].”Line number 18
Critical note
Civil war writers commonly referred to Charles I as being executed upon a “stage,” given both the physical construction outside the Banqueting House upon which the king was killed, and the king’s reputation as an actor, in court masques as well as before the public. Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” famously describes Charles I as a “royal actor” upon a “Tragic Scaffold.” If referencing Charles’ execution here, Pulter’s use of dramatic rhetoric is far less ambivalent than Marvell’s; her reference to the impious stage would be an outright condemnation of the regicide. Such theatrical rhetoric carries additional weight given the Protectorate context (c. 1650s) in which this emblem was likely composed: Pulter rhetorically resurrects the stage in defiance of the closure of public theatres by Charles I’s political opponents in 1642.Line number 20
Critical note
Unlike the sparrow, who does not deserve to be eaten by her adopted chick, and the other maternal animals that Pulter cites, England “deserve[s]” and “expect[s]” vengeance for the crimes against its monarchical parent, these lines suggest. This makes the nation worse than animals, whose consumption by their offspring is undeserved, and who cannot expect justice. Yet these lines create ambiguity: It is unclear both who has committed the crimes and who is exacting “vengeance.” Is England “deserv[ing]” of vengeance upon itself, or does it “deserv[e]” to enact it? Similarly, does the “our” in line 20 refer to those who have suffered crimes, or those who perpetrated them? By allowing such ambiguity, Pulter suggests that England is both the victim of unspeakable crimes and the perpetrator of them, while encouraging the idea that retribution will come both from within England and from a divine power above it.Line number 22
Critical note
Pulter here deploys what is now an obsolete use of “forlorn,” denoting the state of being morally depraved or “doomed to destruction” (see OED “forlorn,” adj. 2, 3). I read the “Forlorn of Hell” as referring to Charles’ subjects, the perpetrators of “Crimes,” rather than the “Crimes” themselves.Line number 24
Critical note
Genesis 1:26 notes that God made man “in our image” (KJV); this image is defaced by the shedding of blood, Genesis 9:6 implies: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” The speaker’s acceptance of her own “defac[ing]” sin in this line is at odds with line 26, which implies that the speaker remains clean of “Such Horrid Crimes.” Such ambiguity echoes that of the preceding lines which similarly elide victim and perpetrator.Line number 26
Critical note
The turn from the first person plural (ll. 18, 20) to singular in these lines signals Pulter’s deviation from emblem convention. Rather than expounding upon the images of the matricidal animals to encourage the reader’s future morality, she turns inward; the speaker turns from the nation’s “Crimes” to her own “Sins,” as if she is taking on all of England’s sins as her own.Line number 28
Critical note
This final couplet–evoking the speaker’s personal, future experience of heaven–is more reminiscent of Pulter’s devotional lyrics than other English emblem books. See, for instance, the final lines of The Eclipse [Poem 1], or Of Night and Morning [Poem 5]. Such a devotional turn is extremely unusual in English emblem books, and may represent Pulter’s appeal to divine authority as a solution to what she portrays as unprecedented events. Sorry, but there are no notes associated with
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