The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee (Emblem 53)

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The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee (Emblem 53)

Poem #118

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 Whitney Sperrazza.
  • Amplified edition: By Deanna Smid.

How to cite these versions

Conventions for these editions

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making

  • Created by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
  • Encoded by Katherine Poland, Matthew Taylor, Elizabeth Chou, and Emily Andrey, Northwestern University
  • Website designed by Sergei Kalugin, Northwestern University
  • IT project consultation by Josh Honn, Northwestern University
  • Project sponsored by Northwestern University, Brock University, and University of Leeds
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X (Close panel)Notes: Transcription
Title note

 Physical note

Unlike surrounding poems in the “Emblems” section, no number precedes this poem.

 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.

 Headnote

Line number 9

 Physical note

“E” and “e” appear written over earlier “i”s
Line number 13

 Physical note

“t” in different hand from main scribe
Line number 19

 Physical note

insertion in different hand from main scribe
Line number 19

 Physical note

double strike-through
Line number 31

 Physical note

double strike-through
Line number 31

 Physical note

in different hand from main scribe
Line number 51

 Physical note

imperfectly erased ascender follows
Line number 52

 Physical note

remainder of page blank, as is reverse
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Transcription

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Physical Note
Unlike surrounding poems in the “Emblems” section, no number precedes this poem.
[Emblem 53]
The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee
(Emblem 53)
The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee
(Emblem 53)
Emblem 53
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

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

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
In my editions of Pulter’s poems, I prioritize accessibility and use my annotations to prompt further exploration. To make the poems accessible to the widest possible audience, I have modernized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization according to American English standards. My editions aim to demonstrate the complexity of Pulter’s thinking, while opening space for the reader’s own analysis and interpretation. I recognize editing as a political act and aim to be as transparent as possible about how I frame Pulter’s poems for the reader. My lengthy annotations are an attempt to reveal my thought processes and make clear the ideological networks that inform my readings.
As an important corollary to Pulter’s conceptual work, I also attend to the material expression of her manuscript object. Her manuscript pages reveal a glimpse of her thinking and writing processes, and I briefly note Pulter’s revisions to the poems in order to foreground her poetic craft. The manuscript features variants and revisions that invite multiple interpretations, and I encourage readers to refer to the manuscript images as they engage with Pulter’s writing. I offer some intertextual references to other early modern texts, but am most interested in drawing out how Pulter’s poems speak to each other as she reflects on clusters of ideas.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 maintains the punctuation and spelling of the Elemental Edition, and places the poem in the context of its contemporary emblem books and bee-keeping treatises.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
We all know the cliché of the busy bee, but Pulter found in the bee an emblem not of virtuous industry but instead of overzealous curiosity, greed, and poor judgment. After praising “the active Amazonian maid” for her industriousness and herbalist know-how, this emblem tells of how the bee—having collected her fill of nectar, but unable to leave well enough alone—becomes trapped in a tulip when, at day’s end, its petals close around her. The bee works furiously to escape; a snail, similarly caught, falls asleep without a struggle. In the morning, when the petals reopen, the snail simply leaves, while the bee dies of exhaustion. Pulter sees in her garden an all-female community of vegetable, animal, and celestial beings demonstrating the moral which the poem then shows men to have enacted historically, in a sequence of exemplars warning against impatience and fighting fate. While that may be the overall moral, the poem also touches on the tension between confinement and freedom which so often preoccupies Pulter. The framing phrase for the emblem’s moral—“if no hope of liberty you see”—closely tracks the concluding declaration in “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57): “I no liberty expect to see …” Did Pulter identify with the snail or the bee?

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Emblem 53 offers a complex political allegory masquerading as a fable about a “covetous” honey bee, a patient snail, and a “painted” tulip. Alongside the poem’s political themes, Pulter raises questions about gender, science, and nature that echo her interest in these topics throughout the manuscript. Most significantly, there are glimpses in this poem of Pulter’s clever theorization of poetry itself—her ongoing exploration of how poetry makes meaning.
Three distinct, but related, mottoes drive this emblem. The first motto—”then let impatient spirits here but see / what ’tis to struggle with their destiny” (lines 37–8)—concludes the story Pulter tells of a honey bee, enticed by the poet’s sumptuous garden, who tries to gather more “nectar” than she can carry. Straying from the hive for far too long, the bee lands in a tulip alongside a snail just as the sun goes down and the tulip closes its petals. The second and third motto come in sequence at the poem’s end: “’tis valianter by far to live than die” (line 50) and “then if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (lines 51–52). These mottoes follow a catalogue of examples from classical history, mostly warnings about excessive pride and arrogance. Three mottoes is a lot for one emblem, which raises interesting questions as we read this poem. How do the three mottoes work together? Do the stories seem to unfold logically into their concluding mottoes or do the mottoes seem incongruous? How does Pulter use these multiple mottoes to invite us to consider the function of the motto as a feature of emblems?
Pulter’s emblem poems are “naked emblems,” as Millie Godfrey and Sarah C. E. Ross explain in their introduction to Mighty Nimrod (Emblem 1) [Poem 67]. Revising the traditional tripartite structure of the emblem (motto, visual image, and short epigrammatic verse), Pulter omits the visual image (pictura) element such that the reader must glean meaning solely from words. But Pulter’s language in this and many of her emblems is meant to help the reader paint their own picture. Here, for instance, Pulter references specific flowers, tracks the bee’s movements as it flits around the poet’s garden, and fills her lines with evocative descriptions (the morning sun is “lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray” [line 5]). The emblem’s central characters—the snail, the tulip, and the bee—would also have been easy visual reference points for Pulter’s readers. All three figures were frequently portrayed in early modern emblem books, textual illustrations, and artwork.
All three figures are also at the center of early modern debates surrounding gender and sexuality. Even though none of the poem’s mottoes directly concern these topics, this emblem has much to teach us about Pulter’s interest and intervention in these debates. I track this theme throughout my annotations on the poem, noting, for instance, that Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (7) refers to a community of warrior women in Greek mythology (the Amazons), who were notoriously complicated gendered figures in early modern culture. “Demonstrating that women and men might be performatively interchangeable,” Kathryn Schwarz explains, “Amazons at once substantiate the signifiers of masculinity and threaten to replace the bodies to which they are attached.”
Gloss Note
Source: Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000): 38.
1
Amazons were often at the center of crossdressing plots (Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia), tales of women’s military leadership (Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo), and stories about the relationship between desire and power (William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Pulter’s comparison of the bee to an “Amazonian maid” draws on this popular trope, but we might also read the comparison as an opening nod to the poem’s formal structure. The poem’s first half outlines a distinctly female garden community, populated by “fair Aurora” (1), the “Amazonian” bee” (7), the poet herself (17), and even the snail that slides about “upon her unctuous breast” (29). When the bee’s plot ends at line 37, though, the poem shifts to solely male reference points. Pulter mentions Biron (39), Belisarius (41), Bajazeth (43), and Callisthenes (47) as she guides the reader toward the poem’s concluding motto. But, shifting once more in the final couplet, Pulter ends by reminding us to “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (52), a return to the female cast of the poem’s first half. In the formal structure of her poem—the gender-bending shifts in metaphors—Pulter brings to mind the threat posed by the figure of the Amazon: the possibility “that women and men might be performatively interchangeable.” In both the content and form of this poem, Pulter raises questions about how gender signifies, and particularly how emblematic, gender-specific metaphors signify.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
To most seventeenth-century readers, Hester Pulter’s bee in Emblem 53 must have seemed unusual indeed. While the vast majority of her contemporaries praised bees for “their labour and order at home and abroad,” which made them “so admirable, that they may bee a pattern unto men,”
Gloss Note
Source: Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie (Oxford, 1634): 2.
1
Pulter’s bee is greedy, and her “labour” is anything but admirable. Yet comparing Emblem 53 to early modern accounts of bees (both real and metaphorical bees) reveals that Pulter reinforces seventeenth-century knowledge about the characteristics of bees, and that her bee’s deviation from “appropriate” bee-behaviour allows Pulter to emphasize the dangers of solitude, particularly solitude from a community of other women.
Bees were a common metaphor, symbol, or analogy in classical and early modern literature, with Shakespeare’s Henry V and Milton’s Paradise Lost two familiar examples. Indeed, Pulter would not have been able to use bees as a metaphor without contending with the vast scope of bee literature and bee metaphors that had come before her. Of course, this assumes that Pulter had read “bee literature” and was acquainted with honeybees in some fashion. In his reading of Shakespeare on bees, Richard Grinnell confronts a similar question: how much did Shakespeare know about bees? His answer is worth quoting at length: “Shakespeare keeps bees the way any well-read and urbane writer might have been able to—building his metaphors and analogies from books at hand. Even when he moves beyond the classics, for example, in his description of Hal as a beekeeper willing to kill the bees to get the honey, he is clearly working with material that was common knowledge in his day” (850). Beekeeping during the early modern period was also an occupation and even obligation for both men and women. Treatises on caring for bees are often addressed to both sexes, and women feature prevalently in stories about bees, honey, and hives. William Lawson, writing in 1623, states in his treatise on gardening that he “will not account her any of my good Housewives, that wanteth either Bees or skilfulnesse about them.”
Gloss Note
Source: William Lawson, The Country Housewifes Garden. Containing Rules for Hearbs and Seeds of common use, with their times and seasons, when to set and sow them. Together With the Husbandry of Bees, published with secrets very necessary for every Housewife […] (London: Printed for Roger Jackson, 1623): 17.
2
Pulter would certainly not be unusual if she knew something—or even much—about the care and characteristics of honeybees.
Pulter’s bee (in contrast to the industrious and virtuous bees of most of the literature that predates Emblem 53) is greedy and grasping, and her bee’s struggle against confinement causes her exhaustion and death. According to Nicole A. Jacobs, another outlier in early modern bee imagery is John Milton, who compares the devils in Pandemonium to a swarm of bees in Paradise Lost. In her monograph Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony, Jacobs emphasizes the weight of literary tradition that any negative depiction of bees would have to shrug off: “The image of the humming collection [in Paradise Lost] resonates with the early modern reader, trained by tradition to imagine humanity as an orderly hive.”
Gloss Note
Source: Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 123.
3
The same “tradition” and “train[ing]” would have applied to Pulter’s readers, which perhaps explains why, although the snail (with its patient endurance) seems to be the positive exemplar for the reader, the “moral” of the emblem does not urge readers to imitate the snail necessarily. Instead, Pulter advises that we “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (line 52). Indeed, while the bee causes her own unnecessary death in Pulter’s poem, the common literary symbolism of worker bees in the seventeenth century was so overwhelmingly positive that readers must have resisted, even a little, the idea that they should be the greasy snail rather than the “active Amazonian maid” (line 7).
If a honey bee is separate from its colony, it is soon to die. In 1657, beekeeper Samuel Purchas wrote baldly, “one Bee, is no Bee.”
Gloss Note
Source: Purchas, A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects (London, 1657): 16.
4
Joseph Campana quotes from Purchas as well to emphasize the apian–and more general–early modern anxiety with solitude, segments, and fragmentation in the commonwealth. “For bees,” Campana concludes, “singularity is unbearable.”
Gloss Note
Source: Campana, “The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Bryan Reynolds, Paul Cefalu, and Gary Kuchar (New York: Routledge, 2011): 67.
5
Keith Botelho summarizes early modern beekeepers’ attitudes towards individual and collective bees: “early modern bee treatises often spoke of bees in the collective, not necessarily concerned with the individual bee (other than the Queen) but rather with the maintenance of the stock of bees in the hives, of the swarm, of the many.”
Gloss Note
Source: Botelho, “Honey, Wax, and the Dead Bee,” Early Modern Culture 11 (2016): 102.
6
Not only beekeepers, but also early modern writers of fiction or moral instruction generally referred to bees in the plural, and James Howell’s 1660 The Parly of Beasts; or Morphandra Queen of the Inchanted Island is a notable example. In Howell’s dialogues, the characters Morphandra and Pererius speak to a number of animals (who were once human) in turn, beginning with an Otter, then an Ass, an Ape, a Hind, a Mule, a Fox, a Boar, a Wolf, and a Goose. In the first ten sections of the book, the animal interlocutor is singular, but not so in the final dialogue, in which Morphandra and Pererius converse with “a Hive of Bees” (my emphasis), for bees were thought to exist only in a collective. All this is to say that when Pulter’s bee diverts from her voyage back to her hive, she is doing something unusual and potentially deadly: separating herself from the collective that gives her life.
Emblem 53 uses a number of means to create and maintain female community, whether real or imagined. The bee is an “Amazonian maid,” which of course places her in the well-known society of Amazons, but it also reminds readers that bees themselves live in a society that is predominantly female. Christina Luckyj and Naimh J. O’Leary assert that “classical models of segregated female communities could serve as code for political protest.”
Gloss Note
Source: Luckyj and O’Leary, Editor’s Introduction to The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017): 6.
7
Natural models–the model of the beehive–could also serve as such a “code,” especially when Pulter compares the bee and snail to Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes. The four men are associated with the military, which may remind readers of the military connotations of bees in early modern England. Butler, for instance, writes that “Besides their Soveraign, the Bees have also subordinate Governours and Leaders, not unfitly resembling Captains and Colonels of Soldiers.
Gloss Note
Source: Butler, 6.
8
With her references to women and military might, Pulter may be subtly gesturing towards a political protest, one that gives communities of women classical, natural, and even military power.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
53When fair Aurora drest with Raidient Light
When fair
Gloss Note
goddess of dawn
Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
When
Critical Note
Pulter’s opening reference to “fair Aurora” (Roman goddess of the dawn) initiates the gendered imagery of the poem’s first seven lines, which culminates with Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (line 7). These opening lines, with the Amazon reference as a kind of anchor point, transform the morning garden into a female separatist community—a framing with important implications for how we read the rest of the poem. First, framing the bee’s actions within this context connects the labor of collecting nectar to women’s work, which then prompts us to read Pulter’s later references to poisonous herbs (lines 13–14) and “choice extractions” (line 15) as nods to domestic labor. Second, it links Emblem 53 to other writings in which Pulter explores the intimacies that develop within communities of women, most notably the female friendships throughout her prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda.
fair Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
When fair
Gloss Note
dawn
Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
2
Had triumph’d o’re the Gloomey Shades of Night
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of night—
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of
Critical Note
My editorial decision to add an em-dash here turns lines 3–6 into a clause that expands Pulter’s description of Aurora in lines 1–2 and emphasizes the unique formal structure of Pulter’s “naked emblems” (for more on this, see my headnote). Adding the em-dash marks how the concise description of Aurora waking up in the poem’s first two lines becomes a more expansive illustration of Aurora in lines 3–6, a kind of visual unfolding that nods to the pictura element of the traditional emblem structure. For more on the flexible structure of early modern emblems, see Peter Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (University of Toronto Press, 1979).
night
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of night—
3
When Shee her Virgin beavty first diſcloſes
When she her
Gloss Note
pure
virgin
beauty first discloses,
When she her
Critical Note
Associating Aurora with virginity, Pulter departs from classical tradition in which Aurora is often aggressively sexualized. Pulter retains some of the figure’s fraught sexual history, though, by drawing on conventional blazon imagery, describing Aurora wrapped in a “silver” robe with “roses” ornamenting her “dewy curls.” This description echoes language from earlier poems in the manuscript dedicated to Aurora: To Aurora [1] [Poem 22], To Aurora [2] [Poem 26], and To Aurora [3] [Poem 34]. “To Aurora [3]” is particularly resonant here. In that earlier poem, Aurora “shakes her dewy curls” and fills the flowers—”each gold-enamelled cup”—with “honeydew” (lines 8–9). For more on Pulter’s use of blazon imagery throughout her poems, see Frances E. Dolan’s Exploration, “Hester Pulter and the Blazon in Early Modern England.”
virgin beauty
first
Gloss Note
uncover or expose to view
discloses
,
When she her
Critical Note
Sperrazza points out in her Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 that Pulter unusually but often associates Aurora with virginity. Bees too, during the early modern period, were considered virginal, as Pulter herself emphasizes in To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], lines 10-11, and in Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57] line 5. The perceived virginity of bees also linked them to the Virgin Mary, which Henry Hawkins explains in his 1633 emblem book, Partheneia Sacra. His bee emblem begins with “To Bethlem’s sillie shed, me thinks I see / The Virgin hasten like a busie Bee,” and ends with “She was the Bee, the Hive her Sacred Womb” (Hawkins, Parthenia Sacra [London, 1633]: lines 1-2; 12). Also during the seventeenth century, the newly-elected Pope Urban VIII heralded himself by means of iconographic bees, iconography that John Milton then used to disparage Charles II (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony [New York: Routledge, 2021]: 117). For more on Urban VIII and bees, see Bee Wilson, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (London: John Murray, 2004): 129-31.
virgin beauty
first discloses,
4
Her dewey Curles Stuck full of half blown Roſes
Her dewy curls stuck full of
Gloss Note
half-blossomed
half-blown
roses,
Her dewy curls stuck full of
Gloss Note
half-bloomed, half-blossomed
half-blown
roses,
Her dewy curls stuck full of half-blown roses,
5
Lapt in A Robe of Silver mixt with graie
Gloss Note
wrapped up
Lapped
in a robe of silver mixed with gray,
Lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray,
Gloss Note
The gorgeous clothing and coloration of Aurora are repeated in the later description of the speaker’s flower garden, which so attracts the bee that she neglects her hive.
Lapped in a robe
of silver mixed with gray,
6
Which did prognoſticate a glorious day
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell
prognosticate
a glorious day—
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell, forecast
prognosticate
a glorious day–
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell
prognosticate
a glorious day—
7
Out flew the active Amizonian Maid
Out flew the
Gloss Note
Amazons were legendary female warriors who served a queen; here used figuratively to describe a bee
active Amazonian maid
;
Out flew the
Critical Note

The bee was a familiar subject of early modern emblems, frequently used as a model of ordered government (see Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber [Padua, 1621], emblem 149) or successful, interdependent economy (see Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblemes [London, 1585], pages 200–201). One seventeenth-century compendium on insects, compiled from the writings of several natural historians, including Edward Wotton, Conrad Gesner, and Thomas Moffet, featured a beehive on its frontispiece and described bees as “patterns and precedents of political and economical virtues” (The Theatre of Insects, or Lesser Living Creatures [London, 1658]).

Pulter’s transformation of the bee into an Amazonian figure, however, is more unusual and even a bit contentious. The comparison enhances Pulter’s interrogation of gender in this poem (see my headnote) and connects this emblem to some of the manuscript’s more explicit political poetry.

active Amazonian maid
.
Critical Note
Out of the beehive (also called a skep). At this point in the poem, the bee is behaving exactly as she ought: during the day, bees must fly out of the hive to forage for nectar and pollen. However, Pulter’s bee remains dangerously “out” of the hive as she is enticed by the garden’s beauty. That “Out” is the first word of this line suggests that the bee’s fault is not just endless toil, but also and particularly solitude and estrangement from the community of the hive (See Headnote).
Out
flew the active
Critical Note
Pulter uses the adjective “Amazonian” to describe the bee in The Garden [Poem 12] as well (line 43). In the Amplified Edition of that poem, Frances E. Dolan notes on line 43 that “references to bees as ‘Amazonian’ acknowledged that their queen was female, which was not yet widely recognized.” While arguments about the sex of the ruling bee remained animated even into the eighteenth century, already in the mid-seventeenth century it would have been difficult to deny that the queen bee was indeed female. The sex of the queen bee was all but established by Charles Butler’s highly influential bee-keeping treatise, The Feminine Monarchy, published in 1609, and again in 1623 and 1634. This is the treatise that almost all later treatises either cited, feted, or challenged. Indeed, Richard R. Prete cites Butler’s text as the turning-point in publications explaining the sex of bees: “Butler’s sound reasoning and empirical observations, in conjunction with the popularity of his book, brought to an end any serious, empirically based debates about the genders of the honey bee castes. From this point on, writers of beekeeping texts would have to recognize these facts, even if only to refute them, if they were to be taken seriously by their audiences.” (“Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Biology, 24.1 (1991), 128). In 1637, therefore, Richard Remnant’s A Discourse or Historie of Bees spends considerable attention on the implication of bees as females. Moreover, in the first bee-keeping manual published after the English Civil War, Samuel Purchas in his 1657 A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects calls the hive “an Amazonian commonwealth” (London, 33). In 1712, Joseph Warder appeals to a metaphor already established when he entitles his bee-keeping treatise The True Amazons: Or The Monarchy of Bees. Pulter is thus hardly bucking tradition or “scientific” knowledge when she calls her bee an “Amazonian maid.”
Amazonian maid
;
8
The Hills and Dales, not onely Shee Surveyd
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
9
But out of every Gold
Physical Note
“E” and “e” appear written over earlier “i”s
Enameld
Cup
But out of every gold-enamelled cup
But out of every
Gloss Note
flowers
gold-enamelled cup
But out of every
Gloss Note
Gold-colored flower
gold-enamelled cup
10
Her Mornings draught of Nectar Shee did Sup
Her morning’s draft of nectar she did sup.
Her morning’s
Gloss Note
a quantity drawn or extracted
draft
of nectar she did sup.
Her morning’s draft of nectar she did
Gloss Note
drink
sup
.
11
Nay where the Toad, and Spider poyſons found
Nay, where the toad and spider’s poison found,
Nay, where the toad and spider poisons found,
Nay, where the toad and spider’s poison found
12
Mell Shee Extracts, for this ^her Wisdome’s Crownd
Gloss Note
honey
Mell
she extracts;
Gloss Note
Bees were reputed to be able to turn poisons into honey.
for this her wisdom’s crowned
.
Gloss Note
honey
Mell
she extracts; for this
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “for this ^her wisdome’s crownd”
her wisdom’s
crowned.
Gloss Note
Honey
Critical Note
The image of a bee extracting honey while other creatures extracted poisons from the same plant is a common emblematic one. Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, for instance, the first emblem book published in English, contains the emblem entitled “Vita, aut morti.” Under the picture of a bee and a spider on a flower, the epigram reads, “Within one flower, two contraries remaine, / For proofe behoulde, the spider, and the bee, / One poison suckes, the bee doth honie draine: / The Scripture soe, hath two effects we see: / Unto the bad, it is a sworde that slaies, / Unto the good, a shielde in ghostlie fraies” (Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes [Leiden: 1586]: 51). Whitney borrows the pictura (and the sentiment of the poem and moral) from Hadrianus Junius’s Emblemata (1565).
Mell
she extracts; for this her
Critical Note
Bees were commonly praised for their intelligence, labour, and loyalty. John Thorley’s 1744 bee treatise Melissologia, for instance, hardly breaks new ground when it summarizes and admires the bees’ “loyalty” (7), “concord and unity” (12), “magnanimity or courage” (15), “labour and industry” (23), “patience and innocency” (27), “temperance and sobriety” (29), “chastity” (30), “neatness and decency” (31), “sympathy, and mutual assistance” (32), “sagacity and prudence” (33), and “vigilance and watchfulness” (Thorley, Melissologia. Or, The Female Monarchy [London, 1744]: 33). Indeed, “Bees themselves excell all other creatures … in Art, Wisdom, or Foresight, Industry, Valour and Loyalty,” Moses Rusden writes in 1679 (Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees [London, 1679]: 9). In particular, the fact that bees make honey and wax—both useful to humans—makes them especially prized or “crowned,” and thus the fertile bee in the hive is called a “queen.” “Her wisdom’s crowned,” however, cannot refer to only one singular bee, for a bee cannot make honey in isolation. If a bee is prized because it extracts honey from plants, the honor must go to the entire hive, the site of honey production.
wisdom’s crowned
.
13
On
Physical Note
“t” in different hand from main scribe
Nightſhade
, Henbane, Helliſh Acconite
On nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite,
On nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite,
On
Gloss Note
All poisonous plants, including opium and hemlock in the following line.
nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite
,
14
On Opium, Hemlock, Shee doth Safely lite
On opium,
Gloss Note
This plant, like opium and the three in the previous line, are all poisonous.
hemlock
she doth safely
Gloss Note
land
light
.
On opium, hemlock she doth
Critical Note
All five plants catalogued in these lines are poisonous, but their pollen is not. Consequently, the bee can safely extract pollen but the toad and spider of line 11 (eating the plants’ leaves, flowers, or stems) find “poisons.” Pulter may have gained knowledge of these plants from direct, hands-on experience. There were also several popular herbals circulating by the time she was writing, including John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597) and Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician Enlarged (London, 1653). The British Library offers a useful peek at Gerard’s Herbal, along with some context on Shakespeare’s use of “henbane” in Hamlet and “nightshade” in Romeo and Juliet.
safely light
.
On opium, hemlock she doth safely
Gloss Note
alight.
light
.
15
Thus being with choyce Extractions loaded well
Thus being with choice extractions loaded well,
Thus being with
Critical Note
John Milton also uses the verb “extract” to describe the bee’s work in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. Adam calls Eve awake “to mark … how the bee / sits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet” (lines 20–25). The noun “extraction” and its verb form “extract” (line 12) had alchemical, medicinal, and culinary connotations in seventeenth-century use. “To extract” is “to obtain (constituent elements, juices, etc.) from a thing or substance by suction, pressure, distillation, or any chemical or mechanical operation” (“extract, v.4a,” OED Online). As evidence for this particular connotation of “extract,” the Oxford English Dictionary cites Hugh Plat’s The Jewel House of Art and Nature (London, 1594) and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History (London, 1626), two popular early modern scientific texts with which Pulter may have been familiar. Is Pulter also demonstrating her knowledge of early modern herbals, texts that catalogued plants and their medicinal and culinary uses? If so, her uses of “extract” and “extraction” connect to the catalogue of poisonous plants in lines 13–14. For an extended exploration of “human art” in relation to plants, see View But This Tulip (Emblem 40) [Poem 105].
choice extractions
loaded well,
Thus being with choice extractions
Gloss Note
Bees were thought to carry their collected nectar in “bags,” emphasized in a popular seventeenth-century song and poem entitled “The Sweet Bag of the Bee.” The poem/song appears numerous times in the expansive collection English Song 1600-1675: Facsimiles of Twenty-Six Manuscripts and an Edition of the Texts, edited with introductions by Elise Bickford Jorgens. Henry Lawes’ composition of the song appears in Oxford, Ms. Tenbury 1018, sig. 95V. The poem “The Sweet Bag of the Bee” also features in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648). Once a bee is “loaded well,” it must return to its hive to share its bounty with the rest of the bees.
loaded well
,
16
Shee turn’d to flie to her Sexanguler Cell
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
six-sided
sexangular
cell.
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
six-sided; a reference to the comb shapes of a bee hive
sexangular cell
.
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
hexagonal honeycomb
Critical Note
If there is any doubt that the bee of Emblem 53 is a honey bee, line 14 negates that doubt. Solitary bees such as bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, etc. do not make hexagonal honeycomb. The honey bee’s decision to abort her return flight to her hive suddenly separates her from the community to which she belongs.
sexangular cell
.
17
But takeing of my Garden in her way
But
Gloss Note
apprehending
taking of
my garden in her way,
But
Gloss Note
to be caught or captured by; the bee is “taken with” the beauty of the narrator’s garden
taking of

This is our first glimpse of the poem’s narrator, often a much more pervasive presence in Pulter’s poems. In early poems in the manuscript, like Made When I Was Sick, 1647 [Poem 31], the entire poem revolves around the narrator’s experience and thoughts. The sparse, late use of the first-person pronoun here, though, is more typical of Pulter’s emblem poems, a few of which never reference the poet directly. See, for instance, Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86].

It’s worth noting that this first reference to the poet (one of only two in the poem) is also connected to the garden and the all-female community of the poem’s first half. Perhaps even more interesting, the narrator’s garden is the site of the bee’s demise. We learn the story of the bee and the snail in the next few lines and we might even imagine that the poet is a first-hand witness, watching the snail “slid[e]” out of the tulip in the morning while the bee “fainting lie[s]” (line 35).

my garden
in her way,
But
Gloss Note
Taking in
taking of
my garden in her way,
18
Though full before Shee could not chooſe but Stay
Though full before, she could not choose but stay
Though full before, she could not choose but stay
Though
Critical Note
The bee’s “bag” is full, so she would be unable to carry any more nectar or pollen, even if she finds some in the speaker’s alluring garden. The bee’s further investigation of the garden, therefore, is futile.
full before
, she could not choose but stay
19
To See the
Physical Note
insertion in different hand from main scribe
\curious \
Ouricolas
Physical Note
double strike-through
curious
drest
To see the
Gloss Note
clever, elaborately made
curious
Gloss Note
type of flower
auriculas
dressed
To see the
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “to see the \curious \ ouricolas curious drest”
curious
Gloss Note
primula auricula; also known as mountain cowslip or bear’s ear (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
auriculas
dressed
To see the curious
Gloss Note
A type of primrose, a greatly prized and showy flower.
auriculas
dressed
20
More variously then Iris dewey breast
More variously than
Gloss Note
goddess of the rainbow, also a type of flower
Iris’s
dewy breast.
More variously than
Gloss Note
In Greek mythology, Iris is messenger of the gods and a personification of the rainbow. Iris is also another type of flower. In contemporary botany, iris is a genus of many species of flowering plants like the iris sibirica (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
Iris’s
dewy breast.
More variously than
Gloss Note
type of flower, also a messenger goddess with the rainbow as her emblem. The auriculas, therefore, which are usually yellow, are here rainbow-hued.
Iris’s
dewy breast.
21
Then were my Tulips painted in there Pride
Then were my tulips painted in their pride,
Then were my
Critical Note
The tulip has special significance in Pulter’s emblem. She not only makes the center of this flower the location for her fable of the bee and snail (as we’re about to see); she also describes the tulip with language that evokes the “tulipmania” of the early seventeenth century: “painted” (here and again in line 27) and “gilded” (line 34). From the 1580’s to the mid-1630’s, tulips were a prized and elusive commodity, famous in aristocratic gardens and still life paintings, but notoriously difficult to study and classify given their infinite variety. In John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597), Gerard describes the tulips as “a strange and foreign flower” and emphasizes that it is impossible to catalogue all of its varieties: “each new yeare bringeth forth new plants of sundry colours, not before seene” ([London, 1597], Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online, pages 137–140). The craze surrounding the tulip culminated in the Dutch “tulipmania” of the 1630’s, when the price of tulip bulbs inflated drastically (the most expensive specimens went for around 5,000 guilders). We might speculate that Pulter has this recent cultural phenomenon in mind when she describes the tulips first as luxurious garden accessories (“painted in their pride”) and then as the bee’s “painted prison.” See this poem’s Curation (Pulter’s Garden) for examples of Gerard’s tulip woodcuts and Dutch still life paintings featuring the flower. For more on the tulip in early modern English contexts, see Anna Pavord’s The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad (Bloomsbury, 1999), especially chapter 3.
tulips painted
in their pride,
Then were my
Critical Note
John Parkinson writes in his 1629 gardening treatise, “There are not only divers kindes of Tulipas, but sundry diversities of colours in them, found out in these later dayes by many the [sic] searchers of natures varieties, which have not formerly been observed: our age being more delighted in the search, curiosity, and rarieites of these pleasant delights, then [sic] any age I thinke before. But indeede, this flower, above many other, deserves his true commendations and acceptance with all lovers of these beauties, both for the stately aspect, and for the admirable varietie of colours, that daily doe arise in them, farre beyond all other plants that grow” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris [London, 1629]: 45). Moreover, as Benedict S. Robinson identifies, tulips were first exported from Turkey to Europe in the late sixteenth century, and, he argues, “the tulip could also be taken to embody an ‘orientalizing’ of English tastes, an errant desire for exotic plants that rooted itself right into the soil” (Robinson, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 [2009]: 96). The bee’s attraction to the tulip, then, demonstrates her “covetousness,” but also her relatable, commonplace, and even human interest in the beautiful and exotic flower.
tulips
painted in their pride,
22
Which when this covetous Inſect Eſpi’de
Which, when this covetous insect espied,
Which, when this
Gloss Note
greedy
covetous
insect espied,
Which, when this
Critical Note
The reader’s suspicion that Pulter’s bee is not the moral exemplar bees usually are in seventeenth-century poetry is here confirmed. While bees were usually considered selfless and self-sacrificing –Moses Rusden praises their “loyalty,” for example—Pulter’s bee is greedy. Another notable example of a “bad bee” appears in John Bunyan’s 1686 A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes For Children, which is filled with moral lessons in the form of naked emblems, not unlike the naked emblems Pulter employs. Bunyan’s emblem “Upon the Bee” starts innocuously enough: “The Bee goes out and Honey home doth bring; / And some who seek that Hony find a sting. / [N]ow wouldst thou have the Hony and be free / [Fr]om stinging; in the first place kill the Bee” (10). The following “Comparison” is startling, especially in contrast to the nigh-universal praise afforded the bee by Bunyan’s contemporaries: “This Bee an Emblem truly is of sin / Whose Sweet unto a many death hath been. / [N]ow would’st have Sweet from sin, and yet not dye, / [D]o thou in the first place mortifie” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 10).
covetous insect
Gloss Note
saw
espied
,
23
To carry home her wealth Shee’d not ye power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
24
Till Shee had Search’d the Sweets of every fflower
Till she had searched the sweets of every flower.
Till she had searched the sweets of every flower.
Till
Critical Note
At this point the bee is unable to return home not because she’s overladen with “nectar,” but because she covetously wants to explore every flower before flying back to the hive. “She’d not the power” to resist the temptation of the beckoning garden, and her greedy appetite leads to a rejection of home and companionship.
she had searched the sweets of every flower
.
the

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25
The Sun, from home, all, Influence Receives
The sun,
Gloss Note
“whom” is spelled as “home” in the manuscript; all are influenced by the sun
from whom all influence receives
,
The sun, from whom all influence receives,
The sun, from whom
Gloss Note
all things
all
Gloss Note
inflowing power, usually from an astral, divine, or secret force.
influence
receives,
26
Bid them decline, The Tulip cloſ’d her Leaves
Bids them
Gloss Note
bend down, droop
decline
; the tulip closed her
Gloss Note
petals
leaves
,
Bid
Gloss Note
the flowers
them
decline; the tulip closed her leaves,
Bids them decline; the tulip closed her leaves,
27
And in that painted Priſon Shut the Bee
And in that painted prison shut the bee,
And in that painted prison shut the bee.
And in that
Gloss Note
“Painted” confirms the exotic and unnatural allure of the tulip, and the bee’s foolishness in yielding to that allure.
painted prison
shut the bee,
28
With her A Snail, who Slid about to See
Gloss Note
and with
With
her a snail, who slid about (to see
With her a
Critical Note
The third central character in Pulter’s emblem, the snail presented a unique sexual conundrum because of its shell, so early moderns hypothesized that the snail could spontaneously reproduce: “Thou thine own daughter then, and sire, / that son and mother art entire” (Richard Lovelace, “The Snail”). In medieval and early modern art, the snail was often linked to the Virgin Mary as a symbol of virginity. Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation, for example, includes a snail in the painting’s foreground, positioned directly in front of Mary as she receives the news of her immaculate conception. Geneticist Steve Jones offers a useful account of the history of the snail as a symbol of “sex, age, and death” in his lecture, “Snails in Art and the Art of Snails” (2014), available online through the Museum of London. By the time Pulter was writing, the snail was increasingly cited in debates about the role of reproduction in the plant and animal worlds. Several decades after Pulter’s death in 1678, Dutch anatomist Jan Swammerdam proved that snails were hermaphrodites (Bybel der Natuure, Leiden, 1737). Before that point, as historian of science Domenico Bertolini Meli outlines, hermaphrodites were seen to be rare occurrences, even monsters. Swammerdam’s findings became the basis for arguments on the natural occurrence of hermaphrodites in nature (Meli, “Of Snails and Horsetails: Anatomical Empiricism in the Early Modern Period,” Early Science and Medicine 18.4/5 (2013): 435–452).
snail
, who slid about to see
With her a snail, who slid about (to see
29
Where to get out upon her Unctious brest
Where to get out) upon her
Gloss Note
greasy
unctuous
breast;
Where to get out upon her
Gloss Note
oily, greasy
unctuous
breast;
Where to get out) upon her
Gloss Note
oily
unctuous
breast;
30
But Seeing noe hope, Shee laid her down to rest
But seeing no hope, she laid
Gloss Note
herself
her
down to rest,
But seeing no hope, she laid her down to rest,
But seeing no hope, she laid
Gloss Note
herself
her
down to rest,
31
Whilst the Angrie Bee
Physical Note
double strike-through
doth
Physical Note
in different hand from main scribe
\did \
Such A ffluttring Keep
Whilst the angry bee did such a flutt’ring
Gloss Note
make
keep
,
Whilst the angry bee
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “bee doth \did \ such a”
did
such a flutt’ring keep,
Whilst the
Gloss Note
Anger is an emotion rarely ascribed to bees during the early modern period. Bees are often called militant, watchful, agitated, or resourceful (all in defense of their hive), but not angry.
angry
bee did such a flutt’ring keep,
32
Shee nor her fellow Priſner could not Sleep
Gloss Note
Neither she
She
nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
She nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
She nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
33
But Night being past, Delia diffuſ’d his Rais
But night being past,
Gloss Note
here, Apollo, the sun god (named because he was from the island of Delos, usually called Delius)
Delia
diffused his rays;
But night being past,
Critical Note
Pulter’s use of “Delia,” an unusual and distinctly feminized name for Apollo, the Greek sun god born on the island of Delos, marks a conscious shift from her use of “Aurora,” goddess of the dawn, at the start of the poem. As Victoria Burke notes in her Amplified Edition of Aurora [1] [Poem 3], the feminized Delia, as opposed to Delius, could be a transcription error, but Pulter does use Delia to refer to Apollo in several other poems, including The Eclipse [Poem 1] and The Garden, or the Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. Given this emblem’s interrogation of gender, we might read Pulter’s slippage here as an invitation. As the female bee (“the active Amazonian maid”) dies and the poem shifts to a cluster of male figures in its closing lines, is Pulter’s switch from Aurora to Delia (and, perhaps, from Delius to Delia) meant to both mark and trouble this transition?
Delia
Gloss Note
spread out
diffused
his rays;
But night being past,
Critical Note
“Delia” is Apollo, the sun god, so named for Delos, his island birthplace. “Delia” seems to be a particularly feminine epithet for Apollo, who is yet clearly gendered male. Indeed, Apollo is the first male character in the poem; Aurora, the bee, the tulip, and the snail are all female. While the feminine Aurora brought life and beauty to the world, Apollo’s “rays” reveal exhaustion and death for the bee.
Delia
diffused his rays;
34
The Tulip then her gilded Leaves diſplais
The tulip then her gilded leaves displays.
The tulip then her
Gloss Note
adorned or embellished; a term most often associated with artificial objects
gilded
leaves displays.
The tulip then her gilded leaves displays.
35
Out Slid the Snail, the Bee did fainting lie
Out slid the snail; the bee did fainting lie,
Out slid the snail; the bee did fainting lie,
Critical Note
“Out slid” mirrors “Out flew” of line 7. Pulter’s diction makes the bee far more attractive than the snail. Where the bee “flew,” the snail “slid.” While the bee is “active,” the snail is “unctuous.” Pulter may be playing up the positive characteristics of the bee to acknowledge its commonplace association with wisdom, virtue, etc. If Pulter’s readers—because of traditional representations and Pulter’s appealing depiction—sympathize with the bee, perhaps they are more likely to take personally the warnings of Emblem 53.
Out slid
the
Critical Note
Again, Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls provides helpful context for Pulter’s instructive snail. His emblem “Upon the Snail” is notably lengthier and more intimate than his scathing indictment of the bee: “She goes but softly, but she goeth sure, / She stumbles not, as stronger Creatures do: / Her Journeys shorter, so she may endure, / Better than they which do much further go. / She makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on / The Flow’r or Herb, appointed for her food: / The which she quietly doth feed upon, / While others range, and gare, but find no good. / And tho she doth but very softly go, / How ever ’tis not fast, nor slow, but sure; / And certainly they that do travel so, / The prize they do aim at, they do procure” (63-64). The subsequent “Comparison” is equally encouraging: “Although they seem not much to stire, less go, / For Christ that hunger, or from Wrath, that flee; / Yet what they seek for, quickly thy come to, / Tho it doth seem the farthest off to be. / One Act of Faith doth bring them to that Flow’r, / They so long for, that they may eat and live; / Which to attain is not in others Pow’r / Tho for it a King’s Ransom they would give. / Then let none faint, nor be at all dismaid, / That Life by Christ do seek, they shall not fail / To have it, let them nothing be afraid; / The Herb, and Flow’r is eaten by the Snail” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 64). George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moral also praises the snail for its patience and tenacity. Wither writes in Book 1, Emblem 11: “If they would contemplate the slow-pac’d Snaile; / Or, this our Hieroglyphicke looke into: / For, thence we learne, that Perseverance brings / Large Workes to end, though slowly they creep on; / And, that Continuance perfects many things, / Which seeme, at first, unlikely to be done” (Wither, A Collection of Emblems [London: 1635]: 11). Pulter’s snail then, unlike her bee, aligns with seventeenth-century emblematics.
snail
; the bee did fainting lie
36
And thus with Beating of her Self did die
And thus with beating of herself did die.
And thus with beating of herself did die.
And thus with
Critical Note
beating her wings, also by herself. The phrase emphasizes the bee’s disordered actions in at least two senses: first, the bee should never have been by herself at night. When she should have returned to the community of the hive to share her nectar with her sisters, she buzzed off by herself to explore the tulip greedily. Second, when the bee finds herself in another, albeit weaker, female community—she, the tulip, and the snail are all gendered female in the poem—she does not function as a helpful part of that group either. Of course, the companionship of the tulip and the snail is a pale imitation of the familiar and ordered security of the hive. Yet the tulip and snail offer some familiar community: the bee is enclosed by the tulip as she would be enclosed by the hive, and she has a “sister” in the snail. Rather than accept the security of the tulip and the company of the snail, she beats her wings by herself, causing both her death by exhaustion, and also a sleepless night for the snail.
beating of herself
did die.
37
Then let impatient Spirits here but See
Then let impatient spirits here but see
Then let impatient spirits here but see
Then let impatient
Gloss Note
souls; people
spirits
Gloss Note
in this emblem
here
but see
38
What ’tis to Struggle with their destinie
What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.
Critical Note
“Then let impatient spirits here but see / What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.” The first of the poem’s three possible mottoes. Pulter uses the fable of the snail, tulip, and bee to offer a lesson in struggling against destiny. The “impatient” bee struggles against her “painted prison” (line 27), while the patient snail “see[s] no hope” and “lay[s] … down to rest” (line 30). In the poem’s final motto, Pulter reminds us of the snail, tulip, and bee fable (“if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” [lines 51–52]), but the lessons of the two mottoes are slightly different—enough to invite some critical thinking on the part of Pulter’s reader. This motto focuses on destiny, while the poem’s final motto foregrounds liberty. Who are the “impatient spirits” Pulter addresses with this lesson? Who is the “you” of the final motto’s direct address?
What ’tis to struggle with their destiny
.
What ’tis to struggle
Gloss Note
against
with
their destiny.
39
Soe Stout Byrone in Priſon was inrag’d
So
Gloss Note
proud, arrogant
stout
Gloss Note
Charles de Gontant, duc de Biron; a celebrated sixteenth-century French soldier famed for his overweening pride and eventually executed for treason; in George Chapman’s play about him, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Biron’s sword is confiscated by the king.
Biron
in prison was enraged,
So
Gloss Note
proud, haughty
stout
Critical Note

This comparison starts Pulter’s catalogue of male military leaders, rulers, and thinkers—four in total by the poem’s end. As I noted in my headnote, this cast of characters marks a significant gender shift from the female-centric opening of the poem. But this phrase is also formally noteworthy. Rather than using just one or two comparisons to illustrate her point, Pulter here offers an extensive catalogue of examples: “so stout Biron” (line 39), “when Belisarius” (line 41), “so miscre’nt Bajazeth” (line 43), and “when wise Callisthenes” (line 47). The anaphoric “so’s” and “when’s” of these final lines, very typical of Pulter’s emblems, signal her strategic accumulation of these examples. Again, how might Pulter be using her poems to explore how poetic language signifies? See my headnote for more on this question.

Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, was a sixteenth-century French military leader eventually involved in conspiracies against the French crown. He was jailed and beheaded for treason in 1602. Alice Eardley cites George Chapman’s play, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France (1608) as one possible source for Pulter’s anecdote here. Biron was “notorious for his arrogance,” Eardley notes, and in Chapman’s play his sword is removed from him, “treatment he vigorously resists.” See Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, Ed. Alice Eardley, (Toronto: Iter, 2014), 263 n.513.

Biron
in prison was enraged,
So stout
Critical Note
Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes, all identified in the Elemental Edition of the poem, are exemplars of human responses to imprisonment and hardship; Biron and Bajazeth react as does the bee, and Belisarius and Callisthenes demonstrate the patience of the snail. The four men are particularly apropos comparisons to the bee because all of them are subordinates to a master. Honeybees, both now and in the seventeenth century, are communal creatures, which Samuel Purchas emphasizes when he writes “una Apis, nulla Apis, one Bee is no Bee” (16). He drives home the point: “A Bee, like a man cannot live alone, if shee be alone, shee dies” (17). The very fact that the bee of Pulter’s poem is an individual apart from the hive puts her in a position of rebellion and danger. In this case, the bee, tulip, and snail are subordinate to the “influence” of the sun, just as Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes were subject to the rulings (or whims) of their masters.
Biron
in prison was enraged,
40
Knowing his King was to his Sword ingag’d
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
41
When Bellizarus by A dog was led
When
Gloss Note
successful general of sixth-century Roman emperor Justinian, later accused of conspiracy; reputedly, his eyes were put out and he ended his life as a beggar.
Belisarius
by a dog was led,
When
Gloss Note
Belisarius was a famous military leader of the Byzantine Empire. Pulter here references the apocryphal story that Justinian ordered Belisarius’s eyes put out and that Belisarius became a beggar at the gates of Rome. Looking forward a bit beyond Pulter’s lifetime, Belisarius’s story was especially popular by the end of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Jean-François Marmontel’s Bélisaire: A Novel (1767), Margaretta Faugères’s closet drama, Belisarius: A Tragedy (1795), and Jacques-Louis David’s painting, “Belisarius Begging for Alms” (1780).
Belisarius
by a dog was led,
When Belisarius by a dog was led,
42
Being blind hee patiently did beg his Bread
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
43
Soe miſcre’nt Bajazet did Shew his Rage
So
Gloss Note
villainous
miscre’nt
Gloss Note
fourteenth-century Turkish Emperor captured in war by Tamburlaine (the “proud Tartar”); in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine, Bajazeth kills himself on the bars of his prison.
Bajazeth
did show his rage
So
Gloss Note
an abbreviation of “miscreant”; heretical or pagan, but also villainous
miscre’nt
Critical Note
In Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s poems, she cites Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590) as a possible source for Pulter’s reference to the Turkish emperor Bajazeth. In Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth and keeps him in a cage, taking him out only to serve as Tamburlaine’s footstool. After a lengthy imprisonment, Bajazeth kills himself by smashing his head against the bars of his cage. See Eardley (ed.), Poems, 263 n.516.
Bajazeth
did show his rage
So miscre’nt Bajazeth did show his rage
44
When that proud Tarter put him in A Cage
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
45
Scorning to bee A footstool to his Pride
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
46
Hee daſh’d his Curſed Brains about & died
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
47
When wiſe Calistines uſ’d with greater Scorn
When wise
Gloss Note
historian for Alexander the Great, reported by some to have been dismembered and displayed in a cage by Alexander in retribution for his criticisms; see Justin (Marcus Justinius), The History of Justin, Taken Out of the Four and Forty Books of Trogus Pompeius (London, 1654), p. 239.
Callisthenes
, used with greater scorn,
When wise
Gloss Note
Callisthenes was a Greek historian, eventually the official historian of Alexander the Great until he was accused of plotting against Alexander. There are several different accounts of his death. Pulter seems to be referencing the version from Ptolemy in which Callisthenes is tortured and hanged in an iron cage.
Callisthenes
, used with greater scorn,
When wise Callisthenes, used with greater scorn,
48
Tyrannically mangled Soe was Born
Tyrannically mangled,
Gloss Note
so it
so
was
Gloss Note
endured
borne
,
Tyrannically mangled, so was borne,
Tyrannically mangled, so was borne,
hee

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49
Hee being unmov’d Shew’d his Philoſophy
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
50
T’is Valianter by far to live then die
’Tis valianter by far to live than die.
Critical Note
The second of the poem’s three mottoes. This message seems specific to Pulter’s lines on Callisthenes, but the connection is puzzling given Callisthenes’s death in prison, without liberty. Is Pulter drawing our attention to the possible incongruities between her anecdotes and their concluding mottos? Or, perhaps, this motto becomes a thread for the poem’s broader message of stoic endurance: be patient and choose life.
’Tis valianter by far to live than die
.
’Tis valianter by far to live than die.
51
Then if noe hope
Physical Note
imperfectly erased ascender follows
of
Liberty you See
Then if no hope of liberty you see
Then if no hope of liberty you see,
Then if no hope of liberty
Critical Note
To whom is Pulter writing here? Nicole A. Jacobs identifies Pulter’s primary audience for her manuscript as her daughters (133), although Pulter appears to have imagined a future, more general readership as well (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 132). Indeed, all people could easily be tempted to behave as the “covetous” bee, “for it may well bee said, he is not humane, that is not allured with [herbs and flowers]” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (London, 1629): sig**3V). Yet if Emblem 53, like The Invitation into the Country, 1647 [Poem 2], A Dialogue Between Two Sisters [Poem 56], and To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter [Poem 38] is written expressly to Pulter’s daughters, the poem’s emphasis on community—and female community at that—becomes all the more pointed. Why does the bee die? Because it was alone. “Come, my dear children, to this lonely place,” Pulter begins “To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield.” “An Invitation into the Country, 1647” opens in a similar vein: “Dear daughters, come, make haste away.”Finally, “A Dialogue Between Two Sisters” concludes with the sisters’ resolve to “go to our sad mother: she’s alone” (line 54). The appropriate response for female grief is therefore female community. Pulter, however, ups the ante in Emblem 53: separation from female community results not just in grief, but in death.
you
see
52
Think on the Snail, the Tulip and the
Physical Note
remainder of page blank, as is reverse
Bee
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.
Critical Note
“Then if no hope of liberty you see, / Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.” The final of the poem’s three mottoes. Pointing us back to the emblem’s central fable, Pulter’s final lines explicitly mark the snail, tulip, and bee story as a political allegory about liberty, resistance, and stoic endurance. But what of the poem’s complex gender politics? Where do they fit within such an allegory, particularly one written by a Royalist female poet at the height of the English Civil Wars? To explore further the intersections of gender and English Civil War politics, see Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 4.
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee
.
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.
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

We all know the cliché of the busy bee, but Pulter found in the bee an emblem not of virtuous industry but instead of overzealous curiosity, greed, and poor judgment. After praising “the active Amazonian maid” for her industriousness and herbalist know-how, this emblem tells of how the bee—having collected her fill of nectar, but unable to leave well enough alone—becomes trapped in a tulip when, at day’s end, its petals close around her. The bee works furiously to escape; a snail, similarly caught, falls asleep without a struggle. In the morning, when the petals reopen, the snail simply leaves, while the bee dies of exhaustion. Pulter sees in her garden an all-female community of vegetable, animal, and celestial beings demonstrating the moral which the poem then shows men to have enacted historically, in a sequence of exemplars warning against impatience and fighting fate. While that may be the overall moral, the poem also touches on the tension between confinement and freedom which so often preoccupies Pulter. The framing phrase for the emblem’s moral—“if no hope of liberty you see”—closely tracks the concluding declaration in “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57): “I no liberty expect to see …” Did Pulter identify with the snail or the bee?
Line number 1

 Gloss note

goddess of dawn
Line number 3

 Gloss note

pure
Line number 4

 Gloss note

half-blossomed
Line number 5

 Gloss note

wrapped up
Line number 6

 Gloss note

foretell
Line number 7

 Gloss note

Amazons were legendary female warriors who served a queen; here used figuratively to describe a bee
Line number 12

 Gloss note

honey
Line number 12

 Gloss note

Bees were reputed to be able to turn poisons into honey.
Line number 14

 Gloss note

This plant, like opium and the three in the previous line, are all poisonous.
Line number 14

 Gloss note

land
Line number 16

 Gloss note

six-sided
Line number 17

 Gloss note

apprehending
Line number 19

 Gloss note

clever, elaborately made
Line number 19

 Gloss note

type of flower
Line number 20

 Gloss note

goddess of the rainbow, also a type of flower
Line number 25

 Gloss note

“whom” is spelled as “home” in the manuscript; all are influenced by the sun
Line number 26

 Gloss note

bend down, droop
Line number 26

 Gloss note

petals
Line number 28

 Gloss note

and with
Line number 29

 Gloss note

greasy
Line number 30

 Gloss note

herself
Line number 31

 Gloss note

make
Line number 32

 Gloss note

Neither she
Line number 33

 Gloss note

here, Apollo, the sun god (named because he was from the island of Delos, usually called Delius)
Line number 39

 Gloss note

proud, arrogant
Line number 39

 Gloss note

Charles de Gontant, duc de Biron; a celebrated sixteenth-century French soldier famed for his overweening pride and eventually executed for treason; in George Chapman’s play about him, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Biron’s sword is confiscated by the king.
Line number 41

 Gloss note

successful general of sixth-century Roman emperor Justinian, later accused of conspiracy; reputedly, his eyes were put out and he ended his life as a beggar.
Line number 43

 Gloss note

villainous
Line number 43

 Gloss note

fourteenth-century Turkish Emperor captured in war by Tamburlaine (the “proud Tartar”); in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine, Bajazeth kills himself on the bars of his prison.
Line number 47

 Gloss note

historian for Alexander the Great, reported by some to have been dismembered and displayed in a cage by Alexander in retribution for his criticisms; see Justin (Marcus Justinius), The History of Justin, Taken Out of the Four and Forty Books of Trogus Pompeius (London, 1654), p. 239.
Line number 48

 Gloss note

so it
Line number 48

 Gloss note

endured
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
X (Close panel)Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition

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Physical Note
Unlike surrounding poems in the “Emblems” section, no number precedes this poem.
[Emblem 53]
The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee
(Emblem 53)
The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee
(Emblem 53)
Emblem 53
In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.

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

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
In my editions of Pulter’s poems, I prioritize accessibility and use my annotations to prompt further exploration. To make the poems accessible to the widest possible audience, I have modernized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization according to American English standards. My editions aim to demonstrate the complexity of Pulter’s thinking, while opening space for the reader’s own analysis and interpretation. I recognize editing as a political act and aim to be as transparent as possible about how I frame Pulter’s poems for the reader. My lengthy annotations are an attempt to reveal my thought processes and make clear the ideological networks that inform my readings.
As an important corollary to Pulter’s conceptual work, I also attend to the material expression of her manuscript object. Her manuscript pages reveal a glimpse of her thinking and writing processes, and I briefly note Pulter’s revisions to the poems in order to foreground her poetic craft. The manuscript features variants and revisions that invite multiple interpretations, and I encourage readers to refer to the manuscript images as they engage with Pulter’s writing. I offer some intertextual references to other early modern texts, but am most interested in drawing out how Pulter’s poems speak to each other as she reflects on clusters of ideas.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 maintains the punctuation and spelling of the Elemental Edition, and places the poem in the context of its contemporary emblem books and bee-keeping treatises.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
We all know the cliché of the busy bee, but Pulter found in the bee an emblem not of virtuous industry but instead of overzealous curiosity, greed, and poor judgment. After praising “the active Amazonian maid” for her industriousness and herbalist know-how, this emblem tells of how the bee—having collected her fill of nectar, but unable to leave well enough alone—becomes trapped in a tulip when, at day’s end, its petals close around her. The bee works furiously to escape; a snail, similarly caught, falls asleep without a struggle. In the morning, when the petals reopen, the snail simply leaves, while the bee dies of exhaustion. Pulter sees in her garden an all-female community of vegetable, animal, and celestial beings demonstrating the moral which the poem then shows men to have enacted historically, in a sequence of exemplars warning against impatience and fighting fate. While that may be the overall moral, the poem also touches on the tension between confinement and freedom which so often preoccupies Pulter. The framing phrase for the emblem’s moral—“if no hope of liberty you see”—closely tracks the concluding declaration in “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57): “I no liberty expect to see …” Did Pulter identify with the snail or the bee?

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Emblem 53 offers a complex political allegory masquerading as a fable about a “covetous” honey bee, a patient snail, and a “painted” tulip. Alongside the poem’s political themes, Pulter raises questions about gender, science, and nature that echo her interest in these topics throughout the manuscript. Most significantly, there are glimpses in this poem of Pulter’s clever theorization of poetry itself—her ongoing exploration of how poetry makes meaning.
Three distinct, but related, mottoes drive this emblem. The first motto—”then let impatient spirits here but see / what ’tis to struggle with their destiny” (lines 37–8)—concludes the story Pulter tells of a honey bee, enticed by the poet’s sumptuous garden, who tries to gather more “nectar” than she can carry. Straying from the hive for far too long, the bee lands in a tulip alongside a snail just as the sun goes down and the tulip closes its petals. The second and third motto come in sequence at the poem’s end: “’tis valianter by far to live than die” (line 50) and “then if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (lines 51–52). These mottoes follow a catalogue of examples from classical history, mostly warnings about excessive pride and arrogance. Three mottoes is a lot for one emblem, which raises interesting questions as we read this poem. How do the three mottoes work together? Do the stories seem to unfold logically into their concluding mottoes or do the mottoes seem incongruous? How does Pulter use these multiple mottoes to invite us to consider the function of the motto as a feature of emblems?
Pulter’s emblem poems are “naked emblems,” as Millie Godfrey and Sarah C. E. Ross explain in their introduction to Mighty Nimrod (Emblem 1) [Poem 67]. Revising the traditional tripartite structure of the emblem (motto, visual image, and short epigrammatic verse), Pulter omits the visual image (pictura) element such that the reader must glean meaning solely from words. But Pulter’s language in this and many of her emblems is meant to help the reader paint their own picture. Here, for instance, Pulter references specific flowers, tracks the bee’s movements as it flits around the poet’s garden, and fills her lines with evocative descriptions (the morning sun is “lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray” [line 5]). The emblem’s central characters—the snail, the tulip, and the bee—would also have been easy visual reference points for Pulter’s readers. All three figures were frequently portrayed in early modern emblem books, textual illustrations, and artwork.
All three figures are also at the center of early modern debates surrounding gender and sexuality. Even though none of the poem’s mottoes directly concern these topics, this emblem has much to teach us about Pulter’s interest and intervention in these debates. I track this theme throughout my annotations on the poem, noting, for instance, that Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (7) refers to a community of warrior women in Greek mythology (the Amazons), who were notoriously complicated gendered figures in early modern culture. “Demonstrating that women and men might be performatively interchangeable,” Kathryn Schwarz explains, “Amazons at once substantiate the signifiers of masculinity and threaten to replace the bodies to which they are attached.”
Gloss Note
Source: Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000): 38.
1
Amazons were often at the center of crossdressing plots (Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia), tales of women’s military leadership (Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo), and stories about the relationship between desire and power (William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Pulter’s comparison of the bee to an “Amazonian maid” draws on this popular trope, but we might also read the comparison as an opening nod to the poem’s formal structure. The poem’s first half outlines a distinctly female garden community, populated by “fair Aurora” (1), the “Amazonian” bee” (7), the poet herself (17), and even the snail that slides about “upon her unctuous breast” (29). When the bee’s plot ends at line 37, though, the poem shifts to solely male reference points. Pulter mentions Biron (39), Belisarius (41), Bajazeth (43), and Callisthenes (47) as she guides the reader toward the poem’s concluding motto. But, shifting once more in the final couplet, Pulter ends by reminding us to “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (52), a return to the female cast of the poem’s first half. In the formal structure of her poem—the gender-bending shifts in metaphors—Pulter brings to mind the threat posed by the figure of the Amazon: the possibility “that women and men might be performatively interchangeable.” In both the content and form of this poem, Pulter raises questions about how gender signifies, and particularly how emblematic, gender-specific metaphors signify.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
To most seventeenth-century readers, Hester Pulter’s bee in Emblem 53 must have seemed unusual indeed. While the vast majority of her contemporaries praised bees for “their labour and order at home and abroad,” which made them “so admirable, that they may bee a pattern unto men,”
Gloss Note
Source: Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie (Oxford, 1634): 2.
1
Pulter’s bee is greedy, and her “labour” is anything but admirable. Yet comparing Emblem 53 to early modern accounts of bees (both real and metaphorical bees) reveals that Pulter reinforces seventeenth-century knowledge about the characteristics of bees, and that her bee’s deviation from “appropriate” bee-behaviour allows Pulter to emphasize the dangers of solitude, particularly solitude from a community of other women.
Bees were a common metaphor, symbol, or analogy in classical and early modern literature, with Shakespeare’s Henry V and Milton’s Paradise Lost two familiar examples. Indeed, Pulter would not have been able to use bees as a metaphor without contending with the vast scope of bee literature and bee metaphors that had come before her. Of course, this assumes that Pulter had read “bee literature” and was acquainted with honeybees in some fashion. In his reading of Shakespeare on bees, Richard Grinnell confronts a similar question: how much did Shakespeare know about bees? His answer is worth quoting at length: “Shakespeare keeps bees the way any well-read and urbane writer might have been able to—building his metaphors and analogies from books at hand. Even when he moves beyond the classics, for example, in his description of Hal as a beekeeper willing to kill the bees to get the honey, he is clearly working with material that was common knowledge in his day” (850). Beekeeping during the early modern period was also an occupation and even obligation for both men and women. Treatises on caring for bees are often addressed to both sexes, and women feature prevalently in stories about bees, honey, and hives. William Lawson, writing in 1623, states in his treatise on gardening that he “will not account her any of my good Housewives, that wanteth either Bees or skilfulnesse about them.”
Gloss Note
Source: William Lawson, The Country Housewifes Garden. Containing Rules for Hearbs and Seeds of common use, with their times and seasons, when to set and sow them. Together With the Husbandry of Bees, published with secrets very necessary for every Housewife […] (London: Printed for Roger Jackson, 1623): 17.
2
Pulter would certainly not be unusual if she knew something—or even much—about the care and characteristics of honeybees.
Pulter’s bee (in contrast to the industrious and virtuous bees of most of the literature that predates Emblem 53) is greedy and grasping, and her bee’s struggle against confinement causes her exhaustion and death. According to Nicole A. Jacobs, another outlier in early modern bee imagery is John Milton, who compares the devils in Pandemonium to a swarm of bees in Paradise Lost. In her monograph Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony, Jacobs emphasizes the weight of literary tradition that any negative depiction of bees would have to shrug off: “The image of the humming collection [in Paradise Lost] resonates with the early modern reader, trained by tradition to imagine humanity as an orderly hive.”
Gloss Note
Source: Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 123.
3
The same “tradition” and “train[ing]” would have applied to Pulter’s readers, which perhaps explains why, although the snail (with its patient endurance) seems to be the positive exemplar for the reader, the “moral” of the emblem does not urge readers to imitate the snail necessarily. Instead, Pulter advises that we “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (line 52). Indeed, while the bee causes her own unnecessary death in Pulter’s poem, the common literary symbolism of worker bees in the seventeenth century was so overwhelmingly positive that readers must have resisted, even a little, the idea that they should be the greasy snail rather than the “active Amazonian maid” (line 7).
If a honey bee is separate from its colony, it is soon to die. In 1657, beekeeper Samuel Purchas wrote baldly, “one Bee, is no Bee.”
Gloss Note
Source: Purchas, A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects (London, 1657): 16.
4
Joseph Campana quotes from Purchas as well to emphasize the apian–and more general–early modern anxiety with solitude, segments, and fragmentation in the commonwealth. “For bees,” Campana concludes, “singularity is unbearable.”
Gloss Note
Source: Campana, “The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Bryan Reynolds, Paul Cefalu, and Gary Kuchar (New York: Routledge, 2011): 67.
5
Keith Botelho summarizes early modern beekeepers’ attitudes towards individual and collective bees: “early modern bee treatises often spoke of bees in the collective, not necessarily concerned with the individual bee (other than the Queen) but rather with the maintenance of the stock of bees in the hives, of the swarm, of the many.”
Gloss Note
Source: Botelho, “Honey, Wax, and the Dead Bee,” Early Modern Culture 11 (2016): 102.
6
Not only beekeepers, but also early modern writers of fiction or moral instruction generally referred to bees in the plural, and James Howell’s 1660 The Parly of Beasts; or Morphandra Queen of the Inchanted Island is a notable example. In Howell’s dialogues, the characters Morphandra and Pererius speak to a number of animals (who were once human) in turn, beginning with an Otter, then an Ass, an Ape, a Hind, a Mule, a Fox, a Boar, a Wolf, and a Goose. In the first ten sections of the book, the animal interlocutor is singular, but not so in the final dialogue, in which Morphandra and Pererius converse with “a Hive of Bees” (my emphasis), for bees were thought to exist only in a collective. All this is to say that when Pulter’s bee diverts from her voyage back to her hive, she is doing something unusual and potentially deadly: separating herself from the collective that gives her life.
Emblem 53 uses a number of means to create and maintain female community, whether real or imagined. The bee is an “Amazonian maid,” which of course places her in the well-known society of Amazons, but it also reminds readers that bees themselves live in a society that is predominantly female. Christina Luckyj and Naimh J. O’Leary assert that “classical models of segregated female communities could serve as code for political protest.”
Gloss Note
Source: Luckyj and O’Leary, Editor’s Introduction to The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017): 6.
7
Natural models–the model of the beehive–could also serve as such a “code,” especially when Pulter compares the bee and snail to Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes. The four men are associated with the military, which may remind readers of the military connotations of bees in early modern England. Butler, for instance, writes that “Besides their Soveraign, the Bees have also subordinate Governours and Leaders, not unfitly resembling Captains and Colonels of Soldiers.
Gloss Note
Source: Butler, 6.
8
With her references to women and military might, Pulter may be subtly gesturing towards a political protest, one that gives communities of women classical, natural, and even military power.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
53When fair Aurora drest with Raidient Light
When fair
Gloss Note
goddess of dawn
Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
When
Critical Note
Pulter’s opening reference to “fair Aurora” (Roman goddess of the dawn) initiates the gendered imagery of the poem’s first seven lines, which culminates with Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (line 7). These opening lines, with the Amazon reference as a kind of anchor point, transform the morning garden into a female separatist community—a framing with important implications for how we read the rest of the poem. First, framing the bee’s actions within this context connects the labor of collecting nectar to women’s work, which then prompts us to read Pulter’s later references to poisonous herbs (lines 13–14) and “choice extractions” (line 15) as nods to domestic labor. Second, it links Emblem 53 to other writings in which Pulter explores the intimacies that develop within communities of women, most notably the female friendships throughout her prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda.
fair Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
When fair
Gloss Note
dawn
Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
2
Had triumph’d o’re the Gloomey Shades of Night
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of night—
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of
Critical Note
My editorial decision to add an em-dash here turns lines 3–6 into a clause that expands Pulter’s description of Aurora in lines 1–2 and emphasizes the unique formal structure of Pulter’s “naked emblems” (for more on this, see my headnote). Adding the em-dash marks how the concise description of Aurora waking up in the poem’s first two lines becomes a more expansive illustration of Aurora in lines 3–6, a kind of visual unfolding that nods to the pictura element of the traditional emblem structure. For more on the flexible structure of early modern emblems, see Peter Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (University of Toronto Press, 1979).
night
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of night—
3
When Shee her Virgin beavty first diſcloſes
When she her
Gloss Note
pure
virgin
beauty first discloses,
When she her
Critical Note
Associating Aurora with virginity, Pulter departs from classical tradition in which Aurora is often aggressively sexualized. Pulter retains some of the figure’s fraught sexual history, though, by drawing on conventional blazon imagery, describing Aurora wrapped in a “silver” robe with “roses” ornamenting her “dewy curls.” This description echoes language from earlier poems in the manuscript dedicated to Aurora: To Aurora [1] [Poem 22], To Aurora [2] [Poem 26], and To Aurora [3] [Poem 34]. “To Aurora [3]” is particularly resonant here. In that earlier poem, Aurora “shakes her dewy curls” and fills the flowers—”each gold-enamelled cup”—with “honeydew” (lines 8–9). For more on Pulter’s use of blazon imagery throughout her poems, see Frances E. Dolan’s Exploration, “Hester Pulter and the Blazon in Early Modern England.”
virgin beauty
first
Gloss Note
uncover or expose to view
discloses
,
When she her
Critical Note
Sperrazza points out in her Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 that Pulter unusually but often associates Aurora with virginity. Bees too, during the early modern period, were considered virginal, as Pulter herself emphasizes in To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], lines 10-11, and in Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57] line 5. The perceived virginity of bees also linked them to the Virgin Mary, which Henry Hawkins explains in his 1633 emblem book, Partheneia Sacra. His bee emblem begins with “To Bethlem’s sillie shed, me thinks I see / The Virgin hasten like a busie Bee,” and ends with “She was the Bee, the Hive her Sacred Womb” (Hawkins, Parthenia Sacra [London, 1633]: lines 1-2; 12). Also during the seventeenth century, the newly-elected Pope Urban VIII heralded himself by means of iconographic bees, iconography that John Milton then used to disparage Charles II (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony [New York: Routledge, 2021]: 117). For more on Urban VIII and bees, see Bee Wilson, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (London: John Murray, 2004): 129-31.
virgin beauty
first discloses,
4
Her dewey Curles Stuck full of half blown Roſes
Her dewy curls stuck full of
Gloss Note
half-blossomed
half-blown
roses,
Her dewy curls stuck full of
Gloss Note
half-bloomed, half-blossomed
half-blown
roses,
Her dewy curls stuck full of half-blown roses,
5
Lapt in A Robe of Silver mixt with graie
Gloss Note
wrapped up
Lapped
in a robe of silver mixed with gray,
Lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray,
Gloss Note
The gorgeous clothing and coloration of Aurora are repeated in the later description of the speaker’s flower garden, which so attracts the bee that she neglects her hive.
Lapped in a robe
of silver mixed with gray,
6
Which did prognoſticate a glorious day
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell
prognosticate
a glorious day—
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell, forecast
prognosticate
a glorious day–
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell
prognosticate
a glorious day—
7
Out flew the active Amizonian Maid
Out flew the
Gloss Note
Amazons were legendary female warriors who served a queen; here used figuratively to describe a bee
active Amazonian maid
;
Out flew the
Critical Note

The bee was a familiar subject of early modern emblems, frequently used as a model of ordered government (see Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber [Padua, 1621], emblem 149) or successful, interdependent economy (see Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblemes [London, 1585], pages 200–201). One seventeenth-century compendium on insects, compiled from the writings of several natural historians, including Edward Wotton, Conrad Gesner, and Thomas Moffet, featured a beehive on its frontispiece and described bees as “patterns and precedents of political and economical virtues” (The Theatre of Insects, or Lesser Living Creatures [London, 1658]).

Pulter’s transformation of the bee into an Amazonian figure, however, is more unusual and even a bit contentious. The comparison enhances Pulter’s interrogation of gender in this poem (see my headnote) and connects this emblem to some of the manuscript’s more explicit political poetry.

active Amazonian maid
.
Critical Note
Out of the beehive (also called a skep). At this point in the poem, the bee is behaving exactly as she ought: during the day, bees must fly out of the hive to forage for nectar and pollen. However, Pulter’s bee remains dangerously “out” of the hive as she is enticed by the garden’s beauty. That “Out” is the first word of this line suggests that the bee’s fault is not just endless toil, but also and particularly solitude and estrangement from the community of the hive (See Headnote).
Out
flew the active
Critical Note
Pulter uses the adjective “Amazonian” to describe the bee in The Garden [Poem 12] as well (line 43). In the Amplified Edition of that poem, Frances E. Dolan notes on line 43 that “references to bees as ‘Amazonian’ acknowledged that their queen was female, which was not yet widely recognized.” While arguments about the sex of the ruling bee remained animated even into the eighteenth century, already in the mid-seventeenth century it would have been difficult to deny that the queen bee was indeed female. The sex of the queen bee was all but established by Charles Butler’s highly influential bee-keeping treatise, The Feminine Monarchy, published in 1609, and again in 1623 and 1634. This is the treatise that almost all later treatises either cited, feted, or challenged. Indeed, Richard R. Prete cites Butler’s text as the turning-point in publications explaining the sex of bees: “Butler’s sound reasoning and empirical observations, in conjunction with the popularity of his book, brought to an end any serious, empirically based debates about the genders of the honey bee castes. From this point on, writers of beekeeping texts would have to recognize these facts, even if only to refute them, if they were to be taken seriously by their audiences.” (“Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Biology, 24.1 (1991), 128). In 1637, therefore, Richard Remnant’s A Discourse or Historie of Bees spends considerable attention on the implication of bees as females. Moreover, in the first bee-keeping manual published after the English Civil War, Samuel Purchas in his 1657 A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects calls the hive “an Amazonian commonwealth” (London, 33). In 1712, Joseph Warder appeals to a metaphor already established when he entitles his bee-keeping treatise The True Amazons: Or The Monarchy of Bees. Pulter is thus hardly bucking tradition or “scientific” knowledge when she calls her bee an “Amazonian maid.”
Amazonian maid
;
8
The Hills and Dales, not onely Shee Surveyd
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
9
But out of every Gold
Physical Note
“E” and “e” appear written over earlier “i”s
Enameld
Cup
But out of every gold-enamelled cup
But out of every
Gloss Note
flowers
gold-enamelled cup
But out of every
Gloss Note
Gold-colored flower
gold-enamelled cup
10
Her Mornings draught of Nectar Shee did Sup
Her morning’s draft of nectar she did sup.
Her morning’s
Gloss Note
a quantity drawn or extracted
draft
of nectar she did sup.
Her morning’s draft of nectar she did
Gloss Note
drink
sup
.
11
Nay where the Toad, and Spider poyſons found
Nay, where the toad and spider’s poison found,
Nay, where the toad and spider poisons found,
Nay, where the toad and spider’s poison found
12
Mell Shee Extracts, for this ^her Wisdome’s Crownd
Gloss Note
honey
Mell
she extracts;
Gloss Note
Bees were reputed to be able to turn poisons into honey.
for this her wisdom’s crowned
.
Gloss Note
honey
Mell
she extracts; for this
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “for this ^her wisdome’s crownd”
her wisdom’s
crowned.
Gloss Note
Honey
Critical Note
The image of a bee extracting honey while other creatures extracted poisons from the same plant is a common emblematic one. Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, for instance, the first emblem book published in English, contains the emblem entitled “Vita, aut morti.” Under the picture of a bee and a spider on a flower, the epigram reads, “Within one flower, two contraries remaine, / For proofe behoulde, the spider, and the bee, / One poison suckes, the bee doth honie draine: / The Scripture soe, hath two effects we see: / Unto the bad, it is a sworde that slaies, / Unto the good, a shielde in ghostlie fraies” (Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes [Leiden: 1586]: 51). Whitney borrows the pictura (and the sentiment of the poem and moral) from Hadrianus Junius’s Emblemata (1565).
Mell
she extracts; for this her
Critical Note
Bees were commonly praised for their intelligence, labour, and loyalty. John Thorley’s 1744 bee treatise Melissologia, for instance, hardly breaks new ground when it summarizes and admires the bees’ “loyalty” (7), “concord and unity” (12), “magnanimity or courage” (15), “labour and industry” (23), “patience and innocency” (27), “temperance and sobriety” (29), “chastity” (30), “neatness and decency” (31), “sympathy, and mutual assistance” (32), “sagacity and prudence” (33), and “vigilance and watchfulness” (Thorley, Melissologia. Or, The Female Monarchy [London, 1744]: 33). Indeed, “Bees themselves excell all other creatures … in Art, Wisdom, or Foresight, Industry, Valour and Loyalty,” Moses Rusden writes in 1679 (Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees [London, 1679]: 9). In particular, the fact that bees make honey and wax—both useful to humans—makes them especially prized or “crowned,” and thus the fertile bee in the hive is called a “queen.” “Her wisdom’s crowned,” however, cannot refer to only one singular bee, for a bee cannot make honey in isolation. If a bee is prized because it extracts honey from plants, the honor must go to the entire hive, the site of honey production.
wisdom’s crowned
.
13
On
Physical Note
“t” in different hand from main scribe
Nightſhade
, Henbane, Helliſh Acconite
On nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite,
On nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite,
On
Gloss Note
All poisonous plants, including opium and hemlock in the following line.
nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite
,
14
On Opium, Hemlock, Shee doth Safely lite
On opium,
Gloss Note
This plant, like opium and the three in the previous line, are all poisonous.
hemlock
she doth safely
Gloss Note
land
light
.
On opium, hemlock she doth
Critical Note
All five plants catalogued in these lines are poisonous, but their pollen is not. Consequently, the bee can safely extract pollen but the toad and spider of line 11 (eating the plants’ leaves, flowers, or stems) find “poisons.” Pulter may have gained knowledge of these plants from direct, hands-on experience. There were also several popular herbals circulating by the time she was writing, including John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597) and Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician Enlarged (London, 1653). The British Library offers a useful peek at Gerard’s Herbal, along with some context on Shakespeare’s use of “henbane” in Hamlet and “nightshade” in Romeo and Juliet.
safely light
.
On opium, hemlock she doth safely
Gloss Note
alight.
light
.
15
Thus being with choyce Extractions loaded well
Thus being with choice extractions loaded well,
Thus being with
Critical Note
John Milton also uses the verb “extract” to describe the bee’s work in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. Adam calls Eve awake “to mark … how the bee / sits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet” (lines 20–25). The noun “extraction” and its verb form “extract” (line 12) had alchemical, medicinal, and culinary connotations in seventeenth-century use. “To extract” is “to obtain (constituent elements, juices, etc.) from a thing or substance by suction, pressure, distillation, or any chemical or mechanical operation” (“extract, v.4a,” OED Online). As evidence for this particular connotation of “extract,” the Oxford English Dictionary cites Hugh Plat’s The Jewel House of Art and Nature (London, 1594) and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History (London, 1626), two popular early modern scientific texts with which Pulter may have been familiar. Is Pulter also demonstrating her knowledge of early modern herbals, texts that catalogued plants and their medicinal and culinary uses? If so, her uses of “extract” and “extraction” connect to the catalogue of poisonous plants in lines 13–14. For an extended exploration of “human art” in relation to plants, see View But This Tulip (Emblem 40) [Poem 105].
choice extractions
loaded well,
Thus being with choice extractions
Gloss Note
Bees were thought to carry their collected nectar in “bags,” emphasized in a popular seventeenth-century song and poem entitled “The Sweet Bag of the Bee.” The poem/song appears numerous times in the expansive collection English Song 1600-1675: Facsimiles of Twenty-Six Manuscripts and an Edition of the Texts, edited with introductions by Elise Bickford Jorgens. Henry Lawes’ composition of the song appears in Oxford, Ms. Tenbury 1018, sig. 95V. The poem “The Sweet Bag of the Bee” also features in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648). Once a bee is “loaded well,” it must return to its hive to share its bounty with the rest of the bees.
loaded well
,
16
Shee turn’d to flie to her Sexanguler Cell
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
six-sided
sexangular
cell.
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
six-sided; a reference to the comb shapes of a bee hive
sexangular cell
.
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
hexagonal honeycomb
Critical Note
If there is any doubt that the bee of Emblem 53 is a honey bee, line 14 negates that doubt. Solitary bees such as bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, etc. do not make hexagonal honeycomb. The honey bee’s decision to abort her return flight to her hive suddenly separates her from the community to which she belongs.
sexangular cell
.
17
But takeing of my Garden in her way
But
Gloss Note
apprehending
taking of
my garden in her way,
But
Gloss Note
to be caught or captured by; the bee is “taken with” the beauty of the narrator’s garden
taking of

This is our first glimpse of the poem’s narrator, often a much more pervasive presence in Pulter’s poems. In early poems in the manuscript, like Made When I Was Sick, 1647 [Poem 31], the entire poem revolves around the narrator’s experience and thoughts. The sparse, late use of the first-person pronoun here, though, is more typical of Pulter’s emblem poems, a few of which never reference the poet directly. See, for instance, Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86].

It’s worth noting that this first reference to the poet (one of only two in the poem) is also connected to the garden and the all-female community of the poem’s first half. Perhaps even more interesting, the narrator’s garden is the site of the bee’s demise. We learn the story of the bee and the snail in the next few lines and we might even imagine that the poet is a first-hand witness, watching the snail “slid[e]” out of the tulip in the morning while the bee “fainting lie[s]” (line 35).

my garden
in her way,
But
Gloss Note
Taking in
taking of
my garden in her way,
18
Though full before Shee could not chooſe but Stay
Though full before, she could not choose but stay
Though full before, she could not choose but stay
Though
Critical Note
The bee’s “bag” is full, so she would be unable to carry any more nectar or pollen, even if she finds some in the speaker’s alluring garden. The bee’s further investigation of the garden, therefore, is futile.
full before
, she could not choose but stay
19
To See the
Physical Note
insertion in different hand from main scribe
\curious \
Ouricolas
Physical Note
double strike-through
curious
drest
To see the
Gloss Note
clever, elaborately made
curious
Gloss Note
type of flower
auriculas
dressed
To see the
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “to see the \curious \ ouricolas curious drest”
curious
Gloss Note
primula auricula; also known as mountain cowslip or bear’s ear (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
auriculas
dressed
To see the curious
Gloss Note
A type of primrose, a greatly prized and showy flower.
auriculas
dressed
20
More variously then Iris dewey breast
More variously than
Gloss Note
goddess of the rainbow, also a type of flower
Iris’s
dewy breast.
More variously than
Gloss Note
In Greek mythology, Iris is messenger of the gods and a personification of the rainbow. Iris is also another type of flower. In contemporary botany, iris is a genus of many species of flowering plants like the iris sibirica (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
Iris’s
dewy breast.
More variously than
Gloss Note
type of flower, also a messenger goddess with the rainbow as her emblem. The auriculas, therefore, which are usually yellow, are here rainbow-hued.
Iris’s
dewy breast.
21
Then were my Tulips painted in there Pride
Then were my tulips painted in their pride,
Then were my
Critical Note
The tulip has special significance in Pulter’s emblem. She not only makes the center of this flower the location for her fable of the bee and snail (as we’re about to see); she also describes the tulip with language that evokes the “tulipmania” of the early seventeenth century: “painted” (here and again in line 27) and “gilded” (line 34). From the 1580’s to the mid-1630’s, tulips were a prized and elusive commodity, famous in aristocratic gardens and still life paintings, but notoriously difficult to study and classify given their infinite variety. In John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597), Gerard describes the tulips as “a strange and foreign flower” and emphasizes that it is impossible to catalogue all of its varieties: “each new yeare bringeth forth new plants of sundry colours, not before seene” ([London, 1597], Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online, pages 137–140). The craze surrounding the tulip culminated in the Dutch “tulipmania” of the 1630’s, when the price of tulip bulbs inflated drastically (the most expensive specimens went for around 5,000 guilders). We might speculate that Pulter has this recent cultural phenomenon in mind when she describes the tulips first as luxurious garden accessories (“painted in their pride”) and then as the bee’s “painted prison.” See this poem’s Curation (Pulter’s Garden) for examples of Gerard’s tulip woodcuts and Dutch still life paintings featuring the flower. For more on the tulip in early modern English contexts, see Anna Pavord’s The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad (Bloomsbury, 1999), especially chapter 3.
tulips painted
in their pride,
Then were my
Critical Note
John Parkinson writes in his 1629 gardening treatise, “There are not only divers kindes of Tulipas, but sundry diversities of colours in them, found out in these later dayes by many the [sic] searchers of natures varieties, which have not formerly been observed: our age being more delighted in the search, curiosity, and rarieites of these pleasant delights, then [sic] any age I thinke before. But indeede, this flower, above many other, deserves his true commendations and acceptance with all lovers of these beauties, both for the stately aspect, and for the admirable varietie of colours, that daily doe arise in them, farre beyond all other plants that grow” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris [London, 1629]: 45). Moreover, as Benedict S. Robinson identifies, tulips were first exported from Turkey to Europe in the late sixteenth century, and, he argues, “the tulip could also be taken to embody an ‘orientalizing’ of English tastes, an errant desire for exotic plants that rooted itself right into the soil” (Robinson, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 [2009]: 96). The bee’s attraction to the tulip, then, demonstrates her “covetousness,” but also her relatable, commonplace, and even human interest in the beautiful and exotic flower.
tulips
painted in their pride,
22
Which when this covetous Inſect Eſpi’de
Which, when this covetous insect espied,
Which, when this
Gloss Note
greedy
covetous
insect espied,
Which, when this
Critical Note
The reader’s suspicion that Pulter’s bee is not the moral exemplar bees usually are in seventeenth-century poetry is here confirmed. While bees were usually considered selfless and self-sacrificing –Moses Rusden praises their “loyalty,” for example—Pulter’s bee is greedy. Another notable example of a “bad bee” appears in John Bunyan’s 1686 A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes For Children, which is filled with moral lessons in the form of naked emblems, not unlike the naked emblems Pulter employs. Bunyan’s emblem “Upon the Bee” starts innocuously enough: “The Bee goes out and Honey home doth bring; / And some who seek that Hony find a sting. / [N]ow wouldst thou have the Hony and be free / [Fr]om stinging; in the first place kill the Bee” (10). The following “Comparison” is startling, especially in contrast to the nigh-universal praise afforded the bee by Bunyan’s contemporaries: “This Bee an Emblem truly is of sin / Whose Sweet unto a many death hath been. / [N]ow would’st have Sweet from sin, and yet not dye, / [D]o thou in the first place mortifie” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 10).
covetous insect
Gloss Note
saw
espied
,
23
To carry home her wealth Shee’d not ye power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
24
Till Shee had Search’d the Sweets of every fflower
Till she had searched the sweets of every flower.
Till she had searched the sweets of every flower.
Till
Critical Note
At this point the bee is unable to return home not because she’s overladen with “nectar,” but because she covetously wants to explore every flower before flying back to the hive. “She’d not the power” to resist the temptation of the beckoning garden, and her greedy appetite leads to a rejection of home and companionship.
she had searched the sweets of every flower
.
the

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder

Facsimile Image Placeholder
25
The Sun, from home, all, Influence Receives
The sun,
Gloss Note
“whom” is spelled as “home” in the manuscript; all are influenced by the sun
from whom all influence receives
,
The sun, from whom all influence receives,
The sun, from whom
Gloss Note
all things
all
Gloss Note
inflowing power, usually from an astral, divine, or secret force.
influence
receives,
26
Bid them decline, The Tulip cloſ’d her Leaves
Bids them
Gloss Note
bend down, droop
decline
; the tulip closed her
Gloss Note
petals
leaves
,
Bid
Gloss Note
the flowers
them
decline; the tulip closed her leaves,
Bids them decline; the tulip closed her leaves,
27
And in that painted Priſon Shut the Bee
And in that painted prison shut the bee,
And in that painted prison shut the bee.
And in that
Gloss Note
“Painted” confirms the exotic and unnatural allure of the tulip, and the bee’s foolishness in yielding to that allure.
painted prison
shut the bee,
28
With her A Snail, who Slid about to See
Gloss Note
and with
With
her a snail, who slid about (to see
With her a
Critical Note
The third central character in Pulter’s emblem, the snail presented a unique sexual conundrum because of its shell, so early moderns hypothesized that the snail could spontaneously reproduce: “Thou thine own daughter then, and sire, / that son and mother art entire” (Richard Lovelace, “The Snail”). In medieval and early modern art, the snail was often linked to the Virgin Mary as a symbol of virginity. Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation, for example, includes a snail in the painting’s foreground, positioned directly in front of Mary as she receives the news of her immaculate conception. Geneticist Steve Jones offers a useful account of the history of the snail as a symbol of “sex, age, and death” in his lecture, “Snails in Art and the Art of Snails” (2014), available online through the Museum of London. By the time Pulter was writing, the snail was increasingly cited in debates about the role of reproduction in the plant and animal worlds. Several decades after Pulter’s death in 1678, Dutch anatomist Jan Swammerdam proved that snails were hermaphrodites (Bybel der Natuure, Leiden, 1737). Before that point, as historian of science Domenico Bertolini Meli outlines, hermaphrodites were seen to be rare occurrences, even monsters. Swammerdam’s findings became the basis for arguments on the natural occurrence of hermaphrodites in nature (Meli, “Of Snails and Horsetails: Anatomical Empiricism in the Early Modern Period,” Early Science and Medicine 18.4/5 (2013): 435–452).
snail
, who slid about to see
With her a snail, who slid about (to see
29
Where to get out upon her Unctious brest
Where to get out) upon her
Gloss Note
greasy
unctuous
breast;
Where to get out upon her
Gloss Note
oily, greasy
unctuous
breast;
Where to get out) upon her
Gloss Note
oily
unctuous
breast;
30
But Seeing noe hope, Shee laid her down to rest
But seeing no hope, she laid
Gloss Note
herself
her
down to rest,
But seeing no hope, she laid her down to rest,
But seeing no hope, she laid
Gloss Note
herself
her
down to rest,
31
Whilst the Angrie Bee
Physical Note
double strike-through
doth
Physical Note
in different hand from main scribe
\did \
Such A ffluttring Keep
Whilst the angry bee did such a flutt’ring
Gloss Note
make
keep
,
Whilst the angry bee
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “bee doth \did \ such a”
did
such a flutt’ring keep,
Whilst the
Gloss Note
Anger is an emotion rarely ascribed to bees during the early modern period. Bees are often called militant, watchful, agitated, or resourceful (all in defense of their hive), but not angry.
angry
bee did such a flutt’ring keep,
32
Shee nor her fellow Priſner could not Sleep
Gloss Note
Neither she
She
nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
She nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
She nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
33
But Night being past, Delia diffuſ’d his Rais
But night being past,
Gloss Note
here, Apollo, the sun god (named because he was from the island of Delos, usually called Delius)
Delia
diffused his rays;
But night being past,
Critical Note
Pulter’s use of “Delia,” an unusual and distinctly feminized name for Apollo, the Greek sun god born on the island of Delos, marks a conscious shift from her use of “Aurora,” goddess of the dawn, at the start of the poem. As Victoria Burke notes in her Amplified Edition of Aurora [1] [Poem 3], the feminized Delia, as opposed to Delius, could be a transcription error, but Pulter does use Delia to refer to Apollo in several other poems, including The Eclipse [Poem 1] and The Garden, or the Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. Given this emblem’s interrogation of gender, we might read Pulter’s slippage here as an invitation. As the female bee (“the active Amazonian maid”) dies and the poem shifts to a cluster of male figures in its closing lines, is Pulter’s switch from Aurora to Delia (and, perhaps, from Delius to Delia) meant to both mark and trouble this transition?
Delia
Gloss Note
spread out
diffused
his rays;
But night being past,
Critical Note
“Delia” is Apollo, the sun god, so named for Delos, his island birthplace. “Delia” seems to be a particularly feminine epithet for Apollo, who is yet clearly gendered male. Indeed, Apollo is the first male character in the poem; Aurora, the bee, the tulip, and the snail are all female. While the feminine Aurora brought life and beauty to the world, Apollo’s “rays” reveal exhaustion and death for the bee.
Delia
diffused his rays;
34
The Tulip then her gilded Leaves diſplais
The tulip then her gilded leaves displays.
The tulip then her
Gloss Note
adorned or embellished; a term most often associated with artificial objects
gilded
leaves displays.
The tulip then her gilded leaves displays.
35
Out Slid the Snail, the Bee did fainting lie
Out slid the snail; the bee did fainting lie,
Out slid the snail; the bee did fainting lie,
Critical Note
“Out slid” mirrors “Out flew” of line 7. Pulter’s diction makes the bee far more attractive than the snail. Where the bee “flew,” the snail “slid.” While the bee is “active,” the snail is “unctuous.” Pulter may be playing up the positive characteristics of the bee to acknowledge its commonplace association with wisdom, virtue, etc. If Pulter’s readers—because of traditional representations and Pulter’s appealing depiction—sympathize with the bee, perhaps they are more likely to take personally the warnings of Emblem 53.
Out slid
the
Critical Note
Again, Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls provides helpful context for Pulter’s instructive snail. His emblem “Upon the Snail” is notably lengthier and more intimate than his scathing indictment of the bee: “She goes but softly, but she goeth sure, / She stumbles not, as stronger Creatures do: / Her Journeys shorter, so she may endure, / Better than they which do much further go. / She makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on / The Flow’r or Herb, appointed for her food: / The which she quietly doth feed upon, / While others range, and gare, but find no good. / And tho she doth but very softly go, / How ever ’tis not fast, nor slow, but sure; / And certainly they that do travel so, / The prize they do aim at, they do procure” (63-64). The subsequent “Comparison” is equally encouraging: “Although they seem not much to stire, less go, / For Christ that hunger, or from Wrath, that flee; / Yet what they seek for, quickly thy come to, / Tho it doth seem the farthest off to be. / One Act of Faith doth bring them to that Flow’r, / They so long for, that they may eat and live; / Which to attain is not in others Pow’r / Tho for it a King’s Ransom they would give. / Then let none faint, nor be at all dismaid, / That Life by Christ do seek, they shall not fail / To have it, let them nothing be afraid; / The Herb, and Flow’r is eaten by the Snail” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 64). George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moral also praises the snail for its patience and tenacity. Wither writes in Book 1, Emblem 11: “If they would contemplate the slow-pac’d Snaile; / Or, this our Hieroglyphicke looke into: / For, thence we learne, that Perseverance brings / Large Workes to end, though slowly they creep on; / And, that Continuance perfects many things, / Which seeme, at first, unlikely to be done” (Wither, A Collection of Emblems [London: 1635]: 11). Pulter’s snail then, unlike her bee, aligns with seventeenth-century emblematics.
snail
; the bee did fainting lie
36
And thus with Beating of her Self did die
And thus with beating of herself did die.
And thus with beating of herself did die.
And thus with
Critical Note
beating her wings, also by herself. The phrase emphasizes the bee’s disordered actions in at least two senses: first, the bee should never have been by herself at night. When she should have returned to the community of the hive to share her nectar with her sisters, she buzzed off by herself to explore the tulip greedily. Second, when the bee finds herself in another, albeit weaker, female community—she, the tulip, and the snail are all gendered female in the poem—she does not function as a helpful part of that group either. Of course, the companionship of the tulip and the snail is a pale imitation of the familiar and ordered security of the hive. Yet the tulip and snail offer some familiar community: the bee is enclosed by the tulip as she would be enclosed by the hive, and she has a “sister” in the snail. Rather than accept the security of the tulip and the company of the snail, she beats her wings by herself, causing both her death by exhaustion, and also a sleepless night for the snail.
beating of herself
did die.
37
Then let impatient Spirits here but See
Then let impatient spirits here but see
Then let impatient spirits here but see
Then let impatient
Gloss Note
souls; people
spirits
Gloss Note
in this emblem
here
but see
38
What ’tis to Struggle with their destinie
What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.
Critical Note
“Then let impatient spirits here but see / What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.” The first of the poem’s three possible mottoes. Pulter uses the fable of the snail, tulip, and bee to offer a lesson in struggling against destiny. The “impatient” bee struggles against her “painted prison” (line 27), while the patient snail “see[s] no hope” and “lay[s] … down to rest” (line 30). In the poem’s final motto, Pulter reminds us of the snail, tulip, and bee fable (“if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” [lines 51–52]), but the lessons of the two mottoes are slightly different—enough to invite some critical thinking on the part of Pulter’s reader. This motto focuses on destiny, while the poem’s final motto foregrounds liberty. Who are the “impatient spirits” Pulter addresses with this lesson? Who is the “you” of the final motto’s direct address?
What ’tis to struggle with their destiny
.
What ’tis to struggle
Gloss Note
against
with
their destiny.
39
Soe Stout Byrone in Priſon was inrag’d
So
Gloss Note
proud, arrogant
stout
Gloss Note
Charles de Gontant, duc de Biron; a celebrated sixteenth-century French soldier famed for his overweening pride and eventually executed for treason; in George Chapman’s play about him, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Biron’s sword is confiscated by the king.
Biron
in prison was enraged,
So
Gloss Note
proud, haughty
stout
Critical Note

This comparison starts Pulter’s catalogue of male military leaders, rulers, and thinkers—four in total by the poem’s end. As I noted in my headnote, this cast of characters marks a significant gender shift from the female-centric opening of the poem. But this phrase is also formally noteworthy. Rather than using just one or two comparisons to illustrate her point, Pulter here offers an extensive catalogue of examples: “so stout Biron” (line 39), “when Belisarius” (line 41), “so miscre’nt Bajazeth” (line 43), and “when wise Callisthenes” (line 47). The anaphoric “so’s” and “when’s” of these final lines, very typical of Pulter’s emblems, signal her strategic accumulation of these examples. Again, how might Pulter be using her poems to explore how poetic language signifies? See my headnote for more on this question.

Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, was a sixteenth-century French military leader eventually involved in conspiracies against the French crown. He was jailed and beheaded for treason in 1602. Alice Eardley cites George Chapman’s play, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France (1608) as one possible source for Pulter’s anecdote here. Biron was “notorious for his arrogance,” Eardley notes, and in Chapman’s play his sword is removed from him, “treatment he vigorously resists.” See Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, Ed. Alice Eardley, (Toronto: Iter, 2014), 263 n.513.

Biron
in prison was enraged,
So stout
Critical Note
Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes, all identified in the Elemental Edition of the poem, are exemplars of human responses to imprisonment and hardship; Biron and Bajazeth react as does the bee, and Belisarius and Callisthenes demonstrate the patience of the snail. The four men are particularly apropos comparisons to the bee because all of them are subordinates to a master. Honeybees, both now and in the seventeenth century, are communal creatures, which Samuel Purchas emphasizes when he writes “una Apis, nulla Apis, one Bee is no Bee” (16). He drives home the point: “A Bee, like a man cannot live alone, if shee be alone, shee dies” (17). The very fact that the bee of Pulter’s poem is an individual apart from the hive puts her in a position of rebellion and danger. In this case, the bee, tulip, and snail are subordinate to the “influence” of the sun, just as Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes were subject to the rulings (or whims) of their masters.
Biron
in prison was enraged,
40
Knowing his King was to his Sword ingag’d
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
41
When Bellizarus by A dog was led
When
Gloss Note
successful general of sixth-century Roman emperor Justinian, later accused of conspiracy; reputedly, his eyes were put out and he ended his life as a beggar.
Belisarius
by a dog was led,
When
Gloss Note
Belisarius was a famous military leader of the Byzantine Empire. Pulter here references the apocryphal story that Justinian ordered Belisarius’s eyes put out and that Belisarius became a beggar at the gates of Rome. Looking forward a bit beyond Pulter’s lifetime, Belisarius’s story was especially popular by the end of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Jean-François Marmontel’s Bélisaire: A Novel (1767), Margaretta Faugères’s closet drama, Belisarius: A Tragedy (1795), and Jacques-Louis David’s painting, “Belisarius Begging for Alms” (1780).
Belisarius
by a dog was led,
When Belisarius by a dog was led,
42
Being blind hee patiently did beg his Bread
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
43
Soe miſcre’nt Bajazet did Shew his Rage
So
Gloss Note
villainous
miscre’nt
Gloss Note
fourteenth-century Turkish Emperor captured in war by Tamburlaine (the “proud Tartar”); in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine, Bajazeth kills himself on the bars of his prison.
Bajazeth
did show his rage
So
Gloss Note
an abbreviation of “miscreant”; heretical or pagan, but also villainous
miscre’nt
Critical Note
In Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s poems, she cites Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590) as a possible source for Pulter’s reference to the Turkish emperor Bajazeth. In Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth and keeps him in a cage, taking him out only to serve as Tamburlaine’s footstool. After a lengthy imprisonment, Bajazeth kills himself by smashing his head against the bars of his cage. See Eardley (ed.), Poems, 263 n.516.
Bajazeth
did show his rage
So miscre’nt Bajazeth did show his rage
44
When that proud Tarter put him in A Cage
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
45
Scorning to bee A footstool to his Pride
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
46
Hee daſh’d his Curſed Brains about & died
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
47
When wiſe Calistines uſ’d with greater Scorn
When wise
Gloss Note
historian for Alexander the Great, reported by some to have been dismembered and displayed in a cage by Alexander in retribution for his criticisms; see Justin (Marcus Justinius), The History of Justin, Taken Out of the Four and Forty Books of Trogus Pompeius (London, 1654), p. 239.
Callisthenes
, used with greater scorn,
When wise
Gloss Note
Callisthenes was a Greek historian, eventually the official historian of Alexander the Great until he was accused of plotting against Alexander. There are several different accounts of his death. Pulter seems to be referencing the version from Ptolemy in which Callisthenes is tortured and hanged in an iron cage.
Callisthenes
, used with greater scorn,
When wise Callisthenes, used with greater scorn,
48
Tyrannically mangled Soe was Born
Tyrannically mangled,
Gloss Note
so it
so
was
Gloss Note
endured
borne
,
Tyrannically mangled, so was borne,
Tyrannically mangled, so was borne,
hee

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49
Hee being unmov’d Shew’d his Philoſophy
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
50
T’is Valianter by far to live then die
’Tis valianter by far to live than die.
Critical Note
The second of the poem’s three mottoes. This message seems specific to Pulter’s lines on Callisthenes, but the connection is puzzling given Callisthenes’s death in prison, without liberty. Is Pulter drawing our attention to the possible incongruities between her anecdotes and their concluding mottos? Or, perhaps, this motto becomes a thread for the poem’s broader message of stoic endurance: be patient and choose life.
’Tis valianter by far to live than die
.
’Tis valianter by far to live than die.
51
Then if noe hope
Physical Note
imperfectly erased ascender follows
of
Liberty you See
Then if no hope of liberty you see
Then if no hope of liberty you see,
Then if no hope of liberty
Critical Note
To whom is Pulter writing here? Nicole A. Jacobs identifies Pulter’s primary audience for her manuscript as her daughters (133), although Pulter appears to have imagined a future, more general readership as well (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 132). Indeed, all people could easily be tempted to behave as the “covetous” bee, “for it may well bee said, he is not humane, that is not allured with [herbs and flowers]” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (London, 1629): sig**3V). Yet if Emblem 53, like The Invitation into the Country, 1647 [Poem 2], A Dialogue Between Two Sisters [Poem 56], and To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter [Poem 38] is written expressly to Pulter’s daughters, the poem’s emphasis on community—and female community at that—becomes all the more pointed. Why does the bee die? Because it was alone. “Come, my dear children, to this lonely place,” Pulter begins “To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield.” “An Invitation into the Country, 1647” opens in a similar vein: “Dear daughters, come, make haste away.”Finally, “A Dialogue Between Two Sisters” concludes with the sisters’ resolve to “go to our sad mother: she’s alone” (line 54). The appropriate response for female grief is therefore female community. Pulter, however, ups the ante in Emblem 53: separation from female community results not just in grief, but in death.
you
see
52
Think on the Snail, the Tulip and the
Physical Note
remainder of page blank, as is reverse
Bee
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.
Critical Note
“Then if no hope of liberty you see, / Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.” The final of the poem’s three mottoes. Pointing us back to the emblem’s central fable, Pulter’s final lines explicitly mark the snail, tulip, and bee story as a political allegory about liberty, resistance, and stoic endurance. But what of the poem’s complex gender politics? Where do they fit within such an allegory, particularly one written by a Royalist female poet at the height of the English Civil Wars? To explore further the intersections of gender and English Civil War politics, see Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 4.
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee
.
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.
X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition A

 Editorial note

In my editions of Pulter’s poems, I prioritize accessibility and use my annotations to prompt further exploration. To make the poems accessible to the widest possible audience, I have modernized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization according to American English standards. My editions aim to demonstrate the complexity of Pulter’s thinking, while opening space for the reader’s own analysis and interpretation. I recognize editing as a political act and aim to be as transparent as possible about how I frame Pulter’s poems for the reader. My lengthy annotations are an attempt to reveal my thought processes and make clear the ideological networks that inform my readings.
As an important corollary to Pulter’s conceptual work, I also attend to the material expression of her manuscript object. Her manuscript pages reveal a glimpse of her thinking and writing processes, and I briefly note Pulter’s revisions to the poems in order to foreground her poetic craft. The manuscript features variants and revisions that invite multiple interpretations, and I encourage readers to refer to the manuscript images as they engage with Pulter’s writing. I offer some intertextual references to other early modern texts, but am most interested in drawing out how Pulter’s poems speak to each other as she reflects on clusters of ideas.

 Headnote

Emblem 53 offers a complex political allegory masquerading as a fable about a “covetous” honey bee, a patient snail, and a “painted” tulip. Alongside the poem’s political themes, Pulter raises questions about gender, science, and nature that echo her interest in these topics throughout the manuscript. Most significantly, there are glimpses in this poem of Pulter’s clever theorization of poetry itself—her ongoing exploration of how poetry makes meaning.
Three distinct, but related, mottoes drive this emblem. The first motto—”then let impatient spirits here but see / what ’tis to struggle with their destiny” (lines 37–8)—concludes the story Pulter tells of a honey bee, enticed by the poet’s sumptuous garden, who tries to gather more “nectar” than she can carry. Straying from the hive for far too long, the bee lands in a tulip alongside a snail just as the sun goes down and the tulip closes its petals. The second and third motto come in sequence at the poem’s end: “’tis valianter by far to live than die” (line 50) and “then if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (lines 51–52). These mottoes follow a catalogue of examples from classical history, mostly warnings about excessive pride and arrogance. Three mottoes is a lot for one emblem, which raises interesting questions as we read this poem. How do the three mottoes work together? Do the stories seem to unfold logically into their concluding mottoes or do the mottoes seem incongruous? How does Pulter use these multiple mottoes to invite us to consider the function of the motto as a feature of emblems?
Pulter’s emblem poems are “naked emblems,” as Millie Godfrey and Sarah C. E. Ross explain in their introduction to Mighty Nimrod (Emblem 1) [Poem 67]. Revising the traditional tripartite structure of the emblem (motto, visual image, and short epigrammatic verse), Pulter omits the visual image (pictura) element such that the reader must glean meaning solely from words. But Pulter’s language in this and many of her emblems is meant to help the reader paint their own picture. Here, for instance, Pulter references specific flowers, tracks the bee’s movements as it flits around the poet’s garden, and fills her lines with evocative descriptions (the morning sun is “lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray” [line 5]). The emblem’s central characters—the snail, the tulip, and the bee—would also have been easy visual reference points for Pulter’s readers. All three figures were frequently portrayed in early modern emblem books, textual illustrations, and artwork.
All three figures are also at the center of early modern debates surrounding gender and sexuality. Even though none of the poem’s mottoes directly concern these topics, this emblem has much to teach us about Pulter’s interest and intervention in these debates. I track this theme throughout my annotations on the poem, noting, for instance, that Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (7) refers to a community of warrior women in Greek mythology (the Amazons), who were notoriously complicated gendered figures in early modern culture. “Demonstrating that women and men might be performatively interchangeable,” Kathryn Schwarz explains, “Amazons at once substantiate the signifiers of masculinity and threaten to replace the bodies to which they are attached.”
Gloss Note
Source: Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000): 38.
1
Amazons were often at the center of crossdressing plots (Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia), tales of women’s military leadership (Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo), and stories about the relationship between desire and power (William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Pulter’s comparison of the bee to an “Amazonian maid” draws on this popular trope, but we might also read the comparison as an opening nod to the poem’s formal structure. The poem’s first half outlines a distinctly female garden community, populated by “fair Aurora” (1), the “Amazonian” bee” (7), the poet herself (17), and even the snail that slides about “upon her unctuous breast” (29). When the bee’s plot ends at line 37, though, the poem shifts to solely male reference points. Pulter mentions Biron (39), Belisarius (41), Bajazeth (43), and Callisthenes (47) as she guides the reader toward the poem’s concluding motto. But, shifting once more in the final couplet, Pulter ends by reminding us to “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (52), a return to the female cast of the poem’s first half. In the formal structure of her poem—the gender-bending shifts in metaphors—Pulter brings to mind the threat posed by the figure of the Amazon: the possibility “that women and men might be performatively interchangeable.” In both the content and form of this poem, Pulter raises questions about how gender signifies, and particularly how emblematic, gender-specific metaphors signify.
Line number 1

 Critical note

Pulter’s opening reference to “fair Aurora” (Roman goddess of the dawn) initiates the gendered imagery of the poem’s first seven lines, which culminates with Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (line 7). These opening lines, with the Amazon reference as a kind of anchor point, transform the morning garden into a female separatist community—a framing with important implications for how we read the rest of the poem. First, framing the bee’s actions within this context connects the labor of collecting nectar to women’s work, which then prompts us to read Pulter’s later references to poisonous herbs (lines 13–14) and “choice extractions” (line 15) as nods to domestic labor. Second, it links Emblem 53 to other writings in which Pulter explores the intimacies that develop within communities of women, most notably the female friendships throughout her prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda.
Line number 2

 Critical note

My editorial decision to add an em-dash here turns lines 3–6 into a clause that expands Pulter’s description of Aurora in lines 1–2 and emphasizes the unique formal structure of Pulter’s “naked emblems” (for more on this, see my headnote). Adding the em-dash marks how the concise description of Aurora waking up in the poem’s first two lines becomes a more expansive illustration of Aurora in lines 3–6, a kind of visual unfolding that nods to the pictura element of the traditional emblem structure. For more on the flexible structure of early modern emblems, see Peter Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (University of Toronto Press, 1979).
Line number 3

 Critical note

Associating Aurora with virginity, Pulter departs from classical tradition in which Aurora is often aggressively sexualized. Pulter retains some of the figure’s fraught sexual history, though, by drawing on conventional blazon imagery, describing Aurora wrapped in a “silver” robe with “roses” ornamenting her “dewy curls.” This description echoes language from earlier poems in the manuscript dedicated to Aurora: To Aurora [1] [Poem 22], To Aurora [2] [Poem 26], and To Aurora [3] [Poem 34]. “To Aurora [3]” is particularly resonant here. In that earlier poem, Aurora “shakes her dewy curls” and fills the flowers—”each gold-enamelled cup”—with “honeydew” (lines 8–9). For more on Pulter’s use of blazon imagery throughout her poems, see Frances E. Dolan’s Exploration, “Hester Pulter and the Blazon in Early Modern England.”
Line number 3

 Gloss note

uncover or expose to view
Line number 4

 Gloss note

half-bloomed, half-blossomed
Line number 6

 Gloss note

foretell, forecast
Line number 7

 Critical note


The bee was a familiar subject of early modern emblems, frequently used as a model of ordered government (see Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber [Padua, 1621], emblem 149) or successful, interdependent economy (see Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblemes [London, 1585], pages 200–201). One seventeenth-century compendium on insects, compiled from the writings of several natural historians, including Edward Wotton, Conrad Gesner, and Thomas Moffet, featured a beehive on its frontispiece and described bees as “patterns and precedents of political and economical virtues” (The Theatre of Insects, or Lesser Living Creatures [London, 1658]).

Pulter’s transformation of the bee into an Amazonian figure, however, is more unusual and even a bit contentious. The comparison enhances Pulter’s interrogation of gender in this poem (see my headnote) and connects this emblem to some of the manuscript’s more explicit political poetry.

Line number 9

 Gloss note

flowers
Line number 10

 Gloss note

a quantity drawn or extracted
Line number 12

 Gloss note

honey
Line number 12

 Physical note

revised in the manuscript; “for this ^her wisdome’s crownd”
Line number 14

 Critical note

All five plants catalogued in these lines are poisonous, but their pollen is not. Consequently, the bee can safely extract pollen but the toad and spider of line 11 (eating the plants’ leaves, flowers, or stems) find “poisons.” Pulter may have gained knowledge of these plants from direct, hands-on experience. There were also several popular herbals circulating by the time she was writing, including John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597) and Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician Enlarged (London, 1653). The British Library offers a useful peek at Gerard’s Herbal, along with some context on Shakespeare’s use of “henbane” in Hamlet and “nightshade” in Romeo and Juliet.
Line number 15

 Critical note

John Milton also uses the verb “extract” to describe the bee’s work in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. Adam calls Eve awake “to mark … how the bee / sits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet” (lines 20–25). The noun “extraction” and its verb form “extract” (line 12) had alchemical, medicinal, and culinary connotations in seventeenth-century use. “To extract” is “to obtain (constituent elements, juices, etc.) from a thing or substance by suction, pressure, distillation, or any chemical or mechanical operation” (“extract, v.4a,” OED Online). As evidence for this particular connotation of “extract,” the Oxford English Dictionary cites Hugh Plat’s The Jewel House of Art and Nature (London, 1594) and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History (London, 1626), two popular early modern scientific texts with which Pulter may have been familiar. Is Pulter also demonstrating her knowledge of early modern herbals, texts that catalogued plants and their medicinal and culinary uses? If so, her uses of “extract” and “extraction” connect to the catalogue of poisonous plants in lines 13–14. For an extended exploration of “human art” in relation to plants, see View But This Tulip (Emblem 40) [Poem 105].
Line number 16

 Gloss note

six-sided; a reference to the comb shapes of a bee hive
Line number 17

 Gloss note

to be caught or captured by; the bee is “taken with” the beauty of the narrator’s garden
Line number 17

This is our first glimpse of the poem’s narrator, often a much more pervasive presence in Pulter’s poems. In early poems in the manuscript, like Made When I Was Sick, 1647 [Poem 31], the entire poem revolves around the narrator’s experience and thoughts. The sparse, late use of the first-person pronoun here, though, is more typical of Pulter’s emblem poems, a few of which never reference the poet directly. See, for instance, Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86].

It’s worth noting that this first reference to the poet (one of only two in the poem) is also connected to the garden and the all-female community of the poem’s first half. Perhaps even more interesting, the narrator’s garden is the site of the bee’s demise. We learn the story of the bee and the snail in the next few lines and we might even imagine that the poet is a first-hand witness, watching the snail “slid[e]” out of the tulip in the morning while the bee “fainting lie[s]” (line 35).

Line number 19

 Physical note

revised in the manuscript; “to see the \curious \ ouricolas curious drest”
Line number 19

 Gloss note

primula auricula; also known as mountain cowslip or bear’s ear (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
Line number 20

 Gloss note

In Greek mythology, Iris is messenger of the gods and a personification of the rainbow. Iris is also another type of flower. In contemporary botany, iris is a genus of many species of flowering plants like the iris sibirica (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
Line number 21

 Critical note

The tulip has special significance in Pulter’s emblem. She not only makes the center of this flower the location for her fable of the bee and snail (as we’re about to see); she also describes the tulip with language that evokes the “tulipmania” of the early seventeenth century: “painted” (here and again in line 27) and “gilded” (line 34). From the 1580’s to the mid-1630’s, tulips were a prized and elusive commodity, famous in aristocratic gardens and still life paintings, but notoriously difficult to study and classify given their infinite variety. In John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597), Gerard describes the tulips as “a strange and foreign flower” and emphasizes that it is impossible to catalogue all of its varieties: “each new yeare bringeth forth new plants of sundry colours, not before seene” ([London, 1597], Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online, pages 137–140). The craze surrounding the tulip culminated in the Dutch “tulipmania” of the 1630’s, when the price of tulip bulbs inflated drastically (the most expensive specimens went for around 5,000 guilders). We might speculate that Pulter has this recent cultural phenomenon in mind when she describes the tulips first as luxurious garden accessories (“painted in their pride”) and then as the bee’s “painted prison.” See this poem’s Curation (Pulter’s Garden) for examples of Gerard’s tulip woodcuts and Dutch still life paintings featuring the flower. For more on the tulip in early modern English contexts, see Anna Pavord’s The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad (Bloomsbury, 1999), especially chapter 3.
Line number 22

 Gloss note

greedy
Line number 26

 Gloss note

the flowers
Line number 28

 Critical note

The third central character in Pulter’s emblem, the snail presented a unique sexual conundrum because of its shell, so early moderns hypothesized that the snail could spontaneously reproduce: “Thou thine own daughter then, and sire, / that son and mother art entire” (Richard Lovelace, “The Snail”). In medieval and early modern art, the snail was often linked to the Virgin Mary as a symbol of virginity. Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation, for example, includes a snail in the painting’s foreground, positioned directly in front of Mary as she receives the news of her immaculate conception. Geneticist Steve Jones offers a useful account of the history of the snail as a symbol of “sex, age, and death” in his lecture, “Snails in Art and the Art of Snails” (2014), available online through the Museum of London. By the time Pulter was writing, the snail was increasingly cited in debates about the role of reproduction in the plant and animal worlds. Several decades after Pulter’s death in 1678, Dutch anatomist Jan Swammerdam proved that snails were hermaphrodites (Bybel der Natuure, Leiden, 1737). Before that point, as historian of science Domenico Bertolini Meli outlines, hermaphrodites were seen to be rare occurrences, even monsters. Swammerdam’s findings became the basis for arguments on the natural occurrence of hermaphrodites in nature (Meli, “Of Snails and Horsetails: Anatomical Empiricism in the Early Modern Period,” Early Science and Medicine 18.4/5 (2013): 435–452).
Line number 29

 Gloss note

oily, greasy
Line number 31

 Physical note

revised in the manuscript; “bee doth \did \ such a”
Line number 33

 Critical note

Pulter’s use of “Delia,” an unusual and distinctly feminized name for Apollo, the Greek sun god born on the island of Delos, marks a conscious shift from her use of “Aurora,” goddess of the dawn, at the start of the poem. As Victoria Burke notes in her Amplified Edition of Aurora [1] [Poem 3], the feminized Delia, as opposed to Delius, could be a transcription error, but Pulter does use Delia to refer to Apollo in several other poems, including The Eclipse [Poem 1] and The Garden, or the Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. Given this emblem’s interrogation of gender, we might read Pulter’s slippage here as an invitation. As the female bee (“the active Amazonian maid”) dies and the poem shifts to a cluster of male figures in its closing lines, is Pulter’s switch from Aurora to Delia (and, perhaps, from Delius to Delia) meant to both mark and trouble this transition?
Line number 33

 Gloss note

spread out
Line number 34

 Gloss note

adorned or embellished; a term most often associated with artificial objects
Line number 38

 Critical note

“Then let impatient spirits here but see / What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.” The first of the poem’s three possible mottoes. Pulter uses the fable of the snail, tulip, and bee to offer a lesson in struggling against destiny. The “impatient” bee struggles against her “painted prison” (line 27), while the patient snail “see[s] no hope” and “lay[s] … down to rest” (line 30). In the poem’s final motto, Pulter reminds us of the snail, tulip, and bee fable (“if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” [lines 51–52]), but the lessons of the two mottoes are slightly different—enough to invite some critical thinking on the part of Pulter’s reader. This motto focuses on destiny, while the poem’s final motto foregrounds liberty. Who are the “impatient spirits” Pulter addresses with this lesson? Who is the “you” of the final motto’s direct address?
Line number 39

 Gloss note

proud, haughty
Line number 39

 Critical note


This comparison starts Pulter’s catalogue of male military leaders, rulers, and thinkers—four in total by the poem’s end. As I noted in my headnote, this cast of characters marks a significant gender shift from the female-centric opening of the poem. But this phrase is also formally noteworthy. Rather than using just one or two comparisons to illustrate her point, Pulter here offers an extensive catalogue of examples: “so stout Biron” (line 39), “when Belisarius” (line 41), “so miscre’nt Bajazeth” (line 43), and “when wise Callisthenes” (line 47). The anaphoric “so’s” and “when’s” of these final lines, very typical of Pulter’s emblems, signal her strategic accumulation of these examples. Again, how might Pulter be using her poems to explore how poetic language signifies? See my headnote for more on this question.

Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, was a sixteenth-century French military leader eventually involved in conspiracies against the French crown. He was jailed and beheaded for treason in 1602. Alice Eardley cites George Chapman’s play, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France (1608) as one possible source for Pulter’s anecdote here. Biron was “notorious for his arrogance,” Eardley notes, and in Chapman’s play his sword is removed from him, “treatment he vigorously resists.” See Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, Ed. Alice Eardley, (Toronto: Iter, 2014), 263 n.513.

Line number 41

 Gloss note

Belisarius was a famous military leader of the Byzantine Empire. Pulter here references the apocryphal story that Justinian ordered Belisarius’s eyes put out and that Belisarius became a beggar at the gates of Rome. Looking forward a bit beyond Pulter’s lifetime, Belisarius’s story was especially popular by the end of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Jean-François Marmontel’s Bélisaire: A Novel (1767), Margaretta Faugères’s closet drama, Belisarius: A Tragedy (1795), and Jacques-Louis David’s painting, “Belisarius Begging for Alms” (1780).
Line number 43

 Gloss note

an abbreviation of “miscreant”; heretical or pagan, but also villainous
Line number 43

 Critical note

In Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s poems, she cites Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590) as a possible source for Pulter’s reference to the Turkish emperor Bajazeth. In Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth and keeps him in a cage, taking him out only to serve as Tamburlaine’s footstool. After a lengthy imprisonment, Bajazeth kills himself by smashing his head against the bars of his cage. See Eardley (ed.), Poems, 263 n.516.
Line number 47

 Gloss note

Callisthenes was a Greek historian, eventually the official historian of Alexander the Great until he was accused of plotting against Alexander. There are several different accounts of his death. Pulter seems to be referencing the version from Ptolemy in which Callisthenes is tortured and hanged in an iron cage.
Line number 50

 Critical note

The second of the poem’s three mottoes. This message seems specific to Pulter’s lines on Callisthenes, but the connection is puzzling given Callisthenes’s death in prison, without liberty. Is Pulter drawing our attention to the possible incongruities between her anecdotes and their concluding mottos? Or, perhaps, this motto becomes a thread for the poem’s broader message of stoic endurance: be patient and choose life.
Line number 52

 Critical note

“Then if no hope of liberty you see, / Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.” The final of the poem’s three mottoes. Pointing us back to the emblem’s central fable, Pulter’s final lines explicitly mark the snail, tulip, and bee story as a political allegory about liberty, resistance, and stoic endurance. But what of the poem’s complex gender politics? Where do they fit within such an allegory, particularly one written by a Royalist female poet at the height of the English Civil Wars? To explore further the intersections of gender and English Civil War politics, see Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 4.
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Physical Note
Unlike surrounding poems in the “Emblems” section, no number precedes this poem.
[Emblem 53]
The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee
(Emblem 53)
The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee
(Emblem 53)
Emblem 53
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.

— Whitney Sperrazza
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.

— Whitney Sperrazza
In my editions of Pulter’s poems, I prioritize accessibility and use my annotations to prompt further exploration. To make the poems accessible to the widest possible audience, I have modernized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization according to American English standards. My editions aim to demonstrate the complexity of Pulter’s thinking, while opening space for the reader’s own analysis and interpretation. I recognize editing as a political act and aim to be as transparent as possible about how I frame Pulter’s poems for the reader. My lengthy annotations are an attempt to reveal my thought processes and make clear the ideological networks that inform my readings.
As an important corollary to Pulter’s conceptual work, I also attend to the material expression of her manuscript object. Her manuscript pages reveal a glimpse of her thinking and writing processes, and I briefly note Pulter’s revisions to the poems in order to foreground her poetic craft. The manuscript features variants and revisions that invite multiple interpretations, and I encourage readers to refer to the manuscript images as they engage with Pulter’s writing. I offer some intertextual references to other early modern texts, but am most interested in drawing out how Pulter’s poems speak to each other as she reflects on clusters of ideas.


— Whitney Sperrazza
This Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 maintains the punctuation and spelling of the Elemental Edition, and places the poem in the context of its contemporary emblem books and bee-keeping treatises.

— Whitney Sperrazza


— Whitney Sperrazza
We all know the cliché of the busy bee, but Pulter found in the bee an emblem not of virtuous industry but instead of overzealous curiosity, greed, and poor judgment. After praising “the active Amazonian maid” for her industriousness and herbalist know-how, this emblem tells of how the bee—having collected her fill of nectar, but unable to leave well enough alone—becomes trapped in a tulip when, at day’s end, its petals close around her. The bee works furiously to escape; a snail, similarly caught, falls asleep without a struggle. In the morning, when the petals reopen, the snail simply leaves, while the bee dies of exhaustion. Pulter sees in her garden an all-female community of vegetable, animal, and celestial beings demonstrating the moral which the poem then shows men to have enacted historically, in a sequence of exemplars warning against impatience and fighting fate. While that may be the overall moral, the poem also touches on the tension between confinement and freedom which so often preoccupies Pulter. The framing phrase for the emblem’s moral—“if no hope of liberty you see”—closely tracks the concluding declaration in “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57): “I no liberty expect to see …” Did Pulter identify with the snail or the bee?

— Whitney Sperrazza
Emblem 53 offers a complex political allegory masquerading as a fable about a “covetous” honey bee, a patient snail, and a “painted” tulip. Alongside the poem’s political themes, Pulter raises questions about gender, science, and nature that echo her interest in these topics throughout the manuscript. Most significantly, there are glimpses in this poem of Pulter’s clever theorization of poetry itself—her ongoing exploration of how poetry makes meaning.
Three distinct, but related, mottoes drive this emblem. The first motto—”then let impatient spirits here but see / what ’tis to struggle with their destiny” (lines 37–8)—concludes the story Pulter tells of a honey bee, enticed by the poet’s sumptuous garden, who tries to gather more “nectar” than she can carry. Straying from the hive for far too long, the bee lands in a tulip alongside a snail just as the sun goes down and the tulip closes its petals. The second and third motto come in sequence at the poem’s end: “’tis valianter by far to live than die” (line 50) and “then if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (lines 51–52). These mottoes follow a catalogue of examples from classical history, mostly warnings about excessive pride and arrogance. Three mottoes is a lot for one emblem, which raises interesting questions as we read this poem. How do the three mottoes work together? Do the stories seem to unfold logically into their concluding mottoes or do the mottoes seem incongruous? How does Pulter use these multiple mottoes to invite us to consider the function of the motto as a feature of emblems?
Pulter’s emblem poems are “naked emblems,” as Millie Godfrey and Sarah C. E. Ross explain in their introduction to Mighty Nimrod (Emblem 1) [Poem 67]. Revising the traditional tripartite structure of the emblem (motto, visual image, and short epigrammatic verse), Pulter omits the visual image (pictura) element such that the reader must glean meaning solely from words. But Pulter’s language in this and many of her emblems is meant to help the reader paint their own picture. Here, for instance, Pulter references specific flowers, tracks the bee’s movements as it flits around the poet’s garden, and fills her lines with evocative descriptions (the morning sun is “lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray” [line 5]). The emblem’s central characters—the snail, the tulip, and the bee—would also have been easy visual reference points for Pulter’s readers. All three figures were frequently portrayed in early modern emblem books, textual illustrations, and artwork.
All three figures are also at the center of early modern debates surrounding gender and sexuality. Even though none of the poem’s mottoes directly concern these topics, this emblem has much to teach us about Pulter’s interest and intervention in these debates. I track this theme throughout my annotations on the poem, noting, for instance, that Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (7) refers to a community of warrior women in Greek mythology (the Amazons), who were notoriously complicated gendered figures in early modern culture. “Demonstrating that women and men might be performatively interchangeable,” Kathryn Schwarz explains, “Amazons at once substantiate the signifiers of masculinity and threaten to replace the bodies to which they are attached.”
Gloss Note
Source: Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000): 38.
1
Amazons were often at the center of crossdressing plots (Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia), tales of women’s military leadership (Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo), and stories about the relationship between desire and power (William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Pulter’s comparison of the bee to an “Amazonian maid” draws on this popular trope, but we might also read the comparison as an opening nod to the poem’s formal structure. The poem’s first half outlines a distinctly female garden community, populated by “fair Aurora” (1), the “Amazonian” bee” (7), the poet herself (17), and even the snail that slides about “upon her unctuous breast” (29). When the bee’s plot ends at line 37, though, the poem shifts to solely male reference points. Pulter mentions Biron (39), Belisarius (41), Bajazeth (43), and Callisthenes (47) as she guides the reader toward the poem’s concluding motto. But, shifting once more in the final couplet, Pulter ends by reminding us to “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (52), a return to the female cast of the poem’s first half. In the formal structure of her poem—the gender-bending shifts in metaphors—Pulter brings to mind the threat posed by the figure of the Amazon: the possibility “that women and men might be performatively interchangeable.” In both the content and form of this poem, Pulter raises questions about how gender signifies, and particularly how emblematic, gender-specific metaphors signify.


— Whitney Sperrazza
To most seventeenth-century readers, Hester Pulter’s bee in Emblem 53 must have seemed unusual indeed. While the vast majority of her contemporaries praised bees for “their labour and order at home and abroad,” which made them “so admirable, that they may bee a pattern unto men,”
Gloss Note
Source: Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie (Oxford, 1634): 2.
1
Pulter’s bee is greedy, and her “labour” is anything but admirable. Yet comparing Emblem 53 to early modern accounts of bees (both real and metaphorical bees) reveals that Pulter reinforces seventeenth-century knowledge about the characteristics of bees, and that her bee’s deviation from “appropriate” bee-behaviour allows Pulter to emphasize the dangers of solitude, particularly solitude from a community of other women.
Bees were a common metaphor, symbol, or analogy in classical and early modern literature, with Shakespeare’s Henry V and Milton’s Paradise Lost two familiar examples. Indeed, Pulter would not have been able to use bees as a metaphor without contending with the vast scope of bee literature and bee metaphors that had come before her. Of course, this assumes that Pulter had read “bee literature” and was acquainted with honeybees in some fashion. In his reading of Shakespeare on bees, Richard Grinnell confronts a similar question: how much did Shakespeare know about bees? His answer is worth quoting at length: “Shakespeare keeps bees the way any well-read and urbane writer might have been able to—building his metaphors and analogies from books at hand. Even when he moves beyond the classics, for example, in his description of Hal as a beekeeper willing to kill the bees to get the honey, he is clearly working with material that was common knowledge in his day” (850). Beekeeping during the early modern period was also an occupation and even obligation for both men and women. Treatises on caring for bees are often addressed to both sexes, and women feature prevalently in stories about bees, honey, and hives. William Lawson, writing in 1623, states in his treatise on gardening that he “will not account her any of my good Housewives, that wanteth either Bees or skilfulnesse about them.”
Gloss Note
Source: William Lawson, The Country Housewifes Garden. Containing Rules for Hearbs and Seeds of common use, with their times and seasons, when to set and sow them. Together With the Husbandry of Bees, published with secrets very necessary for every Housewife […] (London: Printed for Roger Jackson, 1623): 17.
2
Pulter would certainly not be unusual if she knew something—or even much—about the care and characteristics of honeybees.
Pulter’s bee (in contrast to the industrious and virtuous bees of most of the literature that predates Emblem 53) is greedy and grasping, and her bee’s struggle against confinement causes her exhaustion and death. According to Nicole A. Jacobs, another outlier in early modern bee imagery is John Milton, who compares the devils in Pandemonium to a swarm of bees in Paradise Lost. In her monograph Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony, Jacobs emphasizes the weight of literary tradition that any negative depiction of bees would have to shrug off: “The image of the humming collection [in Paradise Lost] resonates with the early modern reader, trained by tradition to imagine humanity as an orderly hive.”
Gloss Note
Source: Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 123.
3
The same “tradition” and “train[ing]” would have applied to Pulter’s readers, which perhaps explains why, although the snail (with its patient endurance) seems to be the positive exemplar for the reader, the “moral” of the emblem does not urge readers to imitate the snail necessarily. Instead, Pulter advises that we “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (line 52). Indeed, while the bee causes her own unnecessary death in Pulter’s poem, the common literary symbolism of worker bees in the seventeenth century was so overwhelmingly positive that readers must have resisted, even a little, the idea that they should be the greasy snail rather than the “active Amazonian maid” (line 7).
If a honey bee is separate from its colony, it is soon to die. In 1657, beekeeper Samuel Purchas wrote baldly, “one Bee, is no Bee.”
Gloss Note
Source: Purchas, A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects (London, 1657): 16.
4
Joseph Campana quotes from Purchas as well to emphasize the apian–and more general–early modern anxiety with solitude, segments, and fragmentation in the commonwealth. “For bees,” Campana concludes, “singularity is unbearable.”
Gloss Note
Source: Campana, “The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Bryan Reynolds, Paul Cefalu, and Gary Kuchar (New York: Routledge, 2011): 67.
5
Keith Botelho summarizes early modern beekeepers’ attitudes towards individual and collective bees: “early modern bee treatises often spoke of bees in the collective, not necessarily concerned with the individual bee (other than the Queen) but rather with the maintenance of the stock of bees in the hives, of the swarm, of the many.”
Gloss Note
Source: Botelho, “Honey, Wax, and the Dead Bee,” Early Modern Culture 11 (2016): 102.
6
Not only beekeepers, but also early modern writers of fiction or moral instruction generally referred to bees in the plural, and James Howell’s 1660 The Parly of Beasts; or Morphandra Queen of the Inchanted Island is a notable example. In Howell’s dialogues, the characters Morphandra and Pererius speak to a number of animals (who were once human) in turn, beginning with an Otter, then an Ass, an Ape, a Hind, a Mule, a Fox, a Boar, a Wolf, and a Goose. In the first ten sections of the book, the animal interlocutor is singular, but not so in the final dialogue, in which Morphandra and Pererius converse with “a Hive of Bees” (my emphasis), for bees were thought to exist only in a collective. All this is to say that when Pulter’s bee diverts from her voyage back to her hive, she is doing something unusual and potentially deadly: separating herself from the collective that gives her life.
Emblem 53 uses a number of means to create and maintain female community, whether real or imagined. The bee is an “Amazonian maid,” which of course places her in the well-known society of Amazons, but it also reminds readers that bees themselves live in a society that is predominantly female. Christina Luckyj and Naimh J. O’Leary assert that “classical models of segregated female communities could serve as code for political protest.”
Gloss Note
Source: Luckyj and O’Leary, Editor’s Introduction to The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017): 6.
7
Natural models–the model of the beehive–could also serve as such a “code,” especially when Pulter compares the bee and snail to Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes. The four men are associated with the military, which may remind readers of the military connotations of bees in early modern England. Butler, for instance, writes that “Besides their Soveraign, the Bees have also subordinate Governours and Leaders, not unfitly resembling Captains and Colonels of Soldiers.
Gloss Note
Source: Butler, 6.
8
With her references to women and military might, Pulter may be subtly gesturing towards a political protest, one that gives communities of women classical, natural, and even military power.


— Whitney Sperrazza
1
53When fair Aurora drest with Raidient Light
When fair
Gloss Note
goddess of dawn
Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
When
Critical Note
Pulter’s opening reference to “fair Aurora” (Roman goddess of the dawn) initiates the gendered imagery of the poem’s first seven lines, which culminates with Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (line 7). These opening lines, with the Amazon reference as a kind of anchor point, transform the morning garden into a female separatist community—a framing with important implications for how we read the rest of the poem. First, framing the bee’s actions within this context connects the labor of collecting nectar to women’s work, which then prompts us to read Pulter’s later references to poisonous herbs (lines 13–14) and “choice extractions” (line 15) as nods to domestic labor. Second, it links Emblem 53 to other writings in which Pulter explores the intimacies that develop within communities of women, most notably the female friendships throughout her prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda.
fair Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
When fair
Gloss Note
dawn
Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
2
Had triumph’d o’re the Gloomey Shades of Night
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of night—
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of
Critical Note
My editorial decision to add an em-dash here turns lines 3–6 into a clause that expands Pulter’s description of Aurora in lines 1–2 and emphasizes the unique formal structure of Pulter’s “naked emblems” (for more on this, see my headnote). Adding the em-dash marks how the concise description of Aurora waking up in the poem’s first two lines becomes a more expansive illustration of Aurora in lines 3–6, a kind of visual unfolding that nods to the pictura element of the traditional emblem structure. For more on the flexible structure of early modern emblems, see Peter Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (University of Toronto Press, 1979).
night
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of night—
3
When Shee her Virgin beavty first diſcloſes
When she her
Gloss Note
pure
virgin
beauty first discloses,
When she her
Critical Note
Associating Aurora with virginity, Pulter departs from classical tradition in which Aurora is often aggressively sexualized. Pulter retains some of the figure’s fraught sexual history, though, by drawing on conventional blazon imagery, describing Aurora wrapped in a “silver” robe with “roses” ornamenting her “dewy curls.” This description echoes language from earlier poems in the manuscript dedicated to Aurora: To Aurora [1] [Poem 22], To Aurora [2] [Poem 26], and To Aurora [3] [Poem 34]. “To Aurora [3]” is particularly resonant here. In that earlier poem, Aurora “shakes her dewy curls” and fills the flowers—”each gold-enamelled cup”—with “honeydew” (lines 8–9). For more on Pulter’s use of blazon imagery throughout her poems, see Frances E. Dolan’s Exploration, “Hester Pulter and the Blazon in Early Modern England.”
virgin beauty
first
Gloss Note
uncover or expose to view
discloses
,
When she her
Critical Note
Sperrazza points out in her Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 that Pulter unusually but often associates Aurora with virginity. Bees too, during the early modern period, were considered virginal, as Pulter herself emphasizes in To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], lines 10-11, and in Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57] line 5. The perceived virginity of bees also linked them to the Virgin Mary, which Henry Hawkins explains in his 1633 emblem book, Partheneia Sacra. His bee emblem begins with “To Bethlem’s sillie shed, me thinks I see / The Virgin hasten like a busie Bee,” and ends with “She was the Bee, the Hive her Sacred Womb” (Hawkins, Parthenia Sacra [London, 1633]: lines 1-2; 12). Also during the seventeenth century, the newly-elected Pope Urban VIII heralded himself by means of iconographic bees, iconography that John Milton then used to disparage Charles II (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony [New York: Routledge, 2021]: 117). For more on Urban VIII and bees, see Bee Wilson, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (London: John Murray, 2004): 129-31.
virgin beauty
first discloses,
4
Her dewey Curles Stuck full of half blown Roſes
Her dewy curls stuck full of
Gloss Note
half-blossomed
half-blown
roses,
Her dewy curls stuck full of
Gloss Note
half-bloomed, half-blossomed
half-blown
roses,
Her dewy curls stuck full of half-blown roses,
5
Lapt in A Robe of Silver mixt with graie
Gloss Note
wrapped up
Lapped
in a robe of silver mixed with gray,
Lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray,
Gloss Note
The gorgeous clothing and coloration of Aurora are repeated in the later description of the speaker’s flower garden, which so attracts the bee that she neglects her hive.
Lapped in a robe
of silver mixed with gray,
6
Which did prognoſticate a glorious day
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell
prognosticate
a glorious day—
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell, forecast
prognosticate
a glorious day–
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell
prognosticate
a glorious day—
7
Out flew the active Amizonian Maid
Out flew the
Gloss Note
Amazons were legendary female warriors who served a queen; here used figuratively to describe a bee
active Amazonian maid
;
Out flew the
Critical Note

The bee was a familiar subject of early modern emblems, frequently used as a model of ordered government (see Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber [Padua, 1621], emblem 149) or successful, interdependent economy (see Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblemes [London, 1585], pages 200–201). One seventeenth-century compendium on insects, compiled from the writings of several natural historians, including Edward Wotton, Conrad Gesner, and Thomas Moffet, featured a beehive on its frontispiece and described bees as “patterns and precedents of political and economical virtues” (The Theatre of Insects, or Lesser Living Creatures [London, 1658]).

Pulter’s transformation of the bee into an Amazonian figure, however, is more unusual and even a bit contentious. The comparison enhances Pulter’s interrogation of gender in this poem (see my headnote) and connects this emblem to some of the manuscript’s more explicit political poetry.

active Amazonian maid
.
Critical Note
Out of the beehive (also called a skep). At this point in the poem, the bee is behaving exactly as she ought: during the day, bees must fly out of the hive to forage for nectar and pollen. However, Pulter’s bee remains dangerously “out” of the hive as she is enticed by the garden’s beauty. That “Out” is the first word of this line suggests that the bee’s fault is not just endless toil, but also and particularly solitude and estrangement from the community of the hive (See Headnote).
Out
flew the active
Critical Note
Pulter uses the adjective “Amazonian” to describe the bee in The Garden [Poem 12] as well (line 43). In the Amplified Edition of that poem, Frances E. Dolan notes on line 43 that “references to bees as ‘Amazonian’ acknowledged that their queen was female, which was not yet widely recognized.” While arguments about the sex of the ruling bee remained animated even into the eighteenth century, already in the mid-seventeenth century it would have been difficult to deny that the queen bee was indeed female. The sex of the queen bee was all but established by Charles Butler’s highly influential bee-keeping treatise, The Feminine Monarchy, published in 1609, and again in 1623 and 1634. This is the treatise that almost all later treatises either cited, feted, or challenged. Indeed, Richard R. Prete cites Butler’s text as the turning-point in publications explaining the sex of bees: “Butler’s sound reasoning and empirical observations, in conjunction with the popularity of his book, brought to an end any serious, empirically based debates about the genders of the honey bee castes. From this point on, writers of beekeeping texts would have to recognize these facts, even if only to refute them, if they were to be taken seriously by their audiences.” (“Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Biology, 24.1 (1991), 128). In 1637, therefore, Richard Remnant’s A Discourse or Historie of Bees spends considerable attention on the implication of bees as females. Moreover, in the first bee-keeping manual published after the English Civil War, Samuel Purchas in his 1657 A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects calls the hive “an Amazonian commonwealth” (London, 33). In 1712, Joseph Warder appeals to a metaphor already established when he entitles his bee-keeping treatise The True Amazons: Or The Monarchy of Bees. Pulter is thus hardly bucking tradition or “scientific” knowledge when she calls her bee an “Amazonian maid.”
Amazonian maid
;
8
The Hills and Dales, not onely Shee Surveyd
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
9
But out of every Gold
Physical Note
“E” and “e” appear written over earlier “i”s
Enameld
Cup
But out of every gold-enamelled cup
But out of every
Gloss Note
flowers
gold-enamelled cup
But out of every
Gloss Note
Gold-colored flower
gold-enamelled cup
10
Her Mornings draught of Nectar Shee did Sup
Her morning’s draft of nectar she did sup.
Her morning’s
Gloss Note
a quantity drawn or extracted
draft
of nectar she did sup.
Her morning’s draft of nectar she did
Gloss Note
drink
sup
.
11
Nay where the Toad, and Spider poyſons found
Nay, where the toad and spider’s poison found,
Nay, where the toad and spider poisons found,
Nay, where the toad and spider’s poison found
12
Mell Shee Extracts, for this ^her Wisdome’s Crownd
Gloss Note
honey
Mell
she extracts;
Gloss Note
Bees were reputed to be able to turn poisons into honey.
for this her wisdom’s crowned
.
Gloss Note
honey
Mell
she extracts; for this
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “for this ^her wisdome’s crownd”
her wisdom’s
crowned.
Gloss Note
Honey
Critical Note
The image of a bee extracting honey while other creatures extracted poisons from the same plant is a common emblematic one. Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, for instance, the first emblem book published in English, contains the emblem entitled “Vita, aut morti.” Under the picture of a bee and a spider on a flower, the epigram reads, “Within one flower, two contraries remaine, / For proofe behoulde, the spider, and the bee, / One poison suckes, the bee doth honie draine: / The Scripture soe, hath two effects we see: / Unto the bad, it is a sworde that slaies, / Unto the good, a shielde in ghostlie fraies” (Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes [Leiden: 1586]: 51). Whitney borrows the pictura (and the sentiment of the poem and moral) from Hadrianus Junius’s Emblemata (1565).
Mell
she extracts; for this her
Critical Note
Bees were commonly praised for their intelligence, labour, and loyalty. John Thorley’s 1744 bee treatise Melissologia, for instance, hardly breaks new ground when it summarizes and admires the bees’ “loyalty” (7), “concord and unity” (12), “magnanimity or courage” (15), “labour and industry” (23), “patience and innocency” (27), “temperance and sobriety” (29), “chastity” (30), “neatness and decency” (31), “sympathy, and mutual assistance” (32), “sagacity and prudence” (33), and “vigilance and watchfulness” (Thorley, Melissologia. Or, The Female Monarchy [London, 1744]: 33). Indeed, “Bees themselves excell all other creatures … in Art, Wisdom, or Foresight, Industry, Valour and Loyalty,” Moses Rusden writes in 1679 (Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees [London, 1679]: 9). In particular, the fact that bees make honey and wax—both useful to humans—makes them especially prized or “crowned,” and thus the fertile bee in the hive is called a “queen.” “Her wisdom’s crowned,” however, cannot refer to only one singular bee, for a bee cannot make honey in isolation. If a bee is prized because it extracts honey from plants, the honor must go to the entire hive, the site of honey production.
wisdom’s crowned
.
13
On
Physical Note
“t” in different hand from main scribe
Nightſhade
, Henbane, Helliſh Acconite
On nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite,
On nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite,
On
Gloss Note
All poisonous plants, including opium and hemlock in the following line.
nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite
,
14
On Opium, Hemlock, Shee doth Safely lite
On opium,
Gloss Note
This plant, like opium and the three in the previous line, are all poisonous.
hemlock
she doth safely
Gloss Note
land
light
.
On opium, hemlock she doth
Critical Note
All five plants catalogued in these lines are poisonous, but their pollen is not. Consequently, the bee can safely extract pollen but the toad and spider of line 11 (eating the plants’ leaves, flowers, or stems) find “poisons.” Pulter may have gained knowledge of these plants from direct, hands-on experience. There were also several popular herbals circulating by the time she was writing, including John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597) and Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician Enlarged (London, 1653). The British Library offers a useful peek at Gerard’s Herbal, along with some context on Shakespeare’s use of “henbane” in Hamlet and “nightshade” in Romeo and Juliet.
safely light
.
On opium, hemlock she doth safely
Gloss Note
alight.
light
.
15
Thus being with choyce Extractions loaded well
Thus being with choice extractions loaded well,
Thus being with
Critical Note
John Milton also uses the verb “extract” to describe the bee’s work in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. Adam calls Eve awake “to mark … how the bee / sits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet” (lines 20–25). The noun “extraction” and its verb form “extract” (line 12) had alchemical, medicinal, and culinary connotations in seventeenth-century use. “To extract” is “to obtain (constituent elements, juices, etc.) from a thing or substance by suction, pressure, distillation, or any chemical or mechanical operation” (“extract, v.4a,” OED Online). As evidence for this particular connotation of “extract,” the Oxford English Dictionary cites Hugh Plat’s The Jewel House of Art and Nature (London, 1594) and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History (London, 1626), two popular early modern scientific texts with which Pulter may have been familiar. Is Pulter also demonstrating her knowledge of early modern herbals, texts that catalogued plants and their medicinal and culinary uses? If so, her uses of “extract” and “extraction” connect to the catalogue of poisonous plants in lines 13–14. For an extended exploration of “human art” in relation to plants, see View But This Tulip (Emblem 40) [Poem 105].
choice extractions
loaded well,
Thus being with choice extractions
Gloss Note
Bees were thought to carry their collected nectar in “bags,” emphasized in a popular seventeenth-century song and poem entitled “The Sweet Bag of the Bee.” The poem/song appears numerous times in the expansive collection English Song 1600-1675: Facsimiles of Twenty-Six Manuscripts and an Edition of the Texts, edited with introductions by Elise Bickford Jorgens. Henry Lawes’ composition of the song appears in Oxford, Ms. Tenbury 1018, sig. 95V. The poem “The Sweet Bag of the Bee” also features in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648). Once a bee is “loaded well,” it must return to its hive to share its bounty with the rest of the bees.
loaded well
,
16
Shee turn’d to flie to her Sexanguler Cell
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
six-sided
sexangular
cell.
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
six-sided; a reference to the comb shapes of a bee hive
sexangular cell
.
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
hexagonal honeycomb
Critical Note
If there is any doubt that the bee of Emblem 53 is a honey bee, line 14 negates that doubt. Solitary bees such as bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, etc. do not make hexagonal honeycomb. The honey bee’s decision to abort her return flight to her hive suddenly separates her from the community to which she belongs.
sexangular cell
.
17
But takeing of my Garden in her way
But
Gloss Note
apprehending
taking of
my garden in her way,
But
Gloss Note
to be caught or captured by; the bee is “taken with” the beauty of the narrator’s garden
taking of

This is our first glimpse of the poem’s narrator, often a much more pervasive presence in Pulter’s poems. In early poems in the manuscript, like Made When I Was Sick, 1647 [Poem 31], the entire poem revolves around the narrator’s experience and thoughts. The sparse, late use of the first-person pronoun here, though, is more typical of Pulter’s emblem poems, a few of which never reference the poet directly. See, for instance, Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86].

It’s worth noting that this first reference to the poet (one of only two in the poem) is also connected to the garden and the all-female community of the poem’s first half. Perhaps even more interesting, the narrator’s garden is the site of the bee’s demise. We learn the story of the bee and the snail in the next few lines and we might even imagine that the poet is a first-hand witness, watching the snail “slid[e]” out of the tulip in the morning while the bee “fainting lie[s]” (line 35).

my garden
in her way,
But
Gloss Note
Taking in
taking of
my garden in her way,
18
Though full before Shee could not chooſe but Stay
Though full before, she could not choose but stay
Though full before, she could not choose but stay
Though
Critical Note
The bee’s “bag” is full, so she would be unable to carry any more nectar or pollen, even if she finds some in the speaker’s alluring garden. The bee’s further investigation of the garden, therefore, is futile.
full before
, she could not choose but stay
19
To See the
Physical Note
insertion in different hand from main scribe
\curious \
Ouricolas
Physical Note
double strike-through
curious
drest
To see the
Gloss Note
clever, elaborately made
curious
Gloss Note
type of flower
auriculas
dressed
To see the
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “to see the \curious \ ouricolas curious drest”
curious
Gloss Note
primula auricula; also known as mountain cowslip or bear’s ear (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
auriculas
dressed
To see the curious
Gloss Note
A type of primrose, a greatly prized and showy flower.
auriculas
dressed
20
More variously then Iris dewey breast
More variously than
Gloss Note
goddess of the rainbow, also a type of flower
Iris’s
dewy breast.
More variously than
Gloss Note
In Greek mythology, Iris is messenger of the gods and a personification of the rainbow. Iris is also another type of flower. In contemporary botany, iris is a genus of many species of flowering plants like the iris sibirica (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
Iris’s
dewy breast.
More variously than
Gloss Note
type of flower, also a messenger goddess with the rainbow as her emblem. The auriculas, therefore, which are usually yellow, are here rainbow-hued.
Iris’s
dewy breast.
21
Then were my Tulips painted in there Pride
Then were my tulips painted in their pride,
Then were my
Critical Note
The tulip has special significance in Pulter’s emblem. She not only makes the center of this flower the location for her fable of the bee and snail (as we’re about to see); she also describes the tulip with language that evokes the “tulipmania” of the early seventeenth century: “painted” (here and again in line 27) and “gilded” (line 34). From the 1580’s to the mid-1630’s, tulips were a prized and elusive commodity, famous in aristocratic gardens and still life paintings, but notoriously difficult to study and classify given their infinite variety. In John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597), Gerard describes the tulips as “a strange and foreign flower” and emphasizes that it is impossible to catalogue all of its varieties: “each new yeare bringeth forth new plants of sundry colours, not before seene” ([London, 1597], Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online, pages 137–140). The craze surrounding the tulip culminated in the Dutch “tulipmania” of the 1630’s, when the price of tulip bulbs inflated drastically (the most expensive specimens went for around 5,000 guilders). We might speculate that Pulter has this recent cultural phenomenon in mind when she describes the tulips first as luxurious garden accessories (“painted in their pride”) and then as the bee’s “painted prison.” See this poem’s Curation (Pulter’s Garden) for examples of Gerard’s tulip woodcuts and Dutch still life paintings featuring the flower. For more on the tulip in early modern English contexts, see Anna Pavord’s The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad (Bloomsbury, 1999), especially chapter 3.
tulips painted
in their pride,
Then were my
Critical Note
John Parkinson writes in his 1629 gardening treatise, “There are not only divers kindes of Tulipas, but sundry diversities of colours in them, found out in these later dayes by many the [sic] searchers of natures varieties, which have not formerly been observed: our age being more delighted in the search, curiosity, and rarieites of these pleasant delights, then [sic] any age I thinke before. But indeede, this flower, above many other, deserves his true commendations and acceptance with all lovers of these beauties, both for the stately aspect, and for the admirable varietie of colours, that daily doe arise in them, farre beyond all other plants that grow” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris [London, 1629]: 45). Moreover, as Benedict S. Robinson identifies, tulips were first exported from Turkey to Europe in the late sixteenth century, and, he argues, “the tulip could also be taken to embody an ‘orientalizing’ of English tastes, an errant desire for exotic plants that rooted itself right into the soil” (Robinson, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 [2009]: 96). The bee’s attraction to the tulip, then, demonstrates her “covetousness,” but also her relatable, commonplace, and even human interest in the beautiful and exotic flower.
tulips
painted in their pride,
22
Which when this covetous Inſect Eſpi’de
Which, when this covetous insect espied,
Which, when this
Gloss Note
greedy
covetous
insect espied,
Which, when this
Critical Note
The reader’s suspicion that Pulter’s bee is not the moral exemplar bees usually are in seventeenth-century poetry is here confirmed. While bees were usually considered selfless and self-sacrificing –Moses Rusden praises their “loyalty,” for example—Pulter’s bee is greedy. Another notable example of a “bad bee” appears in John Bunyan’s 1686 A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes For Children, which is filled with moral lessons in the form of naked emblems, not unlike the naked emblems Pulter employs. Bunyan’s emblem “Upon the Bee” starts innocuously enough: “The Bee goes out and Honey home doth bring; / And some who seek that Hony find a sting. / [N]ow wouldst thou have the Hony and be free / [Fr]om stinging; in the first place kill the Bee” (10). The following “Comparison” is startling, especially in contrast to the nigh-universal praise afforded the bee by Bunyan’s contemporaries: “This Bee an Emblem truly is of sin / Whose Sweet unto a many death hath been. / [N]ow would’st have Sweet from sin, and yet not dye, / [D]o thou in the first place mortifie” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 10).
covetous insect
Gloss Note
saw
espied
,
23
To carry home her wealth Shee’d not ye power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
24
Till Shee had Search’d the Sweets of every fflower
Till she had searched the sweets of every flower.
Till she had searched the sweets of every flower.
Till
Critical Note
At this point the bee is unable to return home not because she’s overladen with “nectar,” but because she covetously wants to explore every flower before flying back to the hive. “She’d not the power” to resist the temptation of the beckoning garden, and her greedy appetite leads to a rejection of home and companionship.
she had searched the sweets of every flower
.
the

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Facsimile Image Placeholder
25
The Sun, from home, all, Influence Receives
The sun,
Gloss Note
“whom” is spelled as “home” in the manuscript; all are influenced by the sun
from whom all influence receives
,
The sun, from whom all influence receives,
The sun, from whom
Gloss Note
all things
all
Gloss Note
inflowing power, usually from an astral, divine, or secret force.
influence
receives,
26
Bid them decline, The Tulip cloſ’d her Leaves
Bids them
Gloss Note
bend down, droop
decline
; the tulip closed her
Gloss Note
petals
leaves
,
Bid
Gloss Note
the flowers
them
decline; the tulip closed her leaves,
Bids them decline; the tulip closed her leaves,
27
And in that painted Priſon Shut the Bee
And in that painted prison shut the bee,
And in that painted prison shut the bee.
And in that
Gloss Note
“Painted” confirms the exotic and unnatural allure of the tulip, and the bee’s foolishness in yielding to that allure.
painted prison
shut the bee,
28
With her A Snail, who Slid about to See
Gloss Note
and with
With
her a snail, who slid about (to see
With her a
Critical Note
The third central character in Pulter’s emblem, the snail presented a unique sexual conundrum because of its shell, so early moderns hypothesized that the snail could spontaneously reproduce: “Thou thine own daughter then, and sire, / that son and mother art entire” (Richard Lovelace, “The Snail”). In medieval and early modern art, the snail was often linked to the Virgin Mary as a symbol of virginity. Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation, for example, includes a snail in the painting’s foreground, positioned directly in front of Mary as she receives the news of her immaculate conception. Geneticist Steve Jones offers a useful account of the history of the snail as a symbol of “sex, age, and death” in his lecture, “Snails in Art and the Art of Snails” (2014), available online through the Museum of London. By the time Pulter was writing, the snail was increasingly cited in debates about the role of reproduction in the plant and animal worlds. Several decades after Pulter’s death in 1678, Dutch anatomist Jan Swammerdam proved that snails were hermaphrodites (Bybel der Natuure, Leiden, 1737). Before that point, as historian of science Domenico Bertolini Meli outlines, hermaphrodites were seen to be rare occurrences, even monsters. Swammerdam’s findings became the basis for arguments on the natural occurrence of hermaphrodites in nature (Meli, “Of Snails and Horsetails: Anatomical Empiricism in the Early Modern Period,” Early Science and Medicine 18.4/5 (2013): 435–452).
snail
, who slid about to see
With her a snail, who slid about (to see
29
Where to get out upon her Unctious brest
Where to get out) upon her
Gloss Note
greasy
unctuous
breast;
Where to get out upon her
Gloss Note
oily, greasy
unctuous
breast;
Where to get out) upon her
Gloss Note
oily
unctuous
breast;
30
But Seeing noe hope, Shee laid her down to rest
But seeing no hope, she laid
Gloss Note
herself
her
down to rest,
But seeing no hope, she laid her down to rest,
But seeing no hope, she laid
Gloss Note
herself
her
down to rest,
31
Whilst the Angrie Bee
Physical Note
double strike-through
doth
Physical Note
in different hand from main scribe
\did \
Such A ffluttring Keep
Whilst the angry bee did such a flutt’ring
Gloss Note
make
keep
,
Whilst the angry bee
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “bee doth \did \ such a”
did
such a flutt’ring keep,
Whilst the
Gloss Note
Anger is an emotion rarely ascribed to bees during the early modern period. Bees are often called militant, watchful, agitated, or resourceful (all in defense of their hive), but not angry.
angry
bee did such a flutt’ring keep,
32
Shee nor her fellow Priſner could not Sleep
Gloss Note
Neither she
She
nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
She nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
She nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
33
But Night being past, Delia diffuſ’d his Rais
But night being past,
Gloss Note
here, Apollo, the sun god (named because he was from the island of Delos, usually called Delius)
Delia
diffused his rays;
But night being past,
Critical Note
Pulter’s use of “Delia,” an unusual and distinctly feminized name for Apollo, the Greek sun god born on the island of Delos, marks a conscious shift from her use of “Aurora,” goddess of the dawn, at the start of the poem. As Victoria Burke notes in her Amplified Edition of Aurora [1] [Poem 3], the feminized Delia, as opposed to Delius, could be a transcription error, but Pulter does use Delia to refer to Apollo in several other poems, including The Eclipse [Poem 1] and The Garden, or the Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. Given this emblem’s interrogation of gender, we might read Pulter’s slippage here as an invitation. As the female bee (“the active Amazonian maid”) dies and the poem shifts to a cluster of male figures in its closing lines, is Pulter’s switch from Aurora to Delia (and, perhaps, from Delius to Delia) meant to both mark and trouble this transition?
Delia
Gloss Note
spread out
diffused
his rays;
But night being past,
Critical Note
“Delia” is Apollo, the sun god, so named for Delos, his island birthplace. “Delia” seems to be a particularly feminine epithet for Apollo, who is yet clearly gendered male. Indeed, Apollo is the first male character in the poem; Aurora, the bee, the tulip, and the snail are all female. While the feminine Aurora brought life and beauty to the world, Apollo’s “rays” reveal exhaustion and death for the bee.
Delia
diffused his rays;
34
The Tulip then her gilded Leaves diſplais
The tulip then her gilded leaves displays.
The tulip then her
Gloss Note
adorned or embellished; a term most often associated with artificial objects
gilded
leaves displays.
The tulip then her gilded leaves displays.
35
Out Slid the Snail, the Bee did fainting lie
Out slid the snail; the bee did fainting lie,
Out slid the snail; the bee did fainting lie,
Critical Note
“Out slid” mirrors “Out flew” of line 7. Pulter’s diction makes the bee far more attractive than the snail. Where the bee “flew,” the snail “slid.” While the bee is “active,” the snail is “unctuous.” Pulter may be playing up the positive characteristics of the bee to acknowledge its commonplace association with wisdom, virtue, etc. If Pulter’s readers—because of traditional representations and Pulter’s appealing depiction—sympathize with the bee, perhaps they are more likely to take personally the warnings of Emblem 53.
Out slid
the
Critical Note
Again, Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls provides helpful context for Pulter’s instructive snail. His emblem “Upon the Snail” is notably lengthier and more intimate than his scathing indictment of the bee: “She goes but softly, but she goeth sure, / She stumbles not, as stronger Creatures do: / Her Journeys shorter, so she may endure, / Better than they which do much further go. / She makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on / The Flow’r or Herb, appointed for her food: / The which she quietly doth feed upon, / While others range, and gare, but find no good. / And tho she doth but very softly go, / How ever ’tis not fast, nor slow, but sure; / And certainly they that do travel so, / The prize they do aim at, they do procure” (63-64). The subsequent “Comparison” is equally encouraging: “Although they seem not much to stire, less go, / For Christ that hunger, or from Wrath, that flee; / Yet what they seek for, quickly thy come to, / Tho it doth seem the farthest off to be. / One Act of Faith doth bring them to that Flow’r, / They so long for, that they may eat and live; / Which to attain is not in others Pow’r / Tho for it a King’s Ransom they would give. / Then let none faint, nor be at all dismaid, / That Life by Christ do seek, they shall not fail / To have it, let them nothing be afraid; / The Herb, and Flow’r is eaten by the Snail” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 64). George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moral also praises the snail for its patience and tenacity. Wither writes in Book 1, Emblem 11: “If they would contemplate the slow-pac’d Snaile; / Or, this our Hieroglyphicke looke into: / For, thence we learne, that Perseverance brings / Large Workes to end, though slowly they creep on; / And, that Continuance perfects many things, / Which seeme, at first, unlikely to be done” (Wither, A Collection of Emblems [London: 1635]: 11). Pulter’s snail then, unlike her bee, aligns with seventeenth-century emblematics.
snail
; the bee did fainting lie
36
And thus with Beating of her Self did die
And thus with beating of herself did die.
And thus with beating of herself did die.
And thus with
Critical Note
beating her wings, also by herself. The phrase emphasizes the bee’s disordered actions in at least two senses: first, the bee should never have been by herself at night. When she should have returned to the community of the hive to share her nectar with her sisters, she buzzed off by herself to explore the tulip greedily. Second, when the bee finds herself in another, albeit weaker, female community—she, the tulip, and the snail are all gendered female in the poem—she does not function as a helpful part of that group either. Of course, the companionship of the tulip and the snail is a pale imitation of the familiar and ordered security of the hive. Yet the tulip and snail offer some familiar community: the bee is enclosed by the tulip as she would be enclosed by the hive, and she has a “sister” in the snail. Rather than accept the security of the tulip and the company of the snail, she beats her wings by herself, causing both her death by exhaustion, and also a sleepless night for the snail.
beating of herself
did die.
37
Then let impatient Spirits here but See
Then let impatient spirits here but see
Then let impatient spirits here but see
Then let impatient
Gloss Note
souls; people
spirits
Gloss Note
in this emblem
here
but see
38
What ’tis to Struggle with their destinie
What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.
Critical Note
“Then let impatient spirits here but see / What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.” The first of the poem’s three possible mottoes. Pulter uses the fable of the snail, tulip, and bee to offer a lesson in struggling against destiny. The “impatient” bee struggles against her “painted prison” (line 27), while the patient snail “see[s] no hope” and “lay[s] … down to rest” (line 30). In the poem’s final motto, Pulter reminds us of the snail, tulip, and bee fable (“if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” [lines 51–52]), but the lessons of the two mottoes are slightly different—enough to invite some critical thinking on the part of Pulter’s reader. This motto focuses on destiny, while the poem’s final motto foregrounds liberty. Who are the “impatient spirits” Pulter addresses with this lesson? Who is the “you” of the final motto’s direct address?
What ’tis to struggle with their destiny
.
What ’tis to struggle
Gloss Note
against
with
their destiny.
39
Soe Stout Byrone in Priſon was inrag’d
So
Gloss Note
proud, arrogant
stout
Gloss Note
Charles de Gontant, duc de Biron; a celebrated sixteenth-century French soldier famed for his overweening pride and eventually executed for treason; in George Chapman’s play about him, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Biron’s sword is confiscated by the king.
Biron
in prison was enraged,
So
Gloss Note
proud, haughty
stout
Critical Note

This comparison starts Pulter’s catalogue of male military leaders, rulers, and thinkers—four in total by the poem’s end. As I noted in my headnote, this cast of characters marks a significant gender shift from the female-centric opening of the poem. But this phrase is also formally noteworthy. Rather than using just one or two comparisons to illustrate her point, Pulter here offers an extensive catalogue of examples: “so stout Biron” (line 39), “when Belisarius” (line 41), “so miscre’nt Bajazeth” (line 43), and “when wise Callisthenes” (line 47). The anaphoric “so’s” and “when’s” of these final lines, very typical of Pulter’s emblems, signal her strategic accumulation of these examples. Again, how might Pulter be using her poems to explore how poetic language signifies? See my headnote for more on this question.

Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, was a sixteenth-century French military leader eventually involved in conspiracies against the French crown. He was jailed and beheaded for treason in 1602. Alice Eardley cites George Chapman’s play, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France (1608) as one possible source for Pulter’s anecdote here. Biron was “notorious for his arrogance,” Eardley notes, and in Chapman’s play his sword is removed from him, “treatment he vigorously resists.” See Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, Ed. Alice Eardley, (Toronto: Iter, 2014), 263 n.513.

Biron
in prison was enraged,
So stout
Critical Note
Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes, all identified in the Elemental Edition of the poem, are exemplars of human responses to imprisonment and hardship; Biron and Bajazeth react as does the bee, and Belisarius and Callisthenes demonstrate the patience of the snail. The four men are particularly apropos comparisons to the bee because all of them are subordinates to a master. Honeybees, both now and in the seventeenth century, are communal creatures, which Samuel Purchas emphasizes when he writes “una Apis, nulla Apis, one Bee is no Bee” (16). He drives home the point: “A Bee, like a man cannot live alone, if shee be alone, shee dies” (17). The very fact that the bee of Pulter’s poem is an individual apart from the hive puts her in a position of rebellion and danger. In this case, the bee, tulip, and snail are subordinate to the “influence” of the sun, just as Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes were subject to the rulings (or whims) of their masters.
Biron
in prison was enraged,
40
Knowing his King was to his Sword ingag’d
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
41
When Bellizarus by A dog was led
When
Gloss Note
successful general of sixth-century Roman emperor Justinian, later accused of conspiracy; reputedly, his eyes were put out and he ended his life as a beggar.
Belisarius
by a dog was led,
When
Gloss Note
Belisarius was a famous military leader of the Byzantine Empire. Pulter here references the apocryphal story that Justinian ordered Belisarius’s eyes put out and that Belisarius became a beggar at the gates of Rome. Looking forward a bit beyond Pulter’s lifetime, Belisarius’s story was especially popular by the end of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Jean-François Marmontel’s Bélisaire: A Novel (1767), Margaretta Faugères’s closet drama, Belisarius: A Tragedy (1795), and Jacques-Louis David’s painting, “Belisarius Begging for Alms” (1780).
Belisarius
by a dog was led,
When Belisarius by a dog was led,
42
Being blind hee patiently did beg his Bread
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
43
Soe miſcre’nt Bajazet did Shew his Rage
So
Gloss Note
villainous
miscre’nt
Gloss Note
fourteenth-century Turkish Emperor captured in war by Tamburlaine (the “proud Tartar”); in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine, Bajazeth kills himself on the bars of his prison.
Bajazeth
did show his rage
So
Gloss Note
an abbreviation of “miscreant”; heretical or pagan, but also villainous
miscre’nt
Critical Note
In Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s poems, she cites Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590) as a possible source for Pulter’s reference to the Turkish emperor Bajazeth. In Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth and keeps him in a cage, taking him out only to serve as Tamburlaine’s footstool. After a lengthy imprisonment, Bajazeth kills himself by smashing his head against the bars of his cage. See Eardley (ed.), Poems, 263 n.516.
Bajazeth
did show his rage
So miscre’nt Bajazeth did show his rage
44
When that proud Tarter put him in A Cage
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
45
Scorning to bee A footstool to his Pride
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
46
Hee daſh’d his Curſed Brains about & died
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
47
When wiſe Calistines uſ’d with greater Scorn
When wise
Gloss Note
historian for Alexander the Great, reported by some to have been dismembered and displayed in a cage by Alexander in retribution for his criticisms; see Justin (Marcus Justinius), The History of Justin, Taken Out of the Four and Forty Books of Trogus Pompeius (London, 1654), p. 239.
Callisthenes
, used with greater scorn,
When wise
Gloss Note
Callisthenes was a Greek historian, eventually the official historian of Alexander the Great until he was accused of plotting against Alexander. There are several different accounts of his death. Pulter seems to be referencing the version from Ptolemy in which Callisthenes is tortured and hanged in an iron cage.
Callisthenes
, used with greater scorn,
When wise Callisthenes, used with greater scorn,
48
Tyrannically mangled Soe was Born
Tyrannically mangled,
Gloss Note
so it
so
was
Gloss Note
endured
borne
,
Tyrannically mangled, so was borne,
Tyrannically mangled, so was borne,
hee

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49
Hee being unmov’d Shew’d his Philoſophy
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
50
T’is Valianter by far to live then die
’Tis valianter by far to live than die.
Critical Note
The second of the poem’s three mottoes. This message seems specific to Pulter’s lines on Callisthenes, but the connection is puzzling given Callisthenes’s death in prison, without liberty. Is Pulter drawing our attention to the possible incongruities between her anecdotes and their concluding mottos? Or, perhaps, this motto becomes a thread for the poem’s broader message of stoic endurance: be patient and choose life.
’Tis valianter by far to live than die
.
’Tis valianter by far to live than die.
51
Then if noe hope
Physical Note
imperfectly erased ascender follows
of
Liberty you See
Then if no hope of liberty you see
Then if no hope of liberty you see,
Then if no hope of liberty
Critical Note
To whom is Pulter writing here? Nicole A. Jacobs identifies Pulter’s primary audience for her manuscript as her daughters (133), although Pulter appears to have imagined a future, more general readership as well (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 132). Indeed, all people could easily be tempted to behave as the “covetous” bee, “for it may well bee said, he is not humane, that is not allured with [herbs and flowers]” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (London, 1629): sig**3V). Yet if Emblem 53, like The Invitation into the Country, 1647 [Poem 2], A Dialogue Between Two Sisters [Poem 56], and To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter [Poem 38] is written expressly to Pulter’s daughters, the poem’s emphasis on community—and female community at that—becomes all the more pointed. Why does the bee die? Because it was alone. “Come, my dear children, to this lonely place,” Pulter begins “To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield.” “An Invitation into the Country, 1647” opens in a similar vein: “Dear daughters, come, make haste away.”Finally, “A Dialogue Between Two Sisters” concludes with the sisters’ resolve to “go to our sad mother: she’s alone” (line 54). The appropriate response for female grief is therefore female community. Pulter, however, ups the ante in Emblem 53: separation from female community results not just in grief, but in death.
you
see
52
Think on the Snail, the Tulip and the
Physical Note
remainder of page blank, as is reverse
Bee
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.
Critical Note
“Then if no hope of liberty you see, / Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.” The final of the poem’s three mottoes. Pointing us back to the emblem’s central fable, Pulter’s final lines explicitly mark the snail, tulip, and bee story as a political allegory about liberty, resistance, and stoic endurance. But what of the poem’s complex gender politics? Where do they fit within such an allegory, particularly one written by a Royalist female poet at the height of the English Civil Wars? To explore further the intersections of gender and English Civil War politics, see Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 4.
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee
.
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.
X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition B

 Editorial note

This Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 maintains the punctuation and spelling of the Elemental Edition, and places the poem in the context of its contemporary emblem books and bee-keeping treatises.

 Headnote

To most seventeenth-century readers, Hester Pulter’s bee in Emblem 53 must have seemed unusual indeed. While the vast majority of her contemporaries praised bees for “their labour and order at home and abroad,” which made them “so admirable, that they may bee a pattern unto men,”
Gloss Note
Source: Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie (Oxford, 1634): 2.
1
Pulter’s bee is greedy, and her “labour” is anything but admirable. Yet comparing Emblem 53 to early modern accounts of bees (both real and metaphorical bees) reveals that Pulter reinforces seventeenth-century knowledge about the characteristics of bees, and that her bee’s deviation from “appropriate” bee-behaviour allows Pulter to emphasize the dangers of solitude, particularly solitude from a community of other women.
Bees were a common metaphor, symbol, or analogy in classical and early modern literature, with Shakespeare’s Henry V and Milton’s Paradise Lost two familiar examples. Indeed, Pulter would not have been able to use bees as a metaphor without contending with the vast scope of bee literature and bee metaphors that had come before her. Of course, this assumes that Pulter had read “bee literature” and was acquainted with honeybees in some fashion. In his reading of Shakespeare on bees, Richard Grinnell confronts a similar question: how much did Shakespeare know about bees? His answer is worth quoting at length: “Shakespeare keeps bees the way any well-read and urbane writer might have been able to—building his metaphors and analogies from books at hand. Even when he moves beyond the classics, for example, in his description of Hal as a beekeeper willing to kill the bees to get the honey, he is clearly working with material that was common knowledge in his day” (850). Beekeeping during the early modern period was also an occupation and even obligation for both men and women. Treatises on caring for bees are often addressed to both sexes, and women feature prevalently in stories about bees, honey, and hives. William Lawson, writing in 1623, states in his treatise on gardening that he “will not account her any of my good Housewives, that wanteth either Bees or skilfulnesse about them.”
Gloss Note
Source: William Lawson, The Country Housewifes Garden. Containing Rules for Hearbs and Seeds of common use, with their times and seasons, when to set and sow them. Together With the Husbandry of Bees, published with secrets very necessary for every Housewife […] (London: Printed for Roger Jackson, 1623): 17.
2
Pulter would certainly not be unusual if she knew something—or even much—about the care and characteristics of honeybees.
Pulter’s bee (in contrast to the industrious and virtuous bees of most of the literature that predates Emblem 53) is greedy and grasping, and her bee’s struggle against confinement causes her exhaustion and death. According to Nicole A. Jacobs, another outlier in early modern bee imagery is John Milton, who compares the devils in Pandemonium to a swarm of bees in Paradise Lost. In her monograph Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony, Jacobs emphasizes the weight of literary tradition that any negative depiction of bees would have to shrug off: “The image of the humming collection [in Paradise Lost] resonates with the early modern reader, trained by tradition to imagine humanity as an orderly hive.”
Gloss Note
Source: Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 123.
3
The same “tradition” and “train[ing]” would have applied to Pulter’s readers, which perhaps explains why, although the snail (with its patient endurance) seems to be the positive exemplar for the reader, the “moral” of the emblem does not urge readers to imitate the snail necessarily. Instead, Pulter advises that we “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (line 52). Indeed, while the bee causes her own unnecessary death in Pulter’s poem, the common literary symbolism of worker bees in the seventeenth century was so overwhelmingly positive that readers must have resisted, even a little, the idea that they should be the greasy snail rather than the “active Amazonian maid” (line 7).
If a honey bee is separate from its colony, it is soon to die. In 1657, beekeeper Samuel Purchas wrote baldly, “one Bee, is no Bee.”
Gloss Note
Source: Purchas, A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects (London, 1657): 16.
4
Joseph Campana quotes from Purchas as well to emphasize the apian–and more general–early modern anxiety with solitude, segments, and fragmentation in the commonwealth. “For bees,” Campana concludes, “singularity is unbearable.”
Gloss Note
Source: Campana, “The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Bryan Reynolds, Paul Cefalu, and Gary Kuchar (New York: Routledge, 2011): 67.
5
Keith Botelho summarizes early modern beekeepers’ attitudes towards individual and collective bees: “early modern bee treatises often spoke of bees in the collective, not necessarily concerned with the individual bee (other than the Queen) but rather with the maintenance of the stock of bees in the hives, of the swarm, of the many.”
Gloss Note
Source: Botelho, “Honey, Wax, and the Dead Bee,” Early Modern Culture 11 (2016): 102.
6
Not only beekeepers, but also early modern writers of fiction or moral instruction generally referred to bees in the plural, and James Howell’s 1660 The Parly of Beasts; or Morphandra Queen of the Inchanted Island is a notable example. In Howell’s dialogues, the characters Morphandra and Pererius speak to a number of animals (who were once human) in turn, beginning with an Otter, then an Ass, an Ape, a Hind, a Mule, a Fox, a Boar, a Wolf, and a Goose. In the first ten sections of the book, the animal interlocutor is singular, but not so in the final dialogue, in which Morphandra and Pererius converse with “a Hive of Bees” (my emphasis), for bees were thought to exist only in a collective. All this is to say that when Pulter’s bee diverts from her voyage back to her hive, she is doing something unusual and potentially deadly: separating herself from the collective that gives her life.
Emblem 53 uses a number of means to create and maintain female community, whether real or imagined. The bee is an “Amazonian maid,” which of course places her in the well-known society of Amazons, but it also reminds readers that bees themselves live in a society that is predominantly female. Christina Luckyj and Naimh J. O’Leary assert that “classical models of segregated female communities could serve as code for political protest.”
Gloss Note
Source: Luckyj and O’Leary, Editor’s Introduction to The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017): 6.
7
Natural models–the model of the beehive–could also serve as such a “code,” especially when Pulter compares the bee and snail to Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes. The four men are associated with the military, which may remind readers of the military connotations of bees in early modern England. Butler, for instance, writes that “Besides their Soveraign, the Bees have also subordinate Governours and Leaders, not unfitly resembling Captains and Colonels of Soldiers.
Gloss Note
Source: Butler, 6.
8
With her references to women and military might, Pulter may be subtly gesturing towards a political protest, one that gives communities of women classical, natural, and even military power.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

dawn
Line number 3

 Critical note

Sperrazza points out in her Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 that Pulter unusually but often associates Aurora with virginity. Bees too, during the early modern period, were considered virginal, as Pulter herself emphasizes in To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], lines 10-11, and in Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57] line 5. The perceived virginity of bees also linked them to the Virgin Mary, which Henry Hawkins explains in his 1633 emblem book, Partheneia Sacra. His bee emblem begins with “To Bethlem’s sillie shed, me thinks I see / The Virgin hasten like a busie Bee,” and ends with “She was the Bee, the Hive her Sacred Womb” (Hawkins, Parthenia Sacra [London, 1633]: lines 1-2; 12). Also during the seventeenth century, the newly-elected Pope Urban VIII heralded himself by means of iconographic bees, iconography that John Milton then used to disparage Charles II (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony [New York: Routledge, 2021]: 117). For more on Urban VIII and bees, see Bee Wilson, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (London: John Murray, 2004): 129-31.
Line number 5

 Gloss note

The gorgeous clothing and coloration of Aurora are repeated in the later description of the speaker’s flower garden, which so attracts the bee that she neglects her hive.
Line number 6

 Gloss note

foretell
Line number 7

 Critical note

Out of the beehive (also called a skep). At this point in the poem, the bee is behaving exactly as she ought: during the day, bees must fly out of the hive to forage for nectar and pollen. However, Pulter’s bee remains dangerously “out” of the hive as she is enticed by the garden’s beauty. That “Out” is the first word of this line suggests that the bee’s fault is not just endless toil, but also and particularly solitude and estrangement from the community of the hive (See Headnote).
Line number 7

 Critical note

Pulter uses the adjective “Amazonian” to describe the bee in The Garden [Poem 12] as well (line 43). In the Amplified Edition of that poem, Frances E. Dolan notes on line 43 that “references to bees as ‘Amazonian’ acknowledged that their queen was female, which was not yet widely recognized.” While arguments about the sex of the ruling bee remained animated even into the eighteenth century, already in the mid-seventeenth century it would have been difficult to deny that the queen bee was indeed female. The sex of the queen bee was all but established by Charles Butler’s highly influential bee-keeping treatise, The Feminine Monarchy, published in 1609, and again in 1623 and 1634. This is the treatise that almost all later treatises either cited, feted, or challenged. Indeed, Richard R. Prete cites Butler’s text as the turning-point in publications explaining the sex of bees: “Butler’s sound reasoning and empirical observations, in conjunction with the popularity of his book, brought to an end any serious, empirically based debates about the genders of the honey bee castes. From this point on, writers of beekeeping texts would have to recognize these facts, even if only to refute them, if they were to be taken seriously by their audiences.” (“Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Biology, 24.1 (1991), 128). In 1637, therefore, Richard Remnant’s A Discourse or Historie of Bees spends considerable attention on the implication of bees as females. Moreover, in the first bee-keeping manual published after the English Civil War, Samuel Purchas in his 1657 A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects calls the hive “an Amazonian commonwealth” (London, 33). In 1712, Joseph Warder appeals to a metaphor already established when he entitles his bee-keeping treatise The True Amazons: Or The Monarchy of Bees. Pulter is thus hardly bucking tradition or “scientific” knowledge when she calls her bee an “Amazonian maid.”
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Gold-colored flower
Line number 10

 Gloss note

drink
Line number 12

 Gloss note

Honey
Line number 12

 Critical note

The image of a bee extracting honey while other creatures extracted poisons from the same plant is a common emblematic one. Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, for instance, the first emblem book published in English, contains the emblem entitled “Vita, aut morti.” Under the picture of a bee and a spider on a flower, the epigram reads, “Within one flower, two contraries remaine, / For proofe behoulde, the spider, and the bee, / One poison suckes, the bee doth honie draine: / The Scripture soe, hath two effects we see: / Unto the bad, it is a sworde that slaies, / Unto the good, a shielde in ghostlie fraies” (Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes [Leiden: 1586]: 51). Whitney borrows the pictura (and the sentiment of the poem and moral) from Hadrianus Junius’s Emblemata (1565).
Line number 12

 Critical note

Bees were commonly praised for their intelligence, labour, and loyalty. John Thorley’s 1744 bee treatise Melissologia, for instance, hardly breaks new ground when it summarizes and admires the bees’ “loyalty” (7), “concord and unity” (12), “magnanimity or courage” (15), “labour and industry” (23), “patience and innocency” (27), “temperance and sobriety” (29), “chastity” (30), “neatness and decency” (31), “sympathy, and mutual assistance” (32), “sagacity and prudence” (33), and “vigilance and watchfulness” (Thorley, Melissologia. Or, The Female Monarchy [London, 1744]: 33). Indeed, “Bees themselves excell all other creatures … in Art, Wisdom, or Foresight, Industry, Valour and Loyalty,” Moses Rusden writes in 1679 (Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees [London, 1679]: 9). In particular, the fact that bees make honey and wax—both useful to humans—makes them especially prized or “crowned,” and thus the fertile bee in the hive is called a “queen.” “Her wisdom’s crowned,” however, cannot refer to only one singular bee, for a bee cannot make honey in isolation. If a bee is prized because it extracts honey from plants, the honor must go to the entire hive, the site of honey production.
Line number 13

 Gloss note

All poisonous plants, including opium and hemlock in the following line.
Line number 14

 Gloss note

alight.
Line number 15

 Gloss note

Bees were thought to carry their collected nectar in “bags,” emphasized in a popular seventeenth-century song and poem entitled “The Sweet Bag of the Bee.” The poem/song appears numerous times in the expansive collection English Song 1600-1675: Facsimiles of Twenty-Six Manuscripts and an Edition of the Texts, edited with introductions by Elise Bickford Jorgens. Henry Lawes’ composition of the song appears in Oxford, Ms. Tenbury 1018, sig. 95V. The poem “The Sweet Bag of the Bee” also features in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648). Once a bee is “loaded well,” it must return to its hive to share its bounty with the rest of the bees.
Line number 16

 Gloss note

hexagonal honeycomb
Line number 16

 Critical note

If there is any doubt that the bee of Emblem 53 is a honey bee, line 14 negates that doubt. Solitary bees such as bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, etc. do not make hexagonal honeycomb. The honey bee’s decision to abort her return flight to her hive suddenly separates her from the community to which she belongs.
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Taking in
Line number 18

 Critical note

The bee’s “bag” is full, so she would be unable to carry any more nectar or pollen, even if she finds some in the speaker’s alluring garden. The bee’s further investigation of the garden, therefore, is futile.
Line number 19

 Gloss note

A type of primrose, a greatly prized and showy flower.
Line number 20

 Gloss note

type of flower, also a messenger goddess with the rainbow as her emblem. The auriculas, therefore, which are usually yellow, are here rainbow-hued.
Line number 21

 Critical note

John Parkinson writes in his 1629 gardening treatise, “There are not only divers kindes of Tulipas, but sundry diversities of colours in them, found out in these later dayes by many the [sic] searchers of natures varieties, which have not formerly been observed: our age being more delighted in the search, curiosity, and rarieites of these pleasant delights, then [sic] any age I thinke before. But indeede, this flower, above many other, deserves his true commendations and acceptance with all lovers of these beauties, both for the stately aspect, and for the admirable varietie of colours, that daily doe arise in them, farre beyond all other plants that grow” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris [London, 1629]: 45). Moreover, as Benedict S. Robinson identifies, tulips were first exported from Turkey to Europe in the late sixteenth century, and, he argues, “the tulip could also be taken to embody an ‘orientalizing’ of English tastes, an errant desire for exotic plants that rooted itself right into the soil” (Robinson, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 [2009]: 96). The bee’s attraction to the tulip, then, demonstrates her “covetousness,” but also her relatable, commonplace, and even human interest in the beautiful and exotic flower.
Line number 22

 Critical note

The reader’s suspicion that Pulter’s bee is not the moral exemplar bees usually are in seventeenth-century poetry is here confirmed. While bees were usually considered selfless and self-sacrificing –Moses Rusden praises their “loyalty,” for example—Pulter’s bee is greedy. Another notable example of a “bad bee” appears in John Bunyan’s 1686 A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes For Children, which is filled with moral lessons in the form of naked emblems, not unlike the naked emblems Pulter employs. Bunyan’s emblem “Upon the Bee” starts innocuously enough: “The Bee goes out and Honey home doth bring; / And some who seek that Hony find a sting. / [N]ow wouldst thou have the Hony and be free / [Fr]om stinging; in the first place kill the Bee” (10). The following “Comparison” is startling, especially in contrast to the nigh-universal praise afforded the bee by Bunyan’s contemporaries: “This Bee an Emblem truly is of sin / Whose Sweet unto a many death hath been. / [N]ow would’st have Sweet from sin, and yet not dye, / [D]o thou in the first place mortifie” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 10).
Line number 22

 Gloss note

saw
Line number 24

 Critical note

At this point the bee is unable to return home not because she’s overladen with “nectar,” but because she covetously wants to explore every flower before flying back to the hive. “She’d not the power” to resist the temptation of the beckoning garden, and her greedy appetite leads to a rejection of home and companionship.
Line number 25

 Gloss note

all things
Line number 25

 Gloss note

inflowing power, usually from an astral, divine, or secret force.
Line number 27

 Gloss note

“Painted” confirms the exotic and unnatural allure of the tulip, and the bee’s foolishness in yielding to that allure.
Line number 29

 Gloss note

oily
Line number 30

 Gloss note

herself
Line number 31

 Gloss note

Anger is an emotion rarely ascribed to bees during the early modern period. Bees are often called militant, watchful, agitated, or resourceful (all in defense of their hive), but not angry.
Line number 33

 Critical note

“Delia” is Apollo, the sun god, so named for Delos, his island birthplace. “Delia” seems to be a particularly feminine epithet for Apollo, who is yet clearly gendered male. Indeed, Apollo is the first male character in the poem; Aurora, the bee, the tulip, and the snail are all female. While the feminine Aurora brought life and beauty to the world, Apollo’s “rays” reveal exhaustion and death for the bee.
Line number 35

 Critical note

“Out slid” mirrors “Out flew” of line 7. Pulter’s diction makes the bee far more attractive than the snail. Where the bee “flew,” the snail “slid.” While the bee is “active,” the snail is “unctuous.” Pulter may be playing up the positive characteristics of the bee to acknowledge its commonplace association with wisdom, virtue, etc. If Pulter’s readers—because of traditional representations and Pulter’s appealing depiction—sympathize with the bee, perhaps they are more likely to take personally the warnings of Emblem 53.
Line number 35

 Critical note

Again, Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls provides helpful context for Pulter’s instructive snail. His emblem “Upon the Snail” is notably lengthier and more intimate than his scathing indictment of the bee: “She goes but softly, but she goeth sure, / She stumbles not, as stronger Creatures do: / Her Journeys shorter, so she may endure, / Better than they which do much further go. / She makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on / The Flow’r or Herb, appointed for her food: / The which she quietly doth feed upon, / While others range, and gare, but find no good. / And tho she doth but very softly go, / How ever ’tis not fast, nor slow, but sure; / And certainly they that do travel so, / The prize they do aim at, they do procure” (63-64). The subsequent “Comparison” is equally encouraging: “Although they seem not much to stire, less go, / For Christ that hunger, or from Wrath, that flee; / Yet what they seek for, quickly thy come to, / Tho it doth seem the farthest off to be. / One Act of Faith doth bring them to that Flow’r, / They so long for, that they may eat and live; / Which to attain is not in others Pow’r / Tho for it a King’s Ransom they would give. / Then let none faint, nor be at all dismaid, / That Life by Christ do seek, they shall not fail / To have it, let them nothing be afraid; / The Herb, and Flow’r is eaten by the Snail” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 64). George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moral also praises the snail for its patience and tenacity. Wither writes in Book 1, Emblem 11: “If they would contemplate the slow-pac’d Snaile; / Or, this our Hieroglyphicke looke into: / For, thence we learne, that Perseverance brings / Large Workes to end, though slowly they creep on; / And, that Continuance perfects many things, / Which seeme, at first, unlikely to be done” (Wither, A Collection of Emblems [London: 1635]: 11). Pulter’s snail then, unlike her bee, aligns with seventeenth-century emblematics.
Line number 36

 Critical note

beating her wings, also by herself. The phrase emphasizes the bee’s disordered actions in at least two senses: first, the bee should never have been by herself at night. When she should have returned to the community of the hive to share her nectar with her sisters, she buzzed off by herself to explore the tulip greedily. Second, when the bee finds herself in another, albeit weaker, female community—she, the tulip, and the snail are all gendered female in the poem—she does not function as a helpful part of that group either. Of course, the companionship of the tulip and the snail is a pale imitation of the familiar and ordered security of the hive. Yet the tulip and snail offer some familiar community: the bee is enclosed by the tulip as she would be enclosed by the hive, and she has a “sister” in the snail. Rather than accept the security of the tulip and the company of the snail, she beats her wings by herself, causing both her death by exhaustion, and also a sleepless night for the snail.
Line number 37

 Gloss note

souls; people
Line number 37

 Gloss note

in this emblem
Line number 38

 Gloss note

against
Line number 39

 Critical note

Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes, all identified in the Elemental Edition of the poem, are exemplars of human responses to imprisonment and hardship; Biron and Bajazeth react as does the bee, and Belisarius and Callisthenes demonstrate the patience of the snail. The four men are particularly apropos comparisons to the bee because all of them are subordinates to a master. Honeybees, both now and in the seventeenth century, are communal creatures, which Samuel Purchas emphasizes when he writes “una Apis, nulla Apis, one Bee is no Bee” (16). He drives home the point: “A Bee, like a man cannot live alone, if shee be alone, shee dies” (17). The very fact that the bee of Pulter’s poem is an individual apart from the hive puts her in a position of rebellion and danger. In this case, the bee, tulip, and snail are subordinate to the “influence” of the sun, just as Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes were subject to the rulings (or whims) of their masters.
Line number 51

 Critical note

To whom is Pulter writing here? Nicole A. Jacobs identifies Pulter’s primary audience for her manuscript as her daughters (133), although Pulter appears to have imagined a future, more general readership as well (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 132). Indeed, all people could easily be tempted to behave as the “covetous” bee, “for it may well bee said, he is not humane, that is not allured with [herbs and flowers]” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (London, 1629): sig**3V). Yet if Emblem 53, like The Invitation into the Country, 1647 [Poem 2], A Dialogue Between Two Sisters [Poem 56], and To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter [Poem 38] is written expressly to Pulter’s daughters, the poem’s emphasis on community—and female community at that—becomes all the more pointed. Why does the bee die? Because it was alone. “Come, my dear children, to this lonely place,” Pulter begins “To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield.” “An Invitation into the Country, 1647” opens in a similar vein: “Dear daughters, come, make haste away.”Finally, “A Dialogue Between Two Sisters” concludes with the sisters’ resolve to “go to our sad mother: she’s alone” (line 54). The appropriate response for female grief is therefore female community. Pulter, however, ups the ante in Emblem 53: separation from female community results not just in grief, but in death.
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Amplified Edition B

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Physical Note
Unlike surrounding poems in the “Emblems” section, no number precedes this poem.
[Emblem 53]
The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee
(Emblem 53)
The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee
(Emblem 53)
Emblem 53
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.

— Deanna Smid
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.

— Deanna Smid
In my editions of Pulter’s poems, I prioritize accessibility and use my annotations to prompt further exploration. To make the poems accessible to the widest possible audience, I have modernized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization according to American English standards. My editions aim to demonstrate the complexity of Pulter’s thinking, while opening space for the reader’s own analysis and interpretation. I recognize editing as a political act and aim to be as transparent as possible about how I frame Pulter’s poems for the reader. My lengthy annotations are an attempt to reveal my thought processes and make clear the ideological networks that inform my readings.
As an important corollary to Pulter’s conceptual work, I also attend to the material expression of her manuscript object. Her manuscript pages reveal a glimpse of her thinking and writing processes, and I briefly note Pulter’s revisions to the poems in order to foreground her poetic craft. The manuscript features variants and revisions that invite multiple interpretations, and I encourage readers to refer to the manuscript images as they engage with Pulter’s writing. I offer some intertextual references to other early modern texts, but am most interested in drawing out how Pulter’s poems speak to each other as she reflects on clusters of ideas.


— Deanna Smid
This Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 maintains the punctuation and spelling of the Elemental Edition, and places the poem in the context of its contemporary emblem books and bee-keeping treatises.

— Deanna Smid


— Deanna Smid
We all know the cliché of the busy bee, but Pulter found in the bee an emblem not of virtuous industry but instead of overzealous curiosity, greed, and poor judgment. After praising “the active Amazonian maid” for her industriousness and herbalist know-how, this emblem tells of how the bee—having collected her fill of nectar, but unable to leave well enough alone—becomes trapped in a tulip when, at day’s end, its petals close around her. The bee works furiously to escape; a snail, similarly caught, falls asleep without a struggle. In the morning, when the petals reopen, the snail simply leaves, while the bee dies of exhaustion. Pulter sees in her garden an all-female community of vegetable, animal, and celestial beings demonstrating the moral which the poem then shows men to have enacted historically, in a sequence of exemplars warning against impatience and fighting fate. While that may be the overall moral, the poem also touches on the tension between confinement and freedom which so often preoccupies Pulter. The framing phrase for the emblem’s moral—“if no hope of liberty you see”—closely tracks the concluding declaration in “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57): “I no liberty expect to see …” Did Pulter identify with the snail or the bee?

— Deanna Smid
Emblem 53 offers a complex political allegory masquerading as a fable about a “covetous” honey bee, a patient snail, and a “painted” tulip. Alongside the poem’s political themes, Pulter raises questions about gender, science, and nature that echo her interest in these topics throughout the manuscript. Most significantly, there are glimpses in this poem of Pulter’s clever theorization of poetry itself—her ongoing exploration of how poetry makes meaning.
Three distinct, but related, mottoes drive this emblem. The first motto—”then let impatient spirits here but see / what ’tis to struggle with their destiny” (lines 37–8)—concludes the story Pulter tells of a honey bee, enticed by the poet’s sumptuous garden, who tries to gather more “nectar” than she can carry. Straying from the hive for far too long, the bee lands in a tulip alongside a snail just as the sun goes down and the tulip closes its petals. The second and third motto come in sequence at the poem’s end: “’tis valianter by far to live than die” (line 50) and “then if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (lines 51–52). These mottoes follow a catalogue of examples from classical history, mostly warnings about excessive pride and arrogance. Three mottoes is a lot for one emblem, which raises interesting questions as we read this poem. How do the three mottoes work together? Do the stories seem to unfold logically into their concluding mottoes or do the mottoes seem incongruous? How does Pulter use these multiple mottoes to invite us to consider the function of the motto as a feature of emblems?
Pulter’s emblem poems are “naked emblems,” as Millie Godfrey and Sarah C. E. Ross explain in their introduction to Mighty Nimrod (Emblem 1) [Poem 67]. Revising the traditional tripartite structure of the emblem (motto, visual image, and short epigrammatic verse), Pulter omits the visual image (pictura) element such that the reader must glean meaning solely from words. But Pulter’s language in this and many of her emblems is meant to help the reader paint their own picture. Here, for instance, Pulter references specific flowers, tracks the bee’s movements as it flits around the poet’s garden, and fills her lines with evocative descriptions (the morning sun is “lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray” [line 5]). The emblem’s central characters—the snail, the tulip, and the bee—would also have been easy visual reference points for Pulter’s readers. All three figures were frequently portrayed in early modern emblem books, textual illustrations, and artwork.
All three figures are also at the center of early modern debates surrounding gender and sexuality. Even though none of the poem’s mottoes directly concern these topics, this emblem has much to teach us about Pulter’s interest and intervention in these debates. I track this theme throughout my annotations on the poem, noting, for instance, that Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (7) refers to a community of warrior women in Greek mythology (the Amazons), who were notoriously complicated gendered figures in early modern culture. “Demonstrating that women and men might be performatively interchangeable,” Kathryn Schwarz explains, “Amazons at once substantiate the signifiers of masculinity and threaten to replace the bodies to which they are attached.”
Gloss Note
Source: Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000): 38.
1
Amazons were often at the center of crossdressing plots (Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia), tales of women’s military leadership (Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo), and stories about the relationship between desire and power (William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Pulter’s comparison of the bee to an “Amazonian maid” draws on this popular trope, but we might also read the comparison as an opening nod to the poem’s formal structure. The poem’s first half outlines a distinctly female garden community, populated by “fair Aurora” (1), the “Amazonian” bee” (7), the poet herself (17), and even the snail that slides about “upon her unctuous breast” (29). When the bee’s plot ends at line 37, though, the poem shifts to solely male reference points. Pulter mentions Biron (39), Belisarius (41), Bajazeth (43), and Callisthenes (47) as she guides the reader toward the poem’s concluding motto. But, shifting once more in the final couplet, Pulter ends by reminding us to “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (52), a return to the female cast of the poem’s first half. In the formal structure of her poem—the gender-bending shifts in metaphors—Pulter brings to mind the threat posed by the figure of the Amazon: the possibility “that women and men might be performatively interchangeable.” In both the content and form of this poem, Pulter raises questions about how gender signifies, and particularly how emblematic, gender-specific metaphors signify.


— Deanna Smid
To most seventeenth-century readers, Hester Pulter’s bee in Emblem 53 must have seemed unusual indeed. While the vast majority of her contemporaries praised bees for “their labour and order at home and abroad,” which made them “so admirable, that they may bee a pattern unto men,”
Gloss Note
Source: Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie (Oxford, 1634): 2.
1
Pulter’s bee is greedy, and her “labour” is anything but admirable. Yet comparing Emblem 53 to early modern accounts of bees (both real and metaphorical bees) reveals that Pulter reinforces seventeenth-century knowledge about the characteristics of bees, and that her bee’s deviation from “appropriate” bee-behaviour allows Pulter to emphasize the dangers of solitude, particularly solitude from a community of other women.
Bees were a common metaphor, symbol, or analogy in classical and early modern literature, with Shakespeare’s Henry V and Milton’s Paradise Lost two familiar examples. Indeed, Pulter would not have been able to use bees as a metaphor without contending with the vast scope of bee literature and bee metaphors that had come before her. Of course, this assumes that Pulter had read “bee literature” and was acquainted with honeybees in some fashion. In his reading of Shakespeare on bees, Richard Grinnell confronts a similar question: how much did Shakespeare know about bees? His answer is worth quoting at length: “Shakespeare keeps bees the way any well-read and urbane writer might have been able to—building his metaphors and analogies from books at hand. Even when he moves beyond the classics, for example, in his description of Hal as a beekeeper willing to kill the bees to get the honey, he is clearly working with material that was common knowledge in his day” (850). Beekeeping during the early modern period was also an occupation and even obligation for both men and women. Treatises on caring for bees are often addressed to both sexes, and women feature prevalently in stories about bees, honey, and hives. William Lawson, writing in 1623, states in his treatise on gardening that he “will not account her any of my good Housewives, that wanteth either Bees or skilfulnesse about them.”
Gloss Note
Source: William Lawson, The Country Housewifes Garden. Containing Rules for Hearbs and Seeds of common use, with their times and seasons, when to set and sow them. Together With the Husbandry of Bees, published with secrets very necessary for every Housewife […] (London: Printed for Roger Jackson, 1623): 17.
2
Pulter would certainly not be unusual if she knew something—or even much—about the care and characteristics of honeybees.
Pulter’s bee (in contrast to the industrious and virtuous bees of most of the literature that predates Emblem 53) is greedy and grasping, and her bee’s struggle against confinement causes her exhaustion and death. According to Nicole A. Jacobs, another outlier in early modern bee imagery is John Milton, who compares the devils in Pandemonium to a swarm of bees in Paradise Lost. In her monograph Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony, Jacobs emphasizes the weight of literary tradition that any negative depiction of bees would have to shrug off: “The image of the humming collection [in Paradise Lost] resonates with the early modern reader, trained by tradition to imagine humanity as an orderly hive.”
Gloss Note
Source: Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 123.
3
The same “tradition” and “train[ing]” would have applied to Pulter’s readers, which perhaps explains why, although the snail (with its patient endurance) seems to be the positive exemplar for the reader, the “moral” of the emblem does not urge readers to imitate the snail necessarily. Instead, Pulter advises that we “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (line 52). Indeed, while the bee causes her own unnecessary death in Pulter’s poem, the common literary symbolism of worker bees in the seventeenth century was so overwhelmingly positive that readers must have resisted, even a little, the idea that they should be the greasy snail rather than the “active Amazonian maid” (line 7).
If a honey bee is separate from its colony, it is soon to die. In 1657, beekeeper Samuel Purchas wrote baldly, “one Bee, is no Bee.”
Gloss Note
Source: Purchas, A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects (London, 1657): 16.
4
Joseph Campana quotes from Purchas as well to emphasize the apian–and more general–early modern anxiety with solitude, segments, and fragmentation in the commonwealth. “For bees,” Campana concludes, “singularity is unbearable.”
Gloss Note
Source: Campana, “The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Bryan Reynolds, Paul Cefalu, and Gary Kuchar (New York: Routledge, 2011): 67.
5
Keith Botelho summarizes early modern beekeepers’ attitudes towards individual and collective bees: “early modern bee treatises often spoke of bees in the collective, not necessarily concerned with the individual bee (other than the Queen) but rather with the maintenance of the stock of bees in the hives, of the swarm, of the many.”
Gloss Note
Source: Botelho, “Honey, Wax, and the Dead Bee,” Early Modern Culture 11 (2016): 102.
6
Not only beekeepers, but also early modern writers of fiction or moral instruction generally referred to bees in the plural, and James Howell’s 1660 The Parly of Beasts; or Morphandra Queen of the Inchanted Island is a notable example. In Howell’s dialogues, the characters Morphandra and Pererius speak to a number of animals (who were once human) in turn, beginning with an Otter, then an Ass, an Ape, a Hind, a Mule, a Fox, a Boar, a Wolf, and a Goose. In the first ten sections of the book, the animal interlocutor is singular, but not so in the final dialogue, in which Morphandra and Pererius converse with “a Hive of Bees” (my emphasis), for bees were thought to exist only in a collective. All this is to say that when Pulter’s bee diverts from her voyage back to her hive, she is doing something unusual and potentially deadly: separating herself from the collective that gives her life.
Emblem 53 uses a number of means to create and maintain female community, whether real or imagined. The bee is an “Amazonian maid,” which of course places her in the well-known society of Amazons, but it also reminds readers that bees themselves live in a society that is predominantly female. Christina Luckyj and Naimh J. O’Leary assert that “classical models of segregated female communities could serve as code for political protest.”
Gloss Note
Source: Luckyj and O’Leary, Editor’s Introduction to The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017): 6.
7
Natural models–the model of the beehive–could also serve as such a “code,” especially when Pulter compares the bee and snail to Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes. The four men are associated with the military, which may remind readers of the military connotations of bees in early modern England. Butler, for instance, writes that “Besides their Soveraign, the Bees have also subordinate Governours and Leaders, not unfitly resembling Captains and Colonels of Soldiers.
Gloss Note
Source: Butler, 6.
8
With her references to women and military might, Pulter may be subtly gesturing towards a political protest, one that gives communities of women classical, natural, and even military power.


— Deanna Smid
1
53When fair Aurora drest with Raidient Light
When fair
Gloss Note
goddess of dawn
Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
When
Critical Note
Pulter’s opening reference to “fair Aurora” (Roman goddess of the dawn) initiates the gendered imagery of the poem’s first seven lines, which culminates with Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (line 7). These opening lines, with the Amazon reference as a kind of anchor point, transform the morning garden into a female separatist community—a framing with important implications for how we read the rest of the poem. First, framing the bee’s actions within this context connects the labor of collecting nectar to women’s work, which then prompts us to read Pulter’s later references to poisonous herbs (lines 13–14) and “choice extractions” (line 15) as nods to domestic labor. Second, it links Emblem 53 to other writings in which Pulter explores the intimacies that develop within communities of women, most notably the female friendships throughout her prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda.
fair Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
When fair
Gloss Note
dawn
Aurora
, dressed with radiant light,
2
Had triumph’d o’re the Gloomey Shades of Night
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of night—
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of
Critical Note
My editorial decision to add an em-dash here turns lines 3–6 into a clause that expands Pulter’s description of Aurora in lines 1–2 and emphasizes the unique formal structure of Pulter’s “naked emblems” (for more on this, see my headnote). Adding the em-dash marks how the concise description of Aurora waking up in the poem’s first two lines becomes a more expansive illustration of Aurora in lines 3–6, a kind of visual unfolding that nods to the pictura element of the traditional emblem structure. For more on the flexible structure of early modern emblems, see Peter Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (University of Toronto Press, 1979).
night
Had triumphed o’er the gloomy shades of night—
3
When Shee her Virgin beavty first diſcloſes
When she her
Gloss Note
pure
virgin
beauty first discloses,
When she her
Critical Note
Associating Aurora with virginity, Pulter departs from classical tradition in which Aurora is often aggressively sexualized. Pulter retains some of the figure’s fraught sexual history, though, by drawing on conventional blazon imagery, describing Aurora wrapped in a “silver” robe with “roses” ornamenting her “dewy curls.” This description echoes language from earlier poems in the manuscript dedicated to Aurora: To Aurora [1] [Poem 22], To Aurora [2] [Poem 26], and To Aurora [3] [Poem 34]. “To Aurora [3]” is particularly resonant here. In that earlier poem, Aurora “shakes her dewy curls” and fills the flowers—”each gold-enamelled cup”—with “honeydew” (lines 8–9). For more on Pulter’s use of blazon imagery throughout her poems, see Frances E. Dolan’s Exploration, “Hester Pulter and the Blazon in Early Modern England.”
virgin beauty
first
Gloss Note
uncover or expose to view
discloses
,
When she her
Critical Note
Sperrazza points out in her Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 that Pulter unusually but often associates Aurora with virginity. Bees too, during the early modern period, were considered virginal, as Pulter herself emphasizes in To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], lines 10-11, and in Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57] line 5. The perceived virginity of bees also linked them to the Virgin Mary, which Henry Hawkins explains in his 1633 emblem book, Partheneia Sacra. His bee emblem begins with “To Bethlem’s sillie shed, me thinks I see / The Virgin hasten like a busie Bee,” and ends with “She was the Bee, the Hive her Sacred Womb” (Hawkins, Parthenia Sacra [London, 1633]: lines 1-2; 12). Also during the seventeenth century, the newly-elected Pope Urban VIII heralded himself by means of iconographic bees, iconography that John Milton then used to disparage Charles II (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony [New York: Routledge, 2021]: 117). For more on Urban VIII and bees, see Bee Wilson, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (London: John Murray, 2004): 129-31.
virgin beauty
first discloses,
4
Her dewey Curles Stuck full of half blown Roſes
Her dewy curls stuck full of
Gloss Note
half-blossomed
half-blown
roses,
Her dewy curls stuck full of
Gloss Note
half-bloomed, half-blossomed
half-blown
roses,
Her dewy curls stuck full of half-blown roses,
5
Lapt in A Robe of Silver mixt with graie
Gloss Note
wrapped up
Lapped
in a robe of silver mixed with gray,
Lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray,
Gloss Note
The gorgeous clothing and coloration of Aurora are repeated in the later description of the speaker’s flower garden, which so attracts the bee that she neglects her hive.
Lapped in a robe
of silver mixed with gray,
6
Which did prognoſticate a glorious day
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell
prognosticate
a glorious day—
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell, forecast
prognosticate
a glorious day–
Which did
Gloss Note
foretell
prognosticate
a glorious day—
7
Out flew the active Amizonian Maid
Out flew the
Gloss Note
Amazons were legendary female warriors who served a queen; here used figuratively to describe a bee
active Amazonian maid
;
Out flew the
Critical Note

The bee was a familiar subject of early modern emblems, frequently used as a model of ordered government (see Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber [Padua, 1621], emblem 149) or successful, interdependent economy (see Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblemes [London, 1585], pages 200–201). One seventeenth-century compendium on insects, compiled from the writings of several natural historians, including Edward Wotton, Conrad Gesner, and Thomas Moffet, featured a beehive on its frontispiece and described bees as “patterns and precedents of political and economical virtues” (The Theatre of Insects, or Lesser Living Creatures [London, 1658]).

Pulter’s transformation of the bee into an Amazonian figure, however, is more unusual and even a bit contentious. The comparison enhances Pulter’s interrogation of gender in this poem (see my headnote) and connects this emblem to some of the manuscript’s more explicit political poetry.

active Amazonian maid
.
Critical Note
Out of the beehive (also called a skep). At this point in the poem, the bee is behaving exactly as she ought: during the day, bees must fly out of the hive to forage for nectar and pollen. However, Pulter’s bee remains dangerously “out” of the hive as she is enticed by the garden’s beauty. That “Out” is the first word of this line suggests that the bee’s fault is not just endless toil, but also and particularly solitude and estrangement from the community of the hive (See Headnote).
Out
flew the active
Critical Note
Pulter uses the adjective “Amazonian” to describe the bee in The Garden [Poem 12] as well (line 43). In the Amplified Edition of that poem, Frances E. Dolan notes on line 43 that “references to bees as ‘Amazonian’ acknowledged that their queen was female, which was not yet widely recognized.” While arguments about the sex of the ruling bee remained animated even into the eighteenth century, already in the mid-seventeenth century it would have been difficult to deny that the queen bee was indeed female. The sex of the queen bee was all but established by Charles Butler’s highly influential bee-keeping treatise, The Feminine Monarchy, published in 1609, and again in 1623 and 1634. This is the treatise that almost all later treatises either cited, feted, or challenged. Indeed, Richard R. Prete cites Butler’s text as the turning-point in publications explaining the sex of bees: “Butler’s sound reasoning and empirical observations, in conjunction with the popularity of his book, brought to an end any serious, empirically based debates about the genders of the honey bee castes. From this point on, writers of beekeeping texts would have to recognize these facts, even if only to refute them, if they were to be taken seriously by their audiences.” (“Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Biology, 24.1 (1991), 128). In 1637, therefore, Richard Remnant’s A Discourse or Historie of Bees spends considerable attention on the implication of bees as females. Moreover, in the first bee-keeping manual published after the English Civil War, Samuel Purchas in his 1657 A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects calls the hive “an Amazonian commonwealth” (London, 33). In 1712, Joseph Warder appeals to a metaphor already established when he entitles his bee-keeping treatise The True Amazons: Or The Monarchy of Bees. Pulter is thus hardly bucking tradition or “scientific” knowledge when she calls her bee an “Amazonian maid.”
Amazonian maid
;
8
The Hills and Dales, not onely Shee Surveyd
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
The hills and dales not only she surveyed,
9
But out of every Gold
Physical Note
“E” and “e” appear written over earlier “i”s
Enameld
Cup
But out of every gold-enamelled cup
But out of every
Gloss Note
flowers
gold-enamelled cup
But out of every
Gloss Note
Gold-colored flower
gold-enamelled cup
10
Her Mornings draught of Nectar Shee did Sup
Her morning’s draft of nectar she did sup.
Her morning’s
Gloss Note
a quantity drawn or extracted
draft
of nectar she did sup.
Her morning’s draft of nectar she did
Gloss Note
drink
sup
.
11
Nay where the Toad, and Spider poyſons found
Nay, where the toad and spider’s poison found,
Nay, where the toad and spider poisons found,
Nay, where the toad and spider’s poison found
12
Mell Shee Extracts, for this ^her Wisdome’s Crownd
Gloss Note
honey
Mell
she extracts;
Gloss Note
Bees were reputed to be able to turn poisons into honey.
for this her wisdom’s crowned
.
Gloss Note
honey
Mell
she extracts; for this
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “for this ^her wisdome’s crownd”
her wisdom’s
crowned.
Gloss Note
Honey
Critical Note
The image of a bee extracting honey while other creatures extracted poisons from the same plant is a common emblematic one. Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, for instance, the first emblem book published in English, contains the emblem entitled “Vita, aut morti.” Under the picture of a bee and a spider on a flower, the epigram reads, “Within one flower, two contraries remaine, / For proofe behoulde, the spider, and the bee, / One poison suckes, the bee doth honie draine: / The Scripture soe, hath two effects we see: / Unto the bad, it is a sworde that slaies, / Unto the good, a shielde in ghostlie fraies” (Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes [Leiden: 1586]: 51). Whitney borrows the pictura (and the sentiment of the poem and moral) from Hadrianus Junius’s Emblemata (1565).
Mell
she extracts; for this her
Critical Note
Bees were commonly praised for their intelligence, labour, and loyalty. John Thorley’s 1744 bee treatise Melissologia, for instance, hardly breaks new ground when it summarizes and admires the bees’ “loyalty” (7), “concord and unity” (12), “magnanimity or courage” (15), “labour and industry” (23), “patience and innocency” (27), “temperance and sobriety” (29), “chastity” (30), “neatness and decency” (31), “sympathy, and mutual assistance” (32), “sagacity and prudence” (33), and “vigilance and watchfulness” (Thorley, Melissologia. Or, The Female Monarchy [London, 1744]: 33). Indeed, “Bees themselves excell all other creatures … in Art, Wisdom, or Foresight, Industry, Valour and Loyalty,” Moses Rusden writes in 1679 (Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees [London, 1679]: 9). In particular, the fact that bees make honey and wax—both useful to humans—makes them especially prized or “crowned,” and thus the fertile bee in the hive is called a “queen.” “Her wisdom’s crowned,” however, cannot refer to only one singular bee, for a bee cannot make honey in isolation. If a bee is prized because it extracts honey from plants, the honor must go to the entire hive, the site of honey production.
wisdom’s crowned
.
13
On
Physical Note
“t” in different hand from main scribe
Nightſhade
, Henbane, Helliſh Acconite
On nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite,
On nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite,
On
Gloss Note
All poisonous plants, including opium and hemlock in the following line.
nightshade, henbane, hellish aconite
,
14
On Opium, Hemlock, Shee doth Safely lite
On opium,
Gloss Note
This plant, like opium and the three in the previous line, are all poisonous.
hemlock
she doth safely
Gloss Note
land
light
.
On opium, hemlock she doth
Critical Note
All five plants catalogued in these lines are poisonous, but their pollen is not. Consequently, the bee can safely extract pollen but the toad and spider of line 11 (eating the plants’ leaves, flowers, or stems) find “poisons.” Pulter may have gained knowledge of these plants from direct, hands-on experience. There were also several popular herbals circulating by the time she was writing, including John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597) and Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician Enlarged (London, 1653). The British Library offers a useful peek at Gerard’s Herbal, along with some context on Shakespeare’s use of “henbane” in Hamlet and “nightshade” in Romeo and Juliet.
safely light
.
On opium, hemlock she doth safely
Gloss Note
alight.
light
.
15
Thus being with choyce Extractions loaded well
Thus being with choice extractions loaded well,
Thus being with
Critical Note
John Milton also uses the verb “extract” to describe the bee’s work in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. Adam calls Eve awake “to mark … how the bee / sits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet” (lines 20–25). The noun “extraction” and its verb form “extract” (line 12) had alchemical, medicinal, and culinary connotations in seventeenth-century use. “To extract” is “to obtain (constituent elements, juices, etc.) from a thing or substance by suction, pressure, distillation, or any chemical or mechanical operation” (“extract, v.4a,” OED Online). As evidence for this particular connotation of “extract,” the Oxford English Dictionary cites Hugh Plat’s The Jewel House of Art and Nature (London, 1594) and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History (London, 1626), two popular early modern scientific texts with which Pulter may have been familiar. Is Pulter also demonstrating her knowledge of early modern herbals, texts that catalogued plants and their medicinal and culinary uses? If so, her uses of “extract” and “extraction” connect to the catalogue of poisonous plants in lines 13–14. For an extended exploration of “human art” in relation to plants, see View But This Tulip (Emblem 40) [Poem 105].
choice extractions
loaded well,
Thus being with choice extractions
Gloss Note
Bees were thought to carry their collected nectar in “bags,” emphasized in a popular seventeenth-century song and poem entitled “The Sweet Bag of the Bee.” The poem/song appears numerous times in the expansive collection English Song 1600-1675: Facsimiles of Twenty-Six Manuscripts and an Edition of the Texts, edited with introductions by Elise Bickford Jorgens. Henry Lawes’ composition of the song appears in Oxford, Ms. Tenbury 1018, sig. 95V. The poem “The Sweet Bag of the Bee” also features in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648). Once a bee is “loaded well,” it must return to its hive to share its bounty with the rest of the bees.
loaded well
,
16
Shee turn’d to flie to her Sexanguler Cell
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
six-sided
sexangular
cell.
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
six-sided; a reference to the comb shapes of a bee hive
sexangular cell
.
She turned to fly to her
Gloss Note
hexagonal honeycomb
Critical Note
If there is any doubt that the bee of Emblem 53 is a honey bee, line 14 negates that doubt. Solitary bees such as bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, etc. do not make hexagonal honeycomb. The honey bee’s decision to abort her return flight to her hive suddenly separates her from the community to which she belongs.
sexangular cell
.
17
But takeing of my Garden in her way
But
Gloss Note
apprehending
taking of
my garden in her way,
But
Gloss Note
to be caught or captured by; the bee is “taken with” the beauty of the narrator’s garden
taking of

This is our first glimpse of the poem’s narrator, often a much more pervasive presence in Pulter’s poems. In early poems in the manuscript, like Made When I Was Sick, 1647 [Poem 31], the entire poem revolves around the narrator’s experience and thoughts. The sparse, late use of the first-person pronoun here, though, is more typical of Pulter’s emblem poems, a few of which never reference the poet directly. See, for instance, Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86].

It’s worth noting that this first reference to the poet (one of only two in the poem) is also connected to the garden and the all-female community of the poem’s first half. Perhaps even more interesting, the narrator’s garden is the site of the bee’s demise. We learn the story of the bee and the snail in the next few lines and we might even imagine that the poet is a first-hand witness, watching the snail “slid[e]” out of the tulip in the morning while the bee “fainting lie[s]” (line 35).

my garden
in her way,
But
Gloss Note
Taking in
taking of
my garden in her way,
18
Though full before Shee could not chooſe but Stay
Though full before, she could not choose but stay
Though full before, she could not choose but stay
Though
Critical Note
The bee’s “bag” is full, so she would be unable to carry any more nectar or pollen, even if she finds some in the speaker’s alluring garden. The bee’s further investigation of the garden, therefore, is futile.
full before
, she could not choose but stay
19
To See the
Physical Note
insertion in different hand from main scribe
\curious \
Ouricolas
Physical Note
double strike-through
curious
drest
To see the
Gloss Note
clever, elaborately made
curious
Gloss Note
type of flower
auriculas
dressed
To see the
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “to see the \curious \ ouricolas curious drest”
curious
Gloss Note
primula auricula; also known as mountain cowslip or bear’s ear (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
auriculas
dressed
To see the curious
Gloss Note
A type of primrose, a greatly prized and showy flower.
auriculas
dressed
20
More variously then Iris dewey breast
More variously than
Gloss Note
goddess of the rainbow, also a type of flower
Iris’s
dewy breast.
More variously than
Gloss Note
In Greek mythology, Iris is messenger of the gods and a personification of the rainbow. Iris is also another type of flower. In contemporary botany, iris is a genus of many species of flowering plants like the iris sibirica (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
Iris’s
dewy breast.
More variously than
Gloss Note
type of flower, also a messenger goddess with the rainbow as her emblem. The auriculas, therefore, which are usually yellow, are here rainbow-hued.
Iris’s
dewy breast.
21
Then were my Tulips painted in there Pride
Then were my tulips painted in their pride,
Then were my
Critical Note
The tulip has special significance in Pulter’s emblem. She not only makes the center of this flower the location for her fable of the bee and snail (as we’re about to see); she also describes the tulip with language that evokes the “tulipmania” of the early seventeenth century: “painted” (here and again in line 27) and “gilded” (line 34). From the 1580’s to the mid-1630’s, tulips were a prized and elusive commodity, famous in aristocratic gardens and still life paintings, but notoriously difficult to study and classify given their infinite variety. In John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597), Gerard describes the tulips as “a strange and foreign flower” and emphasizes that it is impossible to catalogue all of its varieties: “each new yeare bringeth forth new plants of sundry colours, not before seene” ([London, 1597], Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online, pages 137–140). The craze surrounding the tulip culminated in the Dutch “tulipmania” of the 1630’s, when the price of tulip bulbs inflated drastically (the most expensive specimens went for around 5,000 guilders). We might speculate that Pulter has this recent cultural phenomenon in mind when she describes the tulips first as luxurious garden accessories (“painted in their pride”) and then as the bee’s “painted prison.” See this poem’s Curation (Pulter’s Garden) for examples of Gerard’s tulip woodcuts and Dutch still life paintings featuring the flower. For more on the tulip in early modern English contexts, see Anna Pavord’s The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad (Bloomsbury, 1999), especially chapter 3.
tulips painted
in their pride,
Then were my
Critical Note
John Parkinson writes in his 1629 gardening treatise, “There are not only divers kindes of Tulipas, but sundry diversities of colours in them, found out in these later dayes by many the [sic] searchers of natures varieties, which have not formerly been observed: our age being more delighted in the search, curiosity, and rarieites of these pleasant delights, then [sic] any age I thinke before. But indeede, this flower, above many other, deserves his true commendations and acceptance with all lovers of these beauties, both for the stately aspect, and for the admirable varietie of colours, that daily doe arise in them, farre beyond all other plants that grow” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris [London, 1629]: 45). Moreover, as Benedict S. Robinson identifies, tulips were first exported from Turkey to Europe in the late sixteenth century, and, he argues, “the tulip could also be taken to embody an ‘orientalizing’ of English tastes, an errant desire for exotic plants that rooted itself right into the soil” (Robinson, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 [2009]: 96). The bee’s attraction to the tulip, then, demonstrates her “covetousness,” but also her relatable, commonplace, and even human interest in the beautiful and exotic flower.
tulips
painted in their pride,
22
Which when this covetous Inſect Eſpi’de
Which, when this covetous insect espied,
Which, when this
Gloss Note
greedy
covetous
insect espied,
Which, when this
Critical Note
The reader’s suspicion that Pulter’s bee is not the moral exemplar bees usually are in seventeenth-century poetry is here confirmed. While bees were usually considered selfless and self-sacrificing –Moses Rusden praises their “loyalty,” for example—Pulter’s bee is greedy. Another notable example of a “bad bee” appears in John Bunyan’s 1686 A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes For Children, which is filled with moral lessons in the form of naked emblems, not unlike the naked emblems Pulter employs. Bunyan’s emblem “Upon the Bee” starts innocuously enough: “The Bee goes out and Honey home doth bring; / And some who seek that Hony find a sting. / [N]ow wouldst thou have the Hony and be free / [Fr]om stinging; in the first place kill the Bee” (10). The following “Comparison” is startling, especially in contrast to the nigh-universal praise afforded the bee by Bunyan’s contemporaries: “This Bee an Emblem truly is of sin / Whose Sweet unto a many death hath been. / [N]ow would’st have Sweet from sin, and yet not dye, / [D]o thou in the first place mortifie” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 10).
covetous insect
Gloss Note
saw
espied
,
23
To carry home her wealth Shee’d not ye power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
To carry home her wealth she’d not the power
24
Till Shee had Search’d the Sweets of every fflower
Till she had searched the sweets of every flower.
Till she had searched the sweets of every flower.
Till
Critical Note
At this point the bee is unable to return home not because she’s overladen with “nectar,” but because she covetously wants to explore every flower before flying back to the hive. “She’d not the power” to resist the temptation of the beckoning garden, and her greedy appetite leads to a rejection of home and companionship.
she had searched the sweets of every flower
.
the

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25
The Sun, from home, all, Influence Receives
The sun,
Gloss Note
“whom” is spelled as “home” in the manuscript; all are influenced by the sun
from whom all influence receives
,
The sun, from whom all influence receives,
The sun, from whom
Gloss Note
all things
all
Gloss Note
inflowing power, usually from an astral, divine, or secret force.
influence
receives,
26
Bid them decline, The Tulip cloſ’d her Leaves
Bids them
Gloss Note
bend down, droop
decline
; the tulip closed her
Gloss Note
petals
leaves
,
Bid
Gloss Note
the flowers
them
decline; the tulip closed her leaves,
Bids them decline; the tulip closed her leaves,
27
And in that painted Priſon Shut the Bee
And in that painted prison shut the bee,
And in that painted prison shut the bee.
And in that
Gloss Note
“Painted” confirms the exotic and unnatural allure of the tulip, and the bee’s foolishness in yielding to that allure.
painted prison
shut the bee,
28
With her A Snail, who Slid about to See
Gloss Note
and with
With
her a snail, who slid about (to see
With her a
Critical Note
The third central character in Pulter’s emblem, the snail presented a unique sexual conundrum because of its shell, so early moderns hypothesized that the snail could spontaneously reproduce: “Thou thine own daughter then, and sire, / that son and mother art entire” (Richard Lovelace, “The Snail”). In medieval and early modern art, the snail was often linked to the Virgin Mary as a symbol of virginity. Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation, for example, includes a snail in the painting’s foreground, positioned directly in front of Mary as she receives the news of her immaculate conception. Geneticist Steve Jones offers a useful account of the history of the snail as a symbol of “sex, age, and death” in his lecture, “Snails in Art and the Art of Snails” (2014), available online through the Museum of London. By the time Pulter was writing, the snail was increasingly cited in debates about the role of reproduction in the plant and animal worlds. Several decades after Pulter’s death in 1678, Dutch anatomist Jan Swammerdam proved that snails were hermaphrodites (Bybel der Natuure, Leiden, 1737). Before that point, as historian of science Domenico Bertolini Meli outlines, hermaphrodites were seen to be rare occurrences, even monsters. Swammerdam’s findings became the basis for arguments on the natural occurrence of hermaphrodites in nature (Meli, “Of Snails and Horsetails: Anatomical Empiricism in the Early Modern Period,” Early Science and Medicine 18.4/5 (2013): 435–452).
snail
, who slid about to see
With her a snail, who slid about (to see
29
Where to get out upon her Unctious brest
Where to get out) upon her
Gloss Note
greasy
unctuous
breast;
Where to get out upon her
Gloss Note
oily, greasy
unctuous
breast;
Where to get out) upon her
Gloss Note
oily
unctuous
breast;
30
But Seeing noe hope, Shee laid her down to rest
But seeing no hope, she laid
Gloss Note
herself
her
down to rest,
But seeing no hope, she laid her down to rest,
But seeing no hope, she laid
Gloss Note
herself
her
down to rest,
31
Whilst the Angrie Bee
Physical Note
double strike-through
doth
Physical Note
in different hand from main scribe
\did \
Such A ffluttring Keep
Whilst the angry bee did such a flutt’ring
Gloss Note
make
keep
,
Whilst the angry bee
Physical Note
revised in the manuscript; “bee doth \did \ such a”
did
such a flutt’ring keep,
Whilst the
Gloss Note
Anger is an emotion rarely ascribed to bees during the early modern period. Bees are often called militant, watchful, agitated, or resourceful (all in defense of their hive), but not angry.
angry
bee did such a flutt’ring keep,
32
Shee nor her fellow Priſner could not Sleep
Gloss Note
Neither she
She
nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
She nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
She nor her fellow pris’ner could not sleep.
33
But Night being past, Delia diffuſ’d his Rais
But night being past,
Gloss Note
here, Apollo, the sun god (named because he was from the island of Delos, usually called Delius)
Delia
diffused his rays;
But night being past,
Critical Note
Pulter’s use of “Delia,” an unusual and distinctly feminized name for Apollo, the Greek sun god born on the island of Delos, marks a conscious shift from her use of “Aurora,” goddess of the dawn, at the start of the poem. As Victoria Burke notes in her Amplified Edition of Aurora [1] [Poem 3], the feminized Delia, as opposed to Delius, could be a transcription error, but Pulter does use Delia to refer to Apollo in several other poems, including The Eclipse [Poem 1] and The Garden, or the Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. Given this emblem’s interrogation of gender, we might read Pulter’s slippage here as an invitation. As the female bee (“the active Amazonian maid”) dies and the poem shifts to a cluster of male figures in its closing lines, is Pulter’s switch from Aurora to Delia (and, perhaps, from Delius to Delia) meant to both mark and trouble this transition?
Delia
Gloss Note
spread out
diffused
his rays;
But night being past,
Critical Note
“Delia” is Apollo, the sun god, so named for Delos, his island birthplace. “Delia” seems to be a particularly feminine epithet for Apollo, who is yet clearly gendered male. Indeed, Apollo is the first male character in the poem; Aurora, the bee, the tulip, and the snail are all female. While the feminine Aurora brought life and beauty to the world, Apollo’s “rays” reveal exhaustion and death for the bee.
Delia
diffused his rays;
34
The Tulip then her gilded Leaves diſplais
The tulip then her gilded leaves displays.
The tulip then her
Gloss Note
adorned or embellished; a term most often associated with artificial objects
gilded
leaves displays.
The tulip then her gilded leaves displays.
35
Out Slid the Snail, the Bee did fainting lie
Out slid the snail; the bee did fainting lie,
Out slid the snail; the bee did fainting lie,
Critical Note
“Out slid” mirrors “Out flew” of line 7. Pulter’s diction makes the bee far more attractive than the snail. Where the bee “flew,” the snail “slid.” While the bee is “active,” the snail is “unctuous.” Pulter may be playing up the positive characteristics of the bee to acknowledge its commonplace association with wisdom, virtue, etc. If Pulter’s readers—because of traditional representations and Pulter’s appealing depiction—sympathize with the bee, perhaps they are more likely to take personally the warnings of Emblem 53.
Out slid
the
Critical Note
Again, Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls provides helpful context for Pulter’s instructive snail. His emblem “Upon the Snail” is notably lengthier and more intimate than his scathing indictment of the bee: “She goes but softly, but she goeth sure, / She stumbles not, as stronger Creatures do: / Her Journeys shorter, so she may endure, / Better than they which do much further go. / She makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on / The Flow’r or Herb, appointed for her food: / The which she quietly doth feed upon, / While others range, and gare, but find no good. / And tho she doth but very softly go, / How ever ’tis not fast, nor slow, but sure; / And certainly they that do travel so, / The prize they do aim at, they do procure” (63-64). The subsequent “Comparison” is equally encouraging: “Although they seem not much to stire, less go, / For Christ that hunger, or from Wrath, that flee; / Yet what they seek for, quickly thy come to, / Tho it doth seem the farthest off to be. / One Act of Faith doth bring them to that Flow’r, / They so long for, that they may eat and live; / Which to attain is not in others Pow’r / Tho for it a King’s Ransom they would give. / Then let none faint, nor be at all dismaid, / That Life by Christ do seek, they shall not fail / To have it, let them nothing be afraid; / The Herb, and Flow’r is eaten by the Snail” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 64). George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moral also praises the snail for its patience and tenacity. Wither writes in Book 1, Emblem 11: “If they would contemplate the slow-pac’d Snaile; / Or, this our Hieroglyphicke looke into: / For, thence we learne, that Perseverance brings / Large Workes to end, though slowly they creep on; / And, that Continuance perfects many things, / Which seeme, at first, unlikely to be done” (Wither, A Collection of Emblems [London: 1635]: 11). Pulter’s snail then, unlike her bee, aligns with seventeenth-century emblematics.
snail
; the bee did fainting lie
36
And thus with Beating of her Self did die
And thus with beating of herself did die.
And thus with beating of herself did die.
And thus with
Critical Note
beating her wings, also by herself. The phrase emphasizes the bee’s disordered actions in at least two senses: first, the bee should never have been by herself at night. When she should have returned to the community of the hive to share her nectar with her sisters, she buzzed off by herself to explore the tulip greedily. Second, when the bee finds herself in another, albeit weaker, female community—she, the tulip, and the snail are all gendered female in the poem—she does not function as a helpful part of that group either. Of course, the companionship of the tulip and the snail is a pale imitation of the familiar and ordered security of the hive. Yet the tulip and snail offer some familiar community: the bee is enclosed by the tulip as she would be enclosed by the hive, and she has a “sister” in the snail. Rather than accept the security of the tulip and the company of the snail, she beats her wings by herself, causing both her death by exhaustion, and also a sleepless night for the snail.
beating of herself
did die.
37
Then let impatient Spirits here but See
Then let impatient spirits here but see
Then let impatient spirits here but see
Then let impatient
Gloss Note
souls; people
spirits
Gloss Note
in this emblem
here
but see
38
What ’tis to Struggle with their destinie
What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.
Critical Note
“Then let impatient spirits here but see / What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.” The first of the poem’s three possible mottoes. Pulter uses the fable of the snail, tulip, and bee to offer a lesson in struggling against destiny. The “impatient” bee struggles against her “painted prison” (line 27), while the patient snail “see[s] no hope” and “lay[s] … down to rest” (line 30). In the poem’s final motto, Pulter reminds us of the snail, tulip, and bee fable (“if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” [lines 51–52]), but the lessons of the two mottoes are slightly different—enough to invite some critical thinking on the part of Pulter’s reader. This motto focuses on destiny, while the poem’s final motto foregrounds liberty. Who are the “impatient spirits” Pulter addresses with this lesson? Who is the “you” of the final motto’s direct address?
What ’tis to struggle with their destiny
.
What ’tis to struggle
Gloss Note
against
with
their destiny.
39
Soe Stout Byrone in Priſon was inrag’d
So
Gloss Note
proud, arrogant
stout
Gloss Note
Charles de Gontant, duc de Biron; a celebrated sixteenth-century French soldier famed for his overweening pride and eventually executed for treason; in George Chapman’s play about him, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Biron’s sword is confiscated by the king.
Biron
in prison was enraged,
So
Gloss Note
proud, haughty
stout
Critical Note

This comparison starts Pulter’s catalogue of male military leaders, rulers, and thinkers—four in total by the poem’s end. As I noted in my headnote, this cast of characters marks a significant gender shift from the female-centric opening of the poem. But this phrase is also formally noteworthy. Rather than using just one or two comparisons to illustrate her point, Pulter here offers an extensive catalogue of examples: “so stout Biron” (line 39), “when Belisarius” (line 41), “so miscre’nt Bajazeth” (line 43), and “when wise Callisthenes” (line 47). The anaphoric “so’s” and “when’s” of these final lines, very typical of Pulter’s emblems, signal her strategic accumulation of these examples. Again, how might Pulter be using her poems to explore how poetic language signifies? See my headnote for more on this question.

Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, was a sixteenth-century French military leader eventually involved in conspiracies against the French crown. He was jailed and beheaded for treason in 1602. Alice Eardley cites George Chapman’s play, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France (1608) as one possible source for Pulter’s anecdote here. Biron was “notorious for his arrogance,” Eardley notes, and in Chapman’s play his sword is removed from him, “treatment he vigorously resists.” See Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, Ed. Alice Eardley, (Toronto: Iter, 2014), 263 n.513.

Biron
in prison was enraged,
So stout
Critical Note
Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes, all identified in the Elemental Edition of the poem, are exemplars of human responses to imprisonment and hardship; Biron and Bajazeth react as does the bee, and Belisarius and Callisthenes demonstrate the patience of the snail. The four men are particularly apropos comparisons to the bee because all of them are subordinates to a master. Honeybees, both now and in the seventeenth century, are communal creatures, which Samuel Purchas emphasizes when he writes “una Apis, nulla Apis, one Bee is no Bee” (16). He drives home the point: “A Bee, like a man cannot live alone, if shee be alone, shee dies” (17). The very fact that the bee of Pulter’s poem is an individual apart from the hive puts her in a position of rebellion and danger. In this case, the bee, tulip, and snail are subordinate to the “influence” of the sun, just as Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes were subject to the rulings (or whims) of their masters.
Biron
in prison was enraged,
40
Knowing his King was to his Sword ingag’d
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
Knowing his king was to his sword engaged.
41
When Bellizarus by A dog was led
When
Gloss Note
successful general of sixth-century Roman emperor Justinian, later accused of conspiracy; reputedly, his eyes were put out and he ended his life as a beggar.
Belisarius
by a dog was led,
When
Gloss Note
Belisarius was a famous military leader of the Byzantine Empire. Pulter here references the apocryphal story that Justinian ordered Belisarius’s eyes put out and that Belisarius became a beggar at the gates of Rome. Looking forward a bit beyond Pulter’s lifetime, Belisarius’s story was especially popular by the end of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Jean-François Marmontel’s Bélisaire: A Novel (1767), Margaretta Faugères’s closet drama, Belisarius: A Tragedy (1795), and Jacques-Louis David’s painting, “Belisarius Begging for Alms” (1780).
Belisarius
by a dog was led,
When Belisarius by a dog was led,
42
Being blind hee patiently did beg his Bread
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
Being blind, he patiently did beg his bread.
43
Soe miſcre’nt Bajazet did Shew his Rage
So
Gloss Note
villainous
miscre’nt
Gloss Note
fourteenth-century Turkish Emperor captured in war by Tamburlaine (the “proud Tartar”); in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine, Bajazeth kills himself on the bars of his prison.
Bajazeth
did show his rage
So
Gloss Note
an abbreviation of “miscreant”; heretical or pagan, but also villainous
miscre’nt
Critical Note
In Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s poems, she cites Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590) as a possible source for Pulter’s reference to the Turkish emperor Bajazeth. In Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth and keeps him in a cage, taking him out only to serve as Tamburlaine’s footstool. After a lengthy imprisonment, Bajazeth kills himself by smashing his head against the bars of his cage. See Eardley (ed.), Poems, 263 n.516.
Bajazeth
did show his rage
So miscre’nt Bajazeth did show his rage
44
When that proud Tarter put him in A Cage
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
When that proud Tartar put him in a cage;
45
Scorning to bee A footstool to his Pride
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
Scorning to be a footstool to his pride,
46
Hee daſh’d his Curſed Brains about & died
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
He dashed his curséd brains about and died.
47
When wiſe Calistines uſ’d with greater Scorn
When wise
Gloss Note
historian for Alexander the Great, reported by some to have been dismembered and displayed in a cage by Alexander in retribution for his criticisms; see Justin (Marcus Justinius), The History of Justin, Taken Out of the Four and Forty Books of Trogus Pompeius (London, 1654), p. 239.
Callisthenes
, used with greater scorn,
When wise
Gloss Note
Callisthenes was a Greek historian, eventually the official historian of Alexander the Great until he was accused of plotting against Alexander. There are several different accounts of his death. Pulter seems to be referencing the version from Ptolemy in which Callisthenes is tortured and hanged in an iron cage.
Callisthenes
, used with greater scorn,
When wise Callisthenes, used with greater scorn,
48
Tyrannically mangled Soe was Born
Tyrannically mangled,
Gloss Note
so it
so
was
Gloss Note
endured
borne
,
Tyrannically mangled, so was borne,
Tyrannically mangled, so was borne,
hee

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49
Hee being unmov’d Shew’d his Philoſophy
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
He, being unmoved, showed his philosophy:
50
T’is Valianter by far to live then die
’Tis valianter by far to live than die.
Critical Note
The second of the poem’s three mottoes. This message seems specific to Pulter’s lines on Callisthenes, but the connection is puzzling given Callisthenes’s death in prison, without liberty. Is Pulter drawing our attention to the possible incongruities between her anecdotes and their concluding mottos? Or, perhaps, this motto becomes a thread for the poem’s broader message of stoic endurance: be patient and choose life.
’Tis valianter by far to live than die
.
’Tis valianter by far to live than die.
51
Then if noe hope
Physical Note
imperfectly erased ascender follows
of
Liberty you See
Then if no hope of liberty you see
Then if no hope of liberty you see,
Then if no hope of liberty
Critical Note
To whom is Pulter writing here? Nicole A. Jacobs identifies Pulter’s primary audience for her manuscript as her daughters (133), although Pulter appears to have imagined a future, more general readership as well (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 132). Indeed, all people could easily be tempted to behave as the “covetous” bee, “for it may well bee said, he is not humane, that is not allured with [herbs and flowers]” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (London, 1629): sig**3V). Yet if Emblem 53, like The Invitation into the Country, 1647 [Poem 2], A Dialogue Between Two Sisters [Poem 56], and To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter [Poem 38] is written expressly to Pulter’s daughters, the poem’s emphasis on community—and female community at that—becomes all the more pointed. Why does the bee die? Because it was alone. “Come, my dear children, to this lonely place,” Pulter begins “To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield.” “An Invitation into the Country, 1647” opens in a similar vein: “Dear daughters, come, make haste away.”Finally, “A Dialogue Between Two Sisters” concludes with the sisters’ resolve to “go to our sad mother: she’s alone” (line 54). The appropriate response for female grief is therefore female community. Pulter, however, ups the ante in Emblem 53: separation from female community results not just in grief, but in death.
you
see
52
Think on the Snail, the Tulip and the
Physical Note
remainder of page blank, as is reverse
Bee
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.
Critical Note
“Then if no hope of liberty you see, / Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.” The final of the poem’s three mottoes. Pointing us back to the emblem’s central fable, Pulter’s final lines explicitly mark the snail, tulip, and bee story as a political allegory about liberty, resistance, and stoic endurance. But what of the poem’s complex gender politics? Where do they fit within such an allegory, particularly one written by a Royalist female poet at the height of the English Civil Wars? To explore further the intersections of gender and English Civil War politics, see Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 4.
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee
.
Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.
X (Close panel) All Notes
Transcription
Title note

 Physical note

Unlike surrounding poems in the “Emblems” section, no number precedes this poem.
Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Elemental Edition

 Editorial note

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

 Editorial note

In my editions of Pulter’s poems, I prioritize accessibility and use my annotations to prompt further exploration. To make the poems accessible to the widest possible audience, I have modernized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization according to American English standards. My editions aim to demonstrate the complexity of Pulter’s thinking, while opening space for the reader’s own analysis and interpretation. I recognize editing as a political act and aim to be as transparent as possible about how I frame Pulter’s poems for the reader. My lengthy annotations are an attempt to reveal my thought processes and make clear the ideological networks that inform my readings.
As an important corollary to Pulter’s conceptual work, I also attend to the material expression of her manuscript object. Her manuscript pages reveal a glimpse of her thinking and writing processes, and I briefly note Pulter’s revisions to the poems in order to foreground her poetic craft. The manuscript features variants and revisions that invite multiple interpretations, and I encourage readers to refer to the manuscript images as they engage with Pulter’s writing. I offer some intertextual references to other early modern texts, but am most interested in drawing out how Pulter’s poems speak to each other as she reflects on clusters of ideas.
Amplified Edition B

 Editorial note

This Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 maintains the punctuation and spelling of the Elemental Edition, and places the poem in the context of its contemporary emblem books and bee-keeping treatises.
Transcription

 Headnote

Elemental Edition

 Headnote

We all know the cliché of the busy bee, but Pulter found in the bee an emblem not of virtuous industry but instead of overzealous curiosity, greed, and poor judgment. After praising “the active Amazonian maid” for her industriousness and herbalist know-how, this emblem tells of how the bee—having collected her fill of nectar, but unable to leave well enough alone—becomes trapped in a tulip when, at day’s end, its petals close around her. The bee works furiously to escape; a snail, similarly caught, falls asleep without a struggle. In the morning, when the petals reopen, the snail simply leaves, while the bee dies of exhaustion. Pulter sees in her garden an all-female community of vegetable, animal, and celestial beings demonstrating the moral which the poem then shows men to have enacted historically, in a sequence of exemplars warning against impatience and fighting fate. While that may be the overall moral, the poem also touches on the tension between confinement and freedom which so often preoccupies Pulter. The framing phrase for the emblem’s moral—“if no hope of liberty you see”—closely tracks the concluding declaration in “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57): “I no liberty expect to see …” Did Pulter identify with the snail or the bee?
Amplified Edition A

 Headnote

Emblem 53 offers a complex political allegory masquerading as a fable about a “covetous” honey bee, a patient snail, and a “painted” tulip. Alongside the poem’s political themes, Pulter raises questions about gender, science, and nature that echo her interest in these topics throughout the manuscript. Most significantly, there are glimpses in this poem of Pulter’s clever theorization of poetry itself—her ongoing exploration of how poetry makes meaning.
Three distinct, but related, mottoes drive this emblem. The first motto—”then let impatient spirits here but see / what ’tis to struggle with their destiny” (lines 37–8)—concludes the story Pulter tells of a honey bee, enticed by the poet’s sumptuous garden, who tries to gather more “nectar” than she can carry. Straying from the hive for far too long, the bee lands in a tulip alongside a snail just as the sun goes down and the tulip closes its petals. The second and third motto come in sequence at the poem’s end: “’tis valianter by far to live than die” (line 50) and “then if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (lines 51–52). These mottoes follow a catalogue of examples from classical history, mostly warnings about excessive pride and arrogance. Three mottoes is a lot for one emblem, which raises interesting questions as we read this poem. How do the three mottoes work together? Do the stories seem to unfold logically into their concluding mottoes or do the mottoes seem incongruous? How does Pulter use these multiple mottoes to invite us to consider the function of the motto as a feature of emblems?
Pulter’s emblem poems are “naked emblems,” as Millie Godfrey and Sarah C. E. Ross explain in their introduction to Mighty Nimrod (Emblem 1) [Poem 67]. Revising the traditional tripartite structure of the emblem (motto, visual image, and short epigrammatic verse), Pulter omits the visual image (pictura) element such that the reader must glean meaning solely from words. But Pulter’s language in this and many of her emblems is meant to help the reader paint their own picture. Here, for instance, Pulter references specific flowers, tracks the bee’s movements as it flits around the poet’s garden, and fills her lines with evocative descriptions (the morning sun is “lapped in a robe of silver mixed with gray” [line 5]). The emblem’s central characters—the snail, the tulip, and the bee—would also have been easy visual reference points for Pulter’s readers. All three figures were frequently portrayed in early modern emblem books, textual illustrations, and artwork.
All three figures are also at the center of early modern debates surrounding gender and sexuality. Even though none of the poem’s mottoes directly concern these topics, this emblem has much to teach us about Pulter’s interest and intervention in these debates. I track this theme throughout my annotations on the poem, noting, for instance, that Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (7) refers to a community of warrior women in Greek mythology (the Amazons), who were notoriously complicated gendered figures in early modern culture. “Demonstrating that women and men might be performatively interchangeable,” Kathryn Schwarz explains, “Amazons at once substantiate the signifiers of masculinity and threaten to replace the bodies to which they are attached.”
Gloss Note
Source: Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000): 38.
1
Amazons were often at the center of crossdressing plots (Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia), tales of women’s military leadership (Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo), and stories about the relationship between desire and power (William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Pulter’s comparison of the bee to an “Amazonian maid” draws on this popular trope, but we might also read the comparison as an opening nod to the poem’s formal structure. The poem’s first half outlines a distinctly female garden community, populated by “fair Aurora” (1), the “Amazonian” bee” (7), the poet herself (17), and even the snail that slides about “upon her unctuous breast” (29). When the bee’s plot ends at line 37, though, the poem shifts to solely male reference points. Pulter mentions Biron (39), Belisarius (41), Bajazeth (43), and Callisthenes (47) as she guides the reader toward the poem’s concluding motto. But, shifting once more in the final couplet, Pulter ends by reminding us to “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (52), a return to the female cast of the poem’s first half. In the formal structure of her poem—the gender-bending shifts in metaphors—Pulter brings to mind the threat posed by the figure of the Amazon: the possibility “that women and men might be performatively interchangeable.” In both the content and form of this poem, Pulter raises questions about how gender signifies, and particularly how emblematic, gender-specific metaphors signify.
Amplified Edition B

 Headnote

To most seventeenth-century readers, Hester Pulter’s bee in Emblem 53 must have seemed unusual indeed. While the vast majority of her contemporaries praised bees for “their labour and order at home and abroad,” which made them “so admirable, that they may bee a pattern unto men,”
Gloss Note
Source: Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie (Oxford, 1634): 2.
1
Pulter’s bee is greedy, and her “labour” is anything but admirable. Yet comparing Emblem 53 to early modern accounts of bees (both real and metaphorical bees) reveals that Pulter reinforces seventeenth-century knowledge about the characteristics of bees, and that her bee’s deviation from “appropriate” bee-behaviour allows Pulter to emphasize the dangers of solitude, particularly solitude from a community of other women.
Bees were a common metaphor, symbol, or analogy in classical and early modern literature, with Shakespeare’s Henry V and Milton’s Paradise Lost two familiar examples. Indeed, Pulter would not have been able to use bees as a metaphor without contending with the vast scope of bee literature and bee metaphors that had come before her. Of course, this assumes that Pulter had read “bee literature” and was acquainted with honeybees in some fashion. In his reading of Shakespeare on bees, Richard Grinnell confronts a similar question: how much did Shakespeare know about bees? His answer is worth quoting at length: “Shakespeare keeps bees the way any well-read and urbane writer might have been able to—building his metaphors and analogies from books at hand. Even when he moves beyond the classics, for example, in his description of Hal as a beekeeper willing to kill the bees to get the honey, he is clearly working with material that was common knowledge in his day” (850). Beekeeping during the early modern period was also an occupation and even obligation for both men and women. Treatises on caring for bees are often addressed to both sexes, and women feature prevalently in stories about bees, honey, and hives. William Lawson, writing in 1623, states in his treatise on gardening that he “will not account her any of my good Housewives, that wanteth either Bees or skilfulnesse about them.”
Gloss Note
Source: William Lawson, The Country Housewifes Garden. Containing Rules for Hearbs and Seeds of common use, with their times and seasons, when to set and sow them. Together With the Husbandry of Bees, published with secrets very necessary for every Housewife […] (London: Printed for Roger Jackson, 1623): 17.
2
Pulter would certainly not be unusual if she knew something—or even much—about the care and characteristics of honeybees.
Pulter’s bee (in contrast to the industrious and virtuous bees of most of the literature that predates Emblem 53) is greedy and grasping, and her bee’s struggle against confinement causes her exhaustion and death. According to Nicole A. Jacobs, another outlier in early modern bee imagery is John Milton, who compares the devils in Pandemonium to a swarm of bees in Paradise Lost. In her monograph Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony, Jacobs emphasizes the weight of literary tradition that any negative depiction of bees would have to shrug off: “The image of the humming collection [in Paradise Lost] resonates with the early modern reader, trained by tradition to imagine humanity as an orderly hive.”
Gloss Note
Source: Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 123.
3
The same “tradition” and “train[ing]” would have applied to Pulter’s readers, which perhaps explains why, although the snail (with its patient endurance) seems to be the positive exemplar for the reader, the “moral” of the emblem does not urge readers to imitate the snail necessarily. Instead, Pulter advises that we “think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” (line 52). Indeed, while the bee causes her own unnecessary death in Pulter’s poem, the common literary symbolism of worker bees in the seventeenth century was so overwhelmingly positive that readers must have resisted, even a little, the idea that they should be the greasy snail rather than the “active Amazonian maid” (line 7).
If a honey bee is separate from its colony, it is soon to die. In 1657, beekeeper Samuel Purchas wrote baldly, “one Bee, is no Bee.”
Gloss Note
Source: Purchas, A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects (London, 1657): 16.
4
Joseph Campana quotes from Purchas as well to emphasize the apian–and more general–early modern anxiety with solitude, segments, and fragmentation in the commonwealth. “For bees,” Campana concludes, “singularity is unbearable.”
Gloss Note
Source: Campana, “The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Bryan Reynolds, Paul Cefalu, and Gary Kuchar (New York: Routledge, 2011): 67.
5
Keith Botelho summarizes early modern beekeepers’ attitudes towards individual and collective bees: “early modern bee treatises often spoke of bees in the collective, not necessarily concerned with the individual bee (other than the Queen) but rather with the maintenance of the stock of bees in the hives, of the swarm, of the many.”
Gloss Note
Source: Botelho, “Honey, Wax, and the Dead Bee,” Early Modern Culture 11 (2016): 102.
6
Not only beekeepers, but also early modern writers of fiction or moral instruction generally referred to bees in the plural, and James Howell’s 1660 The Parly of Beasts; or Morphandra Queen of the Inchanted Island is a notable example. In Howell’s dialogues, the characters Morphandra and Pererius speak to a number of animals (who were once human) in turn, beginning with an Otter, then an Ass, an Ape, a Hind, a Mule, a Fox, a Boar, a Wolf, and a Goose. In the first ten sections of the book, the animal interlocutor is singular, but not so in the final dialogue, in which Morphandra and Pererius converse with “a Hive of Bees” (my emphasis), for bees were thought to exist only in a collective. All this is to say that when Pulter’s bee diverts from her voyage back to her hive, she is doing something unusual and potentially deadly: separating herself from the collective that gives her life.
Emblem 53 uses a number of means to create and maintain female community, whether real or imagined. The bee is an “Amazonian maid,” which of course places her in the well-known society of Amazons, but it also reminds readers that bees themselves live in a society that is predominantly female. Christina Luckyj and Naimh J. O’Leary assert that “classical models of segregated female communities could serve as code for political protest.”
Gloss Note
Source: Luckyj and O’Leary, Editor’s Introduction to The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017): 6.
7
Natural models–the model of the beehive–could also serve as such a “code,” especially when Pulter compares the bee and snail to Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes. The four men are associated with the military, which may remind readers of the military connotations of bees in early modern England. Butler, for instance, writes that “Besides their Soveraign, the Bees have also subordinate Governours and Leaders, not unfitly resembling Captains and Colonels of Soldiers.
Gloss Note
Source: Butler, 6.
8
With her references to women and military might, Pulter may be subtly gesturing towards a political protest, one that gives communities of women classical, natural, and even military power.
Elemental Edition
Line number 1

 Gloss note

goddess of dawn
Amplified Edition A
Line number 1

 Critical note

Pulter’s opening reference to “fair Aurora” (Roman goddess of the dawn) initiates the gendered imagery of the poem’s first seven lines, which culminates with Pulter’s description of the bee as “the active Amazonian maid” (line 7). These opening lines, with the Amazon reference as a kind of anchor point, transform the morning garden into a female separatist community—a framing with important implications for how we read the rest of the poem. First, framing the bee’s actions within this context connects the labor of collecting nectar to women’s work, which then prompts us to read Pulter’s later references to poisonous herbs (lines 13–14) and “choice extractions” (line 15) as nods to domestic labor. Second, it links Emblem 53 to other writings in which Pulter explores the intimacies that develop within communities of women, most notably the female friendships throughout her prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 1

 Gloss note

dawn
Amplified Edition A
Line number 2

 Critical note

My editorial decision to add an em-dash here turns lines 3–6 into a clause that expands Pulter’s description of Aurora in lines 1–2 and emphasizes the unique formal structure of Pulter’s “naked emblems” (for more on this, see my headnote). Adding the em-dash marks how the concise description of Aurora waking up in the poem’s first two lines becomes a more expansive illustration of Aurora in lines 3–6, a kind of visual unfolding that nods to the pictura element of the traditional emblem structure. For more on the flexible structure of early modern emblems, see Peter Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem (University of Toronto Press, 1979).
Elemental Edition
Line number 3

 Gloss note

pure
Amplified Edition A
Line number 3

 Critical note

Associating Aurora with virginity, Pulter departs from classical tradition in which Aurora is often aggressively sexualized. Pulter retains some of the figure’s fraught sexual history, though, by drawing on conventional blazon imagery, describing Aurora wrapped in a “silver” robe with “roses” ornamenting her “dewy curls.” This description echoes language from earlier poems in the manuscript dedicated to Aurora: To Aurora [1] [Poem 22], To Aurora [2] [Poem 26], and To Aurora [3] [Poem 34]. “To Aurora [3]” is particularly resonant here. In that earlier poem, Aurora “shakes her dewy curls” and fills the flowers—”each gold-enamelled cup”—with “honeydew” (lines 8–9). For more on Pulter’s use of blazon imagery throughout her poems, see Frances E. Dolan’s Exploration, “Hester Pulter and the Blazon in Early Modern England.”
Amplified Edition A
Line number 3

 Gloss note

uncover or expose to view
Amplified Edition B
Line number 3

 Critical note

Sperrazza points out in her Amplified Edition of Emblem 53 that Pulter unusually but often associates Aurora with virginity. Bees too, during the early modern period, were considered virginal, as Pulter herself emphasizes in To Aurora [3] [Poem 34], lines 10-11, and in Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined [Poem 57] line 5. The perceived virginity of bees also linked them to the Virgin Mary, which Henry Hawkins explains in his 1633 emblem book, Partheneia Sacra. His bee emblem begins with “To Bethlem’s sillie shed, me thinks I see / The Virgin hasten like a busie Bee,” and ends with “She was the Bee, the Hive her Sacred Womb” (Hawkins, Parthenia Sacra [London, 1633]: lines 1-2; 12). Also during the seventeenth century, the newly-elected Pope Urban VIII heralded himself by means of iconographic bees, iconography that John Milton then used to disparage Charles II (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony [New York: Routledge, 2021]: 117). For more on Urban VIII and bees, see Bee Wilson, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (London: John Murray, 2004): 129-31.
Elemental Edition
Line number 4

 Gloss note

half-blossomed
Amplified Edition A
Line number 4

 Gloss note

half-bloomed, half-blossomed
Elemental Edition
Line number 5

 Gloss note

wrapped up
Amplified Edition B
Line number 5

 Gloss note

The gorgeous clothing and coloration of Aurora are repeated in the later description of the speaker’s flower garden, which so attracts the bee that she neglects her hive.
Elemental Edition
Line number 6

 Gloss note

foretell
Amplified Edition A
Line number 6

 Gloss note

foretell, forecast
Amplified Edition B
Line number 6

 Gloss note

foretell
Elemental Edition
Line number 7

 Gloss note

Amazons were legendary female warriors who served a queen; here used figuratively to describe a bee
Amplified Edition A
Line number 7

 Critical note


The bee was a familiar subject of early modern emblems, frequently used as a model of ordered government (see Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber [Padua, 1621], emblem 149) or successful, interdependent economy (see Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblemes [London, 1585], pages 200–201). One seventeenth-century compendium on insects, compiled from the writings of several natural historians, including Edward Wotton, Conrad Gesner, and Thomas Moffet, featured a beehive on its frontispiece and described bees as “patterns and precedents of political and economical virtues” (The Theatre of Insects, or Lesser Living Creatures [London, 1658]).

Pulter’s transformation of the bee into an Amazonian figure, however, is more unusual and even a bit contentious. The comparison enhances Pulter’s interrogation of gender in this poem (see my headnote) and connects this emblem to some of the manuscript’s more explicit political poetry.

Amplified Edition B
Line number 7

 Critical note

Out of the beehive (also called a skep). At this point in the poem, the bee is behaving exactly as she ought: during the day, bees must fly out of the hive to forage for nectar and pollen. However, Pulter’s bee remains dangerously “out” of the hive as she is enticed by the garden’s beauty. That “Out” is the first word of this line suggests that the bee’s fault is not just endless toil, but also and particularly solitude and estrangement from the community of the hive (See Headnote).
Amplified Edition B
Line number 7

 Critical note

Pulter uses the adjective “Amazonian” to describe the bee in The Garden [Poem 12] as well (line 43). In the Amplified Edition of that poem, Frances E. Dolan notes on line 43 that “references to bees as ‘Amazonian’ acknowledged that their queen was female, which was not yet widely recognized.” While arguments about the sex of the ruling bee remained animated even into the eighteenth century, already in the mid-seventeenth century it would have been difficult to deny that the queen bee was indeed female. The sex of the queen bee was all but established by Charles Butler’s highly influential bee-keeping treatise, The Feminine Monarchy, published in 1609, and again in 1623 and 1634. This is the treatise that almost all later treatises either cited, feted, or challenged. Indeed, Richard R. Prete cites Butler’s text as the turning-point in publications explaining the sex of bees: “Butler’s sound reasoning and empirical observations, in conjunction with the popularity of his book, brought to an end any serious, empirically based debates about the genders of the honey bee castes. From this point on, writers of beekeeping texts would have to recognize these facts, even if only to refute them, if they were to be taken seriously by their audiences.” (“Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Biology, 24.1 (1991), 128). In 1637, therefore, Richard Remnant’s A Discourse or Historie of Bees spends considerable attention on the implication of bees as females. Moreover, in the first bee-keeping manual published after the English Civil War, Samuel Purchas in his 1657 A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects calls the hive “an Amazonian commonwealth” (London, 33). In 1712, Joseph Warder appeals to a metaphor already established when he entitles his bee-keeping treatise The True Amazons: Or The Monarchy of Bees. Pulter is thus hardly bucking tradition or “scientific” knowledge when she calls her bee an “Amazonian maid.”
Transcription
Line number 9

 Physical note

“E” and “e” appear written over earlier “i”s
Amplified Edition A
Line number 9

 Gloss note

flowers
Amplified Edition B
Line number 9

 Gloss note

Gold-colored flower
Amplified Edition A
Line number 10

 Gloss note

a quantity drawn or extracted
Amplified Edition B
Line number 10

 Gloss note

drink
Elemental Edition
Line number 12

 Gloss note

honey
Elemental Edition
Line number 12

 Gloss note

Bees were reputed to be able to turn poisons into honey.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 12

 Gloss note

honey
Amplified Edition A
Line number 12

 Physical note

revised in the manuscript; “for this ^her wisdome’s crownd”
Amplified Edition B
Line number 12

 Gloss note

Honey
Amplified Edition B
Line number 12

 Critical note

The image of a bee extracting honey while other creatures extracted poisons from the same plant is a common emblematic one. Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, for instance, the first emblem book published in English, contains the emblem entitled “Vita, aut morti.” Under the picture of a bee and a spider on a flower, the epigram reads, “Within one flower, two contraries remaine, / For proofe behoulde, the spider, and the bee, / One poison suckes, the bee doth honie draine: / The Scripture soe, hath two effects we see: / Unto the bad, it is a sworde that slaies, / Unto the good, a shielde in ghostlie fraies” (Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes [Leiden: 1586]: 51). Whitney borrows the pictura (and the sentiment of the poem and moral) from Hadrianus Junius’s Emblemata (1565).
Amplified Edition B
Line number 12

 Critical note

Bees were commonly praised for their intelligence, labour, and loyalty. John Thorley’s 1744 bee treatise Melissologia, for instance, hardly breaks new ground when it summarizes and admires the bees’ “loyalty” (7), “concord and unity” (12), “magnanimity or courage” (15), “labour and industry” (23), “patience and innocency” (27), “temperance and sobriety” (29), “chastity” (30), “neatness and decency” (31), “sympathy, and mutual assistance” (32), “sagacity and prudence” (33), and “vigilance and watchfulness” (Thorley, Melissologia. Or, The Female Monarchy [London, 1744]: 33). Indeed, “Bees themselves excell all other creatures … in Art, Wisdom, or Foresight, Industry, Valour and Loyalty,” Moses Rusden writes in 1679 (Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees [London, 1679]: 9). In particular, the fact that bees make honey and wax—both useful to humans—makes them especially prized or “crowned,” and thus the fertile bee in the hive is called a “queen.” “Her wisdom’s crowned,” however, cannot refer to only one singular bee, for a bee cannot make honey in isolation. If a bee is prized because it extracts honey from plants, the honor must go to the entire hive, the site of honey production.
Transcription
Line number 13

 Physical note

“t” in different hand from main scribe
Amplified Edition B
Line number 13

 Gloss note

All poisonous plants, including opium and hemlock in the following line.
Elemental Edition
Line number 14

 Gloss note

This plant, like opium and the three in the previous line, are all poisonous.
Elemental Edition
Line number 14

 Gloss note

land
Amplified Edition A
Line number 14

 Critical note

All five plants catalogued in these lines are poisonous, but their pollen is not. Consequently, the bee can safely extract pollen but the toad and spider of line 11 (eating the plants’ leaves, flowers, or stems) find “poisons.” Pulter may have gained knowledge of these plants from direct, hands-on experience. There were also several popular herbals circulating by the time she was writing, including John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597) and Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician Enlarged (London, 1653). The British Library offers a useful peek at Gerard’s Herbal, along with some context on Shakespeare’s use of “henbane” in Hamlet and “nightshade” in Romeo and Juliet.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 14

 Gloss note

alight.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 15

 Critical note

John Milton also uses the verb “extract” to describe the bee’s work in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. Adam calls Eve awake “to mark … how the bee / sits on the bloom extracting liquid sweet” (lines 20–25). The noun “extraction” and its verb form “extract” (line 12) had alchemical, medicinal, and culinary connotations in seventeenth-century use. “To extract” is “to obtain (constituent elements, juices, etc.) from a thing or substance by suction, pressure, distillation, or any chemical or mechanical operation” (“extract, v.4a,” OED Online). As evidence for this particular connotation of “extract,” the Oxford English Dictionary cites Hugh Plat’s The Jewel House of Art and Nature (London, 1594) and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History (London, 1626), two popular early modern scientific texts with which Pulter may have been familiar. Is Pulter also demonstrating her knowledge of early modern herbals, texts that catalogued plants and their medicinal and culinary uses? If so, her uses of “extract” and “extraction” connect to the catalogue of poisonous plants in lines 13–14. For an extended exploration of “human art” in relation to plants, see View But This Tulip (Emblem 40) [Poem 105].
Amplified Edition B
Line number 15

 Gloss note

Bees were thought to carry their collected nectar in “bags,” emphasized in a popular seventeenth-century song and poem entitled “The Sweet Bag of the Bee.” The poem/song appears numerous times in the expansive collection English Song 1600-1675: Facsimiles of Twenty-Six Manuscripts and an Edition of the Texts, edited with introductions by Elise Bickford Jorgens. Henry Lawes’ composition of the song appears in Oxford, Ms. Tenbury 1018, sig. 95V. The poem “The Sweet Bag of the Bee” also features in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648). Once a bee is “loaded well,” it must return to its hive to share its bounty with the rest of the bees.
Elemental Edition
Line number 16

 Gloss note

six-sided
Amplified Edition A
Line number 16

 Gloss note

six-sided; a reference to the comb shapes of a bee hive
Amplified Edition B
Line number 16

 Gloss note

hexagonal honeycomb
Amplified Edition B
Line number 16

 Critical note

If there is any doubt that the bee of Emblem 53 is a honey bee, line 14 negates that doubt. Solitary bees such as bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, etc. do not make hexagonal honeycomb. The honey bee’s decision to abort her return flight to her hive suddenly separates her from the community to which she belongs.
Elemental Edition
Line number 17

 Gloss note

apprehending
Amplified Edition A
Line number 17

 Gloss note

to be caught or captured by; the bee is “taken with” the beauty of the narrator’s garden
Amplified Edition A
Line number 17

This is our first glimpse of the poem’s narrator, often a much more pervasive presence in Pulter’s poems. In early poems in the manuscript, like Made When I Was Sick, 1647 [Poem 31], the entire poem revolves around the narrator’s experience and thoughts. The sparse, late use of the first-person pronoun here, though, is more typical of Pulter’s emblem poems, a few of which never reference the poet directly. See, for instance, Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86].

It’s worth noting that this first reference to the poet (one of only two in the poem) is also connected to the garden and the all-female community of the poem’s first half. Perhaps even more interesting, the narrator’s garden is the site of the bee’s demise. We learn the story of the bee and the snail in the next few lines and we might even imagine that the poet is a first-hand witness, watching the snail “slid[e]” out of the tulip in the morning while the bee “fainting lie[s]” (line 35).

Amplified Edition B
Line number 17

 Gloss note

Taking in
Amplified Edition B
Line number 18

 Critical note

The bee’s “bag” is full, so she would be unable to carry any more nectar or pollen, even if she finds some in the speaker’s alluring garden. The bee’s further investigation of the garden, therefore, is futile.
Transcription
Line number 19

 Physical note

insertion in different hand from main scribe
Transcription
Line number 19

 Physical note

double strike-through
Elemental Edition
Line number 19

 Gloss note

clever, elaborately made
Elemental Edition
Line number 19

 Gloss note

type of flower
Amplified Edition A
Line number 19

 Physical note

revised in the manuscript; “to see the \curious \ ouricolas curious drest”
Amplified Edition A
Line number 19

 Gloss note

primula auricula; also known as mountain cowslip or bear’s ear (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
Amplified Edition B
Line number 19

 Gloss note

A type of primrose, a greatly prized and showy flower.
Elemental Edition
Line number 20

 Gloss note

goddess of the rainbow, also a type of flower
Amplified Edition A
Line number 20

 Gloss note

In Greek mythology, Iris is messenger of the gods and a personification of the rainbow. Iris is also another type of flower. In contemporary botany, iris is a genus of many species of flowering plants like the iris sibirica (see Curation, Pulter’s Garden, for an image)
Amplified Edition B
Line number 20

 Gloss note

type of flower, also a messenger goddess with the rainbow as her emblem. The auriculas, therefore, which are usually yellow, are here rainbow-hued.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 21

 Critical note

The tulip has special significance in Pulter’s emblem. She not only makes the center of this flower the location for her fable of the bee and snail (as we’re about to see); she also describes the tulip with language that evokes the “tulipmania” of the early seventeenth century: “painted” (here and again in line 27) and “gilded” (line 34). From the 1580’s to the mid-1630’s, tulips were a prized and elusive commodity, famous in aristocratic gardens and still life paintings, but notoriously difficult to study and classify given their infinite variety. In John Gerard’s The Herbal, or General History of Plants (London, 1597), Gerard describes the tulips as “a strange and foreign flower” and emphasizes that it is impossible to catalogue all of its varieties: “each new yeare bringeth forth new plants of sundry colours, not before seene” ([London, 1597], Text Creation Partnership digital edition, Early English Books Online, pages 137–140). The craze surrounding the tulip culminated in the Dutch “tulipmania” of the 1630’s, when the price of tulip bulbs inflated drastically (the most expensive specimens went for around 5,000 guilders). We might speculate that Pulter has this recent cultural phenomenon in mind when she describes the tulips first as luxurious garden accessories (“painted in their pride”) and then as the bee’s “painted prison.” See this poem’s Curation (Pulter’s Garden) for examples of Gerard’s tulip woodcuts and Dutch still life paintings featuring the flower. For more on the tulip in early modern English contexts, see Anna Pavord’s The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad (Bloomsbury, 1999), especially chapter 3.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 21

 Critical note

John Parkinson writes in his 1629 gardening treatise, “There are not only divers kindes of Tulipas, but sundry diversities of colours in them, found out in these later dayes by many the [sic] searchers of natures varieties, which have not formerly been observed: our age being more delighted in the search, curiosity, and rarieites of these pleasant delights, then [sic] any age I thinke before. But indeede, this flower, above many other, deserves his true commendations and acceptance with all lovers of these beauties, both for the stately aspect, and for the admirable varietie of colours, that daily doe arise in them, farre beyond all other plants that grow” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris [London, 1629]: 45). Moreover, as Benedict S. Robinson identifies, tulips were first exported from Turkey to Europe in the late sixteenth century, and, he argues, “the tulip could also be taken to embody an ‘orientalizing’ of English tastes, an errant desire for exotic plants that rooted itself right into the soil” (Robinson, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 [2009]: 96). The bee’s attraction to the tulip, then, demonstrates her “covetousness,” but also her relatable, commonplace, and even human interest in the beautiful and exotic flower.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 22

 Gloss note

greedy
Amplified Edition B
Line number 22

 Critical note

The reader’s suspicion that Pulter’s bee is not the moral exemplar bees usually are in seventeenth-century poetry is here confirmed. While bees were usually considered selfless and self-sacrificing –Moses Rusden praises their “loyalty,” for example—Pulter’s bee is greedy. Another notable example of a “bad bee” appears in John Bunyan’s 1686 A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes For Children, which is filled with moral lessons in the form of naked emblems, not unlike the naked emblems Pulter employs. Bunyan’s emblem “Upon the Bee” starts innocuously enough: “The Bee goes out and Honey home doth bring; / And some who seek that Hony find a sting. / [N]ow wouldst thou have the Hony and be free / [Fr]om stinging; in the first place kill the Bee” (10). The following “Comparison” is startling, especially in contrast to the nigh-universal praise afforded the bee by Bunyan’s contemporaries: “This Bee an Emblem truly is of sin / Whose Sweet unto a many death hath been. / [N]ow would’st have Sweet from sin, and yet not dye, / [D]o thou in the first place mortifie” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 10).
Amplified Edition B
Line number 22

 Gloss note

saw
Amplified Edition B
Line number 24

 Critical note

At this point the bee is unable to return home not because she’s overladen with “nectar,” but because she covetously wants to explore every flower before flying back to the hive. “She’d not the power” to resist the temptation of the beckoning garden, and her greedy appetite leads to a rejection of home and companionship.
Elemental Edition
Line number 25

 Gloss note

“whom” is spelled as “home” in the manuscript; all are influenced by the sun
Amplified Edition B
Line number 25

 Gloss note

all things
Amplified Edition B
Line number 25

 Gloss note

inflowing power, usually from an astral, divine, or secret force.
Elemental Edition
Line number 26

 Gloss note

bend down, droop
Elemental Edition
Line number 26

 Gloss note

petals
Amplified Edition A
Line number 26

 Gloss note

the flowers
Amplified Edition B
Line number 27

 Gloss note

“Painted” confirms the exotic and unnatural allure of the tulip, and the bee’s foolishness in yielding to that allure.
Elemental Edition
Line number 28

 Gloss note

and with
Amplified Edition A
Line number 28

 Critical note

The third central character in Pulter’s emblem, the snail presented a unique sexual conundrum because of its shell, so early moderns hypothesized that the snail could spontaneously reproduce: “Thou thine own daughter then, and sire, / that son and mother art entire” (Richard Lovelace, “The Snail”). In medieval and early modern art, the snail was often linked to the Virgin Mary as a symbol of virginity. Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation, for example, includes a snail in the painting’s foreground, positioned directly in front of Mary as she receives the news of her immaculate conception. Geneticist Steve Jones offers a useful account of the history of the snail as a symbol of “sex, age, and death” in his lecture, “Snails in Art and the Art of Snails” (2014), available online through the Museum of London. By the time Pulter was writing, the snail was increasingly cited in debates about the role of reproduction in the plant and animal worlds. Several decades after Pulter’s death in 1678, Dutch anatomist Jan Swammerdam proved that snails were hermaphrodites (Bybel der Natuure, Leiden, 1737). Before that point, as historian of science Domenico Bertolini Meli outlines, hermaphrodites were seen to be rare occurrences, even monsters. Swammerdam’s findings became the basis for arguments on the natural occurrence of hermaphrodites in nature (Meli, “Of Snails and Horsetails: Anatomical Empiricism in the Early Modern Period,” Early Science and Medicine 18.4/5 (2013): 435–452).
Elemental Edition
Line number 29

 Gloss note

greasy
Amplified Edition A
Line number 29

 Gloss note

oily, greasy
Amplified Edition B
Line number 29

 Gloss note

oily
Elemental Edition
Line number 30

 Gloss note

herself
Amplified Edition B
Line number 30

 Gloss note

herself
Transcription
Line number 31

 Physical note

double strike-through
Transcription
Line number 31

 Physical note

in different hand from main scribe
Elemental Edition
Line number 31

 Gloss note

make
Amplified Edition A
Line number 31

 Physical note

revised in the manuscript; “bee doth \did \ such a”
Amplified Edition B
Line number 31

 Gloss note

Anger is an emotion rarely ascribed to bees during the early modern period. Bees are often called militant, watchful, agitated, or resourceful (all in defense of their hive), but not angry.
Elemental Edition
Line number 32

 Gloss note

Neither she
Elemental Edition
Line number 33

 Gloss note

here, Apollo, the sun god (named because he was from the island of Delos, usually called Delius)
Amplified Edition A
Line number 33

 Critical note

Pulter’s use of “Delia,” an unusual and distinctly feminized name for Apollo, the Greek sun god born on the island of Delos, marks a conscious shift from her use of “Aurora,” goddess of the dawn, at the start of the poem. As Victoria Burke notes in her Amplified Edition of Aurora [1] [Poem 3], the feminized Delia, as opposed to Delius, could be a transcription error, but Pulter does use Delia to refer to Apollo in several other poems, including The Eclipse [Poem 1] and The Garden, or the Contention of Flowers [Poem 12]. Given this emblem’s interrogation of gender, we might read Pulter’s slippage here as an invitation. As the female bee (“the active Amazonian maid”) dies and the poem shifts to a cluster of male figures in its closing lines, is Pulter’s switch from Aurora to Delia (and, perhaps, from Delius to Delia) meant to both mark and trouble this transition?
Amplified Edition A
Line number 33

 Gloss note

spread out
Amplified Edition B
Line number 33

 Critical note

“Delia” is Apollo, the sun god, so named for Delos, his island birthplace. “Delia” seems to be a particularly feminine epithet for Apollo, who is yet clearly gendered male. Indeed, Apollo is the first male character in the poem; Aurora, the bee, the tulip, and the snail are all female. While the feminine Aurora brought life and beauty to the world, Apollo’s “rays” reveal exhaustion and death for the bee.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 34

 Gloss note

adorned or embellished; a term most often associated with artificial objects
Amplified Edition B
Line number 35

 Critical note

“Out slid” mirrors “Out flew” of line 7. Pulter’s diction makes the bee far more attractive than the snail. Where the bee “flew,” the snail “slid.” While the bee is “active,” the snail is “unctuous.” Pulter may be playing up the positive characteristics of the bee to acknowledge its commonplace association with wisdom, virtue, etc. If Pulter’s readers—because of traditional representations and Pulter’s appealing depiction—sympathize with the bee, perhaps they are more likely to take personally the warnings of Emblem 53.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 35

 Critical note

Again, Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls provides helpful context for Pulter’s instructive snail. His emblem “Upon the Snail” is notably lengthier and more intimate than his scathing indictment of the bee: “She goes but softly, but she goeth sure, / She stumbles not, as stronger Creatures do: / Her Journeys shorter, so she may endure, / Better than they which do much further go. / She makes no noise, but stilly seizeth on / The Flow’r or Herb, appointed for her food: / The which she quietly doth feed upon, / While others range, and gare, but find no good. / And tho she doth but very softly go, / How ever ’tis not fast, nor slow, but sure; / And certainly they that do travel so, / The prize they do aim at, they do procure” (63-64). The subsequent “Comparison” is equally encouraging: “Although they seem not much to stire, less go, / For Christ that hunger, or from Wrath, that flee; / Yet what they seek for, quickly thy come to, / Tho it doth seem the farthest off to be. / One Act of Faith doth bring them to that Flow’r, / They so long for, that they may eat and live; / Which to attain is not in others Pow’r / Tho for it a King’s Ransom they would give. / Then let none faint, nor be at all dismaid, / That Life by Christ do seek, they shall not fail / To have it, let them nothing be afraid; / The Herb, and Flow’r is eaten by the Snail” (Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls [London, 1686]: 64). George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moral also praises the snail for its patience and tenacity. Wither writes in Book 1, Emblem 11: “If they would contemplate the slow-pac’d Snaile; / Or, this our Hieroglyphicke looke into: / For, thence we learne, that Perseverance brings / Large Workes to end, though slowly they creep on; / And, that Continuance perfects many things, / Which seeme, at first, unlikely to be done” (Wither, A Collection of Emblems [London: 1635]: 11). Pulter’s snail then, unlike her bee, aligns with seventeenth-century emblematics.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 36

 Critical note

beating her wings, also by herself. The phrase emphasizes the bee’s disordered actions in at least two senses: first, the bee should never have been by herself at night. When she should have returned to the community of the hive to share her nectar with her sisters, she buzzed off by herself to explore the tulip greedily. Second, when the bee finds herself in another, albeit weaker, female community—she, the tulip, and the snail are all gendered female in the poem—she does not function as a helpful part of that group either. Of course, the companionship of the tulip and the snail is a pale imitation of the familiar and ordered security of the hive. Yet the tulip and snail offer some familiar community: the bee is enclosed by the tulip as she would be enclosed by the hive, and she has a “sister” in the snail. Rather than accept the security of the tulip and the company of the snail, she beats her wings by herself, causing both her death by exhaustion, and also a sleepless night for the snail.
Amplified Edition B
Line number 37

 Gloss note

souls; people
Amplified Edition B
Line number 37

 Gloss note

in this emblem
Amplified Edition A
Line number 38

 Critical note

“Then let impatient spirits here but see / What ’tis to struggle with their destiny.” The first of the poem’s three possible mottoes. Pulter uses the fable of the snail, tulip, and bee to offer a lesson in struggling against destiny. The “impatient” bee struggles against her “painted prison” (line 27), while the patient snail “see[s] no hope” and “lay[s] … down to rest” (line 30). In the poem’s final motto, Pulter reminds us of the snail, tulip, and bee fable (“if no hope of liberty you see, / think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee” [lines 51–52]), but the lessons of the two mottoes are slightly different—enough to invite some critical thinking on the part of Pulter’s reader. This motto focuses on destiny, while the poem’s final motto foregrounds liberty. Who are the “impatient spirits” Pulter addresses with this lesson? Who is the “you” of the final motto’s direct address?
Amplified Edition B
Line number 38

 Gloss note

against
Elemental Edition
Line number 39

 Gloss note

proud, arrogant
Elemental Edition
Line number 39

 Gloss note

Charles de Gontant, duc de Biron; a celebrated sixteenth-century French soldier famed for his overweening pride and eventually executed for treason; in George Chapman’s play about him, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Biron’s sword is confiscated by the king.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 39

 Gloss note

proud, haughty
Amplified Edition A
Line number 39

 Critical note


This comparison starts Pulter’s catalogue of male military leaders, rulers, and thinkers—four in total by the poem’s end. As I noted in my headnote, this cast of characters marks a significant gender shift from the female-centric opening of the poem. But this phrase is also formally noteworthy. Rather than using just one or two comparisons to illustrate her point, Pulter here offers an extensive catalogue of examples: “so stout Biron” (line 39), “when Belisarius” (line 41), “so miscre’nt Bajazeth” (line 43), and “when wise Callisthenes” (line 47). The anaphoric “so’s” and “when’s” of these final lines, very typical of Pulter’s emblems, signal her strategic accumulation of these examples. Again, how might Pulter be using her poems to explore how poetic language signifies? See my headnote for more on this question.

Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, was a sixteenth-century French military leader eventually involved in conspiracies against the French crown. He was jailed and beheaded for treason in 1602. Alice Eardley cites George Chapman’s play, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France (1608) as one possible source for Pulter’s anecdote here. Biron was “notorious for his arrogance,” Eardley notes, and in Chapman’s play his sword is removed from him, “treatment he vigorously resists.” See Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, Ed. Alice Eardley, (Toronto: Iter, 2014), 263 n.513.

Amplified Edition B
Line number 39

 Critical note

Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes, all identified in the Elemental Edition of the poem, are exemplars of human responses to imprisonment and hardship; Biron and Bajazeth react as does the bee, and Belisarius and Callisthenes demonstrate the patience of the snail. The four men are particularly apropos comparisons to the bee because all of them are subordinates to a master. Honeybees, both now and in the seventeenth century, are communal creatures, which Samuel Purchas emphasizes when he writes “una Apis, nulla Apis, one Bee is no Bee” (16). He drives home the point: “A Bee, like a man cannot live alone, if shee be alone, shee dies” (17). The very fact that the bee of Pulter’s poem is an individual apart from the hive puts her in a position of rebellion and danger. In this case, the bee, tulip, and snail are subordinate to the “influence” of the sun, just as Biron, Belisarius, Bajazeth, and Callisthenes were subject to the rulings (or whims) of their masters.
Elemental Edition
Line number 41

 Gloss note

successful general of sixth-century Roman emperor Justinian, later accused of conspiracy; reputedly, his eyes were put out and he ended his life as a beggar.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 41

 Gloss note

Belisarius was a famous military leader of the Byzantine Empire. Pulter here references the apocryphal story that Justinian ordered Belisarius’s eyes put out and that Belisarius became a beggar at the gates of Rome. Looking forward a bit beyond Pulter’s lifetime, Belisarius’s story was especially popular by the end of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Jean-François Marmontel’s Bélisaire: A Novel (1767), Margaretta Faugères’s closet drama, Belisarius: A Tragedy (1795), and Jacques-Louis David’s painting, “Belisarius Begging for Alms” (1780).
Elemental Edition
Line number 43

 Gloss note

villainous
Elemental Edition
Line number 43

 Gloss note

fourteenth-century Turkish Emperor captured in war by Tamburlaine (the “proud Tartar”); in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine, Bajazeth kills himself on the bars of his prison.
Amplified Edition A
Line number 43

 Gloss note

an abbreviation of “miscreant”; heretical or pagan, but also villainous
Amplified Edition A
Line number 43

 Critical note

In Alice Eardley’s edition of Pulter’s poems, she cites Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590) as a possible source for Pulter’s reference to the Turkish emperor Bajazeth. In Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth and keeps him in a cage, taking him out only to serve as Tamburlaine’s footstool. After a lengthy imprisonment, Bajazeth kills himself by smashing his head against the bars of his cage. See Eardley (ed.), Poems, 263 n.516.
Elemental Edition
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 Gloss note

historian for Alexander the Great, reported by some to have been dismembered and displayed in a cage by Alexander in retribution for his criticisms; see Justin (Marcus Justinius), The History of Justin, Taken Out of the Four and Forty Books of Trogus Pompeius (London, 1654), p. 239.
Amplified Edition A
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 Gloss note

Callisthenes was a Greek historian, eventually the official historian of Alexander the Great until he was accused of plotting against Alexander. There are several different accounts of his death. Pulter seems to be referencing the version from Ptolemy in which Callisthenes is tortured and hanged in an iron cage.
Elemental Edition
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 Gloss note

so it
Elemental Edition
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 Gloss note

endured
Amplified Edition A
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 Critical note

The second of the poem’s three mottoes. This message seems specific to Pulter’s lines on Callisthenes, but the connection is puzzling given Callisthenes’s death in prison, without liberty. Is Pulter drawing our attention to the possible incongruities between her anecdotes and their concluding mottos? Or, perhaps, this motto becomes a thread for the poem’s broader message of stoic endurance: be patient and choose life.
Transcription
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 Physical note

imperfectly erased ascender follows
Amplified Edition B
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 Critical note

To whom is Pulter writing here? Nicole A. Jacobs identifies Pulter’s primary audience for her manuscript as her daughters (133), although Pulter appears to have imagined a future, more general readership as well (Jacobs, Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (New York: Routledge, 2021): 132). Indeed, all people could easily be tempted to behave as the “covetous” bee, “for it may well bee said, he is not humane, that is not allured with [herbs and flowers]” (Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (London, 1629): sig**3V). Yet if Emblem 53, like The Invitation into the Country, 1647 [Poem 2], A Dialogue Between Two Sisters [Poem 56], and To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter [Poem 38] is written expressly to Pulter’s daughters, the poem’s emphasis on community—and female community at that—becomes all the more pointed. Why does the bee die? Because it was alone. “Come, my dear children, to this lonely place,” Pulter begins “To My Dear Jane, Margaret, and Penelope Pulter, They Being at London, I at Broadfield.” “An Invitation into the Country, 1647” opens in a similar vein: “Dear daughters, come, make haste away.”Finally, “A Dialogue Between Two Sisters” concludes with the sisters’ resolve to “go to our sad mother: she’s alone” (line 54). The appropriate response for female grief is therefore female community. Pulter, however, ups the ante in Emblem 53: separation from female community results not just in grief, but in death.
Transcription
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 Physical note

remainder of page blank, as is reverse
Amplified Edition A
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 Critical note

“Then if no hope of liberty you see, / Think on the snail, the tulip, and the bee.” The final of the poem’s three mottoes. Pointing us back to the emblem’s central fable, Pulter’s final lines explicitly mark the snail, tulip, and bee story as a political allegory about liberty, resistance, and stoic endurance. But what of the poem’s complex gender politics? Where do they fit within such an allegory, particularly one written by a Royalist female poet at the height of the English Civil Wars? To explore further the intersections of gender and English Civil War politics, see Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 4.
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