The Stately Moose (Emblem 27)

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The Stately Moose (Emblem 27)

Poem #92

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 Charlotte Newcombe.

How to cite these versions

Conventions for these editions

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making

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X (Close panel)Notes: Transcription

 Editorial note

In these transcriptions we preserve as many details of the original material, textual, and graphic properties of Hester Pulter’s manuscript verse as we have found practical. Whenever possible, for instance, original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, lineation, insertions, deletions, alterations, spacing between words and lines, and indentation are all maintained; abbreviations and brevigraphs are not expanded; and superscript and subscript representations are retained. See full conventions for the transcriptions here.
Line number 1

 Physical note

poem follows end of the preceding one on same page, beginning two-thirds down
Line number 7

 Physical note

the “S” is possibly written over a prior letter (or there is an ink transfer across the page with a descender)
Line number 11

 Physical note

“u” corrects earlier “n”
Line number 11

 Physical note

all but comma (and possibly comma) in different hand from main scribe
Line number 36

 Physical note

written over “ff” and other letters, likely “ffor”
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
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Transcription
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[Emblem 27]
The Stately Moose
(Emblem 27)
Gloss Note
In the manuscript, Pulter’s emblems are numbered in the left margin alongside their first lines. This poem is emblem 27. As the poem is otherwise untitled, I have chosen to use the marginal number alongside the poem’s opening words (“The Stately Mooz”) as the title for this edition to reflect the emblem’s appearance in the manuscript.
27. The Stately Mooz
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
My main goal with editing this poem has been to preserve something of the texture and feel of reading the manuscript text while aiding clarity. For this reason, I have modernised u/v, i/j and long ‘s’, and the scribe’s ‘ff’ as ‘F’, but I have otherwise maintained the original spelling, punctuation and capitalisation. I have also silently lowered two words in superscript (“mounted” (l.1); “and” (l.11)), and expanded the poem’s one abbreviation (l.30) while italicising the supplied letter. To aid with clarity I have glossed words with their modern spellings where the manuscript’s spelling may hinder understanding. I have also glossed unfamiliar words with definitions from the OED, providing multiple possible definitions separated by semicolons where appropriate. Finally, I have provided explanatory notes to cultural and historical references.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This poem’s picturesque opening scene—a hill above a river valley, a moose munching quietly, her young skipping and playing—is darkly savaged when the moose is so foolish as to forego high ground and the light of day, out of envy of those in the shade beneath. The imagery is simultaneously naturalistic and moral, and the moose’s comeuppance speedy and grotesque: in the dark forest, she is “snatched,” “overpowered,” and “devoured” by a snake (again, uniting the naturalistic and the moral). The speaker then links this vivid image of a moose-stuffed serpent to more ordinary kinds of predation and, finally, a sequence of fairly banal complaints: “on this orb there’s no felicity”; “we are in a sea of sorrows tossed”; “when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost.” In the face of such relentless carnage and misery throughout the animal kingdom, it’s no surprise that the speaker’s final declaration of fealty is to God instead.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
In “27. The Stately Mooz”, Pulter presents the titular moose as an ambiguous emblematic figure who occupies an unpredictable and unfeeling world. The moose starts on a secure hilltop, but she descends, driven by hunger, and then seeks shade from the scorching sun under trees that (unknown to her) are infested with deadly serpents. She is consequently devoured by one of the “Hugest” (l.23), most monstrous serpents. Unlike emblems such as The Porcupine (Emblem 13) [Poem 79] where the prideful porcupine is condemned or Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86] where the raccoons (really beavers) are praised for their exemplary teamwork, in “The Stately Mooz” Pulter neither condemns nor praises the moose’s actions. Rather, Pulter characterises the moose as a sympathetic but flawed figure whose “hard fate” (l.26) emblematises the “Casuall” (l.39) and difficult nature of postlapsarian existence.
Pulter understands moose as shrewd, practical animals. The moose is a positive example of parental love in The Indian Moose (Emblem 7) [Poem 73] where she loves all three of her calves equally and so uses her “policy” (l.7) to pragmatically place them in three different locations and thus protect them from predators. Pulter also presents this astuteness in “The Stately Mooz” where the moose “Politickly… doth the Feilds Survey” (l.7) for lions, tigers, leopards and bears and only leaves the hill once she believes herself, albeit falsely, “Secure” (l.13). Given the“Stately” moose’s eventual demise, her descent of the hill could symbolise a blameworthy moral decline to be avoided by the reader, but Pulter offers no direct caution against this action. Instead, Pulter presents the moose as being compelled by the practicality of hunger. Having “of the beautious prospect tane her fill” (l.2) the moose sensibly next “Considers… her diet” (l.5). Indeed, the emblem implies that eating downhill may be a physical necessity:
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
For Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
(ll.13–15)
Seventeenth-century descriptions of moose, or moose-like creatures such as elk, often allude to their difficulty in eating (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). In his bestiary The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (1607) Edward Topsell describes elk as having to walk “backward like a Sea-crab” while eating to avoid biting their own large upper lip.
Gloss Note
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T5r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised]
1 Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1637) characterises moose as “long legged” and thus needing to “kneel” to feed on grass, while the anonymous A Treatise of New England (1645) describes moose as “frequent[ing] the low rank grounds to feed upon long grass, by reason their fore feet are longer than their hinder feet”.
Gloss Note
Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an abstract of New England, composed in three books (Printed for Charles Green, 1637), sig. K1v. EEBO; A treatise of Nevv England published in anno Dom. 1637. And now reprinted (London, 1645), sig. A4r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised].
2 Pulter’s moose also has difficulty eating because “Nature” has placed her antlers so “low” that she cannot easily reach the grass. While Pulter does not mention the moose’s legs, the conjunction “For” implies that the moose may need to feed going “down” the hill. Perhaps her moose is also moving to the “low rank grounds” (“rank” meaning growing vigorously) and “long grass” at the bottom of the hill to compensate for her “low” antlers.
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “rank, adj., sense II.6”, last modified December 2023.
3 Alternatively, the continuous verb in “feeding down did go”, and again in “when in feeding Shee went down the Hill” (l.16), suggests the moose eats as she moves downhill. Interestingly, eating whilst facing or moving downhill would somewhat level the unevenness of overly-long front legs and thus allow the moose’s head to reach closer to the ground. Whatever the exact reasoning, Pulter clearly presents the moose’s descent of the hill as a physical necessity that is nonetheless undertaken cautiously and carefully. Pulter also offers a physical explanation for the moose’s retreat from the sun into the shade: “His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe / That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe” (ll.19–20). The moose’s initial shrewd caution and Pulter’s naturalistic justifications for the moose’s movements make her actions understandable to the reader. Thus, we are more likely to sympathise with the moose when the poem’s speaker parenthetically laments the “poor Beast” (l.24) and “her hard fate” (l.26). Indeed, the references to “Nature” (l.14) and “fate” confer a sense of inevitability onto the moose’s death that somewhat absolves her of culpability.
However, Pulter’s description of the moose’s movement out of the “Scald[ing]” sun and into “the Shades” is complicated by the fact that the scorching sun also makes the moose “envie” (l.18) those feeding beneath the trees. This is an odd detail to include as it does not seem to clearly contribute narratively or causally to the moose’s movement out of the sun which, as above, is directly prompted by the burning sun. On the one hand, the shade is a place of privacy in Pulter’s The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84] and of sanctuary in The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) [Poem 87] so to a reader of Pulter’s emblems it is understandable that the shade could represent a place of respite. Again, in The Invitation into the Country (Poem 2) [Poem 2] “shady groves” (l.38) are a key component of the ideal pastoral landscape of pre-Civil War Broadfield, Pulter’s country estate. Given these poems and Pulter’s opening description in “The Stately Mooz” of the “beautious prospect” (l.2) where “Floras Robe” (l.4) is ornamented with lace-like silver streams, the reader is as liable as the moose to misread or misinterpret the environment as a locus amoenus (a lovely or idyllic place). On the other hand, Pulter’s poetry is replete with light imagery and sunlight in particular often symbolises the divine (see, for example, The Eclipse (Poem 1) [Poem 1], Of Night and Morning (Poem 5) [Poem 5], The Center (Poem 30) [Poem 30]). The complement to these images is Pulter’s equally pervasive association of darkness and shade with misery, death, sin and hell (see, for example, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul (Poem 24) [Poem 24], My Soul’s Sole Desire (Poem 29) [Poem 29], The Center (Poem 30), and Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory (Poem 48) [Poem 48]). By leaving the hilltop and forsaking the “Sun” (l.17) for the “Shades” (l.20), is the moose forsaking the moral high ground and light of God for the darkness of sin, implied by her “envie”? If the moose’s actions are meant to be understood as sinful, then is Pulter using the epithet “Stately” (l.1) in the now obsolete sense of haughty or arrogant?
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “stately, adj., sense 3.a”, last modified September 2023.
4 This is how she seems to use the term in Universal Dissolution (Poem 6) [Poem 6] where a “stately cedar” is characterised as overly ambitious and proud (ll.23–25). If so, the moose may misread her environment not through an understandable error, but because she is too proud and thus assured of her own safety to recognise Pulter’s caution that “when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost” (l.36).
Pulter’s precise choice of serpents as the moose’s predator also seems to support the interpretation of the moose as sinful, with snakes being a common Christian symbol of the “Death & Hell” (l.33) the speaker explicitly links them to later in the poem. However, the serpent and moose is not the only example of animal predation Pulter offers in the emblem and the moose’s demise precipitates a list of more predators and prey: hawks trussing pheasant and partridges, cats catching mice, and foxes snatching lambs from their mothers (ll.27–30). Seventeenth-century accounts of New England make no mention of snakes attacking or eating moose (see Curation “Moose: Fact and Fiction”), potentially indicating that Pulter’s choice of serpents may be primarily symbolic. Yet, these same accounts demonstrate an understanding of moose as a species of, or at least akin to, deer. Significantly, an antipathy between snakes and deer is not unfounded (see Curation Serpents vs. Deer). For example, both Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History (1601) and Topsell give accounts of deer and snakes fighting. Furthermore, in his Latin emblem book Symbolorum et Emblematum ex Animalibus (1595), Joachim Camerarius uses the antipathy between deers and serpents for an emblem where the serpent-covered deer seeking water becomes a symbol for the Christian seeking God as the one means of salvation. Therefore, Pulter seems to synthesise accounts of New England with older natural histories and emblem tradition to flesh out her knowledge of the moose and its possible symbolic associations. Placing the pairing of moose and snake at the beginning of a longer list of predators and prey partially naturalises the image, complicating the serpent’s devouring of the moose as an emblem for the descent into and punishment of sin: pheasant, partridge, mice and especially the seemingly innocent “playing” (l.30) lambs are the unfortunate prey of a natural, albeit unsparing, order rather than of their own sinful ways.
The poem does not conclude with a call to avoid envy and sin, or with a recommendation to keep to the security of the high ground and divine light. Rather, by layering the natural brutality of animal predation and the symbolic punishment of sin, Pulter implicates the postlapsarian world as a whole in the emblem’s scope: “By which example wee may plainly See / That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie” (ll.31–32). The final ten lines of the poem are in first-person plural, involving both the speaker and reader in the emblem’s wretched world. Like the serpent, hawk, cat and fox, “Death & Hell” are continually “Watch[ing]” and stalking us, predators waiting to “devour” “Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies” (ll.33–34). By mentioning “Our Sinfull Souls”, Pulter evokes the human postlapsarian condition as inherently sinful. In A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44] Pulter describes the sun as able to scorch the speaker because of the biblical Fall that imbues humanity with sin (ll.77–80). In “The Stately Mooz”, the moose being scorched by the sun may indicate her, and by extension the reader’s, inherited fallen condition. Perhaps the fact that the sun scorches the moose is more emblematically significant than the moose entering the shade. Furthermore, perhaps the moose is not sinful because she is envious, but rather her enviousness is a symptom of her fallenness. The moose is sinful, but we nonetheless are expected to empathise with her flawed character because we too are fallen. As such, the emblem as a whole imagines the transitory, postlapsarian world as a relentless “Sea of Sorrows” (l.35) that can only end in death.
For the Royalist Pulter, this postlapsarian “Sea of Sorrows” is also a post-Civil War world. Alice Eardley dates the composition of Pulter’s emblems to between 1653 and 1658, during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.
Gloss Note
Alice Eardley, “Introduction”, in Poems, Emblems and the Unfortunate Florinda, by Hester Pulter (Toronto, Iter Press, 2014), 21.
5 While less explicitly political than some of Pulter’s other emblems, the adjective “Stately” (l.1) and adverb “Politickly” (l.7) place the poem in the realm of politics. Moreover, Pulter’s mention of the drowning of “Beauclarks Children” (l.37) references a shipwreck where King Henry I’s only legitimate male heir to the throne died, thus contributing to a civil war upon his death between Matilda, his only surviving legitimate child, and his nephew Stephen for the throne (see Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War). In the wake of the Civil War and Charles I’s execution, this story of English royalty in crisis may have particularly evoked Pulter’s Royalist sympathies. Finally, Pulter’s description of the moose’s “Stag like horns” is suggestive of the hunted harts and stags that so often represent the plight of Charles I in seventeenth-century poetry, including Pulter’s own verse (see Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter (Poem 10) [Poem 10], The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) and This Flying Fish (Emblem 25) [Poem 90]. See also Elizabeth Kolkovich’s Curation The Hunted Deer).
Gloss Note
See also Anne Elizabeth Carson, “The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King”, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45, no.3 (2005): 537–56.
6 Pulter’s moose is not hunted, but the fact that her forest is infested with “horrid Serpents” bears symbolic similarities to the many-headed, serpentine hydra that Pulter and other Royalists used to depict the Republican government (see This Huge Leviathan (Emblem 42) [Poem 107]. See also Victoria E. Burke’s Curation The Many Headed Hydra). As such, it is perhaps not too outlandish to suggest that the “Hugest” (l.23) serpent, described as a “Monster” (l.25), could emblematise Cromwell himself and (from a Royalist perspective) his sinful role in Charles I’s execution. In “The Stately Mooz”, the inevitability of predators catching prey, as well as the moose’s rapidly changing fortune, bear similarity to the overtly political emblem "This Flying Fish (Emblem 25)". In this reading, Charles I as the “Stately Mooz” becomes a sympathetic, although not flawless, victim of the “Monster” (l.25) Cromwell, but also secondarily of the relentlessly brutal, unpredictable world.
In the face of such a world, Pulter closes the emblem by enacting the “devotional turn” that Rachel Dunn identifies as characteristic of her emblems.
Gloss Note
Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book”, The Seventeenth Century 30, no.1 (2015): 63.
7 Rather than ending with a moral call to action (e.g., avoid envy or stay in God’s light), Pulter turns inward. Unable to resolve the world’s unpredictability, the speaker can only rely on God: “Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Casuall bee / Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee” (ll.39–40). It is this unpredictability that makes the moose such an ambiguous and complicated emblematic figure, straddling both sympathy and culpability: if the moose’s “hard fate” is the outcome of the changeable, uncontrollable world of animal predation, then how could her caution and pragmatism ever counteract this? Pulter cannot conclude with a call to emulate or condemn the moose, because the poem forces us all, including the speaker, to grapple with our own sinful, postlapsarian and mortal nature. Ultimately, “The Stately Mooz” is an emblem for the unavoidable transience and difficulty of our own existence. We cannot model the moose, Pulter suggests, because we are all already the moose, involved in an infelicitous and brutal world.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
27
Physical Note
poem follows end of the preceding one on same page, beginning two-thirds down
The Stately Mooz being ^mounted up the hill
The stately moose, being mounted up the hill,
The
Gloss Note
Noble, majestic; more negatively, haughty or arrogant; majestic in size, elegantly built; possessing a slow and dignified gait.
Stately
Gloss Note
Moose. This was a relatively new word in early modern English (OED first usage 1614) deriving from two Algonquian languages of North America.
Mooz being mounted up the hill
2
And of the beavtious proſpect tane her fill
And of the beauteous prospect taken her fill,
And of
Gloss Note
The beautiful view.
the beautious prospect
Critical Note
Taken, likely an alternate spelling of the elided form ta’en to preserve the metre by condensing two syllables to one.
tane her fill
3
Viewing the Rivers in the vale that Trace
Viewing the rivers in the
Gloss Note
valley
vale that
Gloss Note
pass
trace,
Viewing the Rivers in the vale that Trace
4
Inriching ffloras Robe like Silver Lace
Enriching
Gloss Note
goddess of spring
Flora’s robe like silver lace;
Gloss Note
Enriching.
Inriching
Gloss Note
Flora’s. The Roman Goddess of Flowers.
Floras Robe like Silver Lace
5
The next thing Shee Conſiders is her diet
The next thing she considers is her diet:
The next thing
Gloss Note
the Moose.
Shee Considers is her diet
6
How Shee may eat the fflowers and herbs in quiet
How she may eat the flowers and herbs in quiet.
How Shee may eat the Flowers and herbs in quiet
7
Then Politickly
Physical Note
the “S” is possibly written over a prior letter (or there is an ink transfer across the page with a descender)
Shee doth the ffeilds Survey
Then
Gloss Note
shrewdly
politicly she doth the fields survey
Then
Gloss Note
Shrewdly, skillfully.
Politickly Shee doth the Feilds Survey
8
To See if any cruell Beasts of prey
To see if any cruel beasts of prey–
To See if any cruell Beasts of prey
9
As Lion, Tiger, Leopard, or Bear,
As lion, tiger, leopard, or bear–
As Lion, Tiger, Leopard, or Bear,
10
Might her disturb, but to diſpell all fear
Might her disturb; but to dispel all fear,
Might her disturb, but to dispell all fear
11
Physical Note
“u” corrects earlier “n”
ffauns, Lambs
Physical Note
all but comma (and possibly comma) in different hand from main scribe
\, and \ Kids, did Skip about and play
Fawns, lambs, and kids did skip about and play
Fauns, Lambs, and Kids, did Skip about and play
12
Whilst their old weary Dams their Sentinels lay
Whilst their old weary dams, their
Gloss Note
guards
sentinels, lay.
Whilst their old weary
Gloss Note
Mothers.
Dams their
Gloss Note
Guards.
Sentinels lay
thus
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
13
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
Thus, being secure, she feeding down did go,
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
14
ffor Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
For Nature placed her stag-like horns so low
For Nature
Gloss Note
Placed.
plac’t her
Critical Note
A stag is a male deer, and often specifically a male red deer. Pulter’s moose is presented as female throughout, so this description introduces some gender ambiguity into the poem (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). The hunted stag was also a popular Royalist symbol for Charles I (see Elizabeth Kolkovich’s CurationThe Hunted Deer).
Stag like horns Soe low
15
That Shee could never have of graſs her ffill
That she could never have of grass her fill.
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
16
But when in feeding Shee went down the Hill
But when, in feeding, she went down the hill
But when in feeding Shee went down the Hill
17
Which lay full South, the Sun being now her zeneth
Which lay full south, the sun being
Gloss Note
now at
now her zenith,
Which lay full South, the Sun being now
Gloss Note
A zenith is the point in the sky directly overhead. The sun is “her zeneth” meaning it is directly over the moose’s head, perhaps indicating that it is midday (see A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44], l.67).
her zeneth
18
Which made her envie thoſe that fed bene’th
Which made her envy those that fed
Gloss Note
beneath the shade
beneath,
Which made her envie those that fed bene’th
19
His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe
His perpendicular beams did scald her so,
His
Gloss Note
At right-angle to the horizon, vertical. As the sun is directly over the moose’s head, its beams are beating down on her vertically.
Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe
20
That Shee Reſolv’d into the Shades to goe
That she resolved into the shade to go
That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe
21
Of Straight Armd Cedars, ffirrs, Cypres, Pine
Of straight-armed cedars, firs, cypress, pine,
Of Straight Armd Cedars, Firrs, Cypres, Pine
22
About whoſe branches horrid Serpents Twine
About whose branches horrid serpents twine.
About whose branches horrid
Critical Note
Serpents and deer were commonly considered natural enemies. See Curation Serpents vs. Deer.
Serpents Twine
23
One of the Hugest Slip’d down from a bough
One of the hugest slipped down from a bough
One of the Hugest Slip’d down from a bough
24
And Snatcht the Mooz (poor Beast) Shee knew not how
And snatched the moose (poor beast!) she knew not how.
And
Critical Note
Snatched. To suddenly snap or bite at something; or to seize or take hold of; or to remove quickly from sight. There is precedent in early modern natural histories for massive snakes capable of eating large animals like moose whole (see Curation “Serpents vs. Deer”), but it is also possible that the serpent is quickly grabbing the moose and dragging it away.
Snatcht the Mooz (poor Beast) Shee knew not how
25
Thus beeing by this Monſter over powr’d
Thus being by this monster overpowered
Thus beeing by this Monster over powr’d
26
(Oh her hard fate) Shee was by him devour’d
(O her hard fate!), she was by him devoured.
(Oh her hard fate) Shee was by him devour’d
27
Soe have I Seen a hawk A Pheſant truſs
So have I seen a hawk a pheasant
Gloss Note
seize
truss
Soe have I Seen a hawk A Phesant
Gloss Note
To seize or clutch in its talons.
truss
28
Or Patriges, Soe Melancholly Puſs
(Or partridges), so
Gloss Note
Cats were proverbially associated with sadness.
melancholy puss
Or
Gloss Note
Partridges.
Patriges, Soe
Critical Note
Cats were proverbially associated with melancholy. Cf. Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), sig.N3v, where a cat contributes “his melancholy” for the making of a human; William Shakespeare, The history of Henrie the Fourth [Henry IV, Part 1] (1598), sig.A4r, where Falstaff declares he is “as melancholy as a gyb Cat, or a lugd beare”. In modern editions of Henry IV, Part 1, the line appears around 1.2.69. In Josua Poole’s The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English poesie (1657) he suggests multiple epithets for “Cat” but “Melancholy” is first in the list (sig.F3r).
Melancholly Puss
29
Doth Mice Surpriſe, Soe ffoxes Snatch up Lambs
Doth mice
Gloss Note
attack suddenly
surprise, so foxes snatch up lambs
Doth Mice
Gloss Note
To attack suddenly; to capture, seize.
Surprise, Soe Foxes Snatch up Lambs
30
As they lie playing by their Uberous Dams
As they lie playing by their
Gloss Note
nursing, nurturing
uberous dams–
As they lie playing by their
Gloss Note
Supplying abundant milk or nourishment.
Uberous Damms
31
By which example wee may plainly See
By which example we may plainly see
By which example wee may plainly See
32
That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie
That on this orb there’s no felicity.
That on this
Gloss Note
The Earth.
Orb ther’s noe felicitie
33
ffor Death & Hell Combine, and Watch each hour
For Death and Hell combine and watch, each hour
For Death & Hell Combine, and Watch each hour
34
Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies to devour
Our sinful souls and bodies to devour;
Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies to devour
35
’ffor wee are in A Sea of Sorrows Tost
For we are in a sea of sorrows tossed,
For wee are in A Sea of Sorrows Tost
36
Physical Note
written over “ff” and other letters, likely “ffor”
And when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost
And when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost.
Physical Note
In the manuscript “And” is written over “ffor”. As the previous line also begins with “ffor” this could have been done to avoid repetition, or it could be the correcting of a mistranscription.
And when we’re most Secure
Gloss Note
we’re.
wee’r nearest lost
37
As Beauclarks Children did their wrack deplore
As
Gloss Note
The children of King Henry I (Henry Beauclerc), including his heir and many illegitimate children, drowned when their ship hit a rock near the shore of Normandy.
Beauclerc’s children did their wrack
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
Gloss Note
In 1120 three children of King Henry I, also known as Henry Beauclerc, including his only male heir, died in a shipwreck. See Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War.
As Beauclarks Children did their wrack deplore
38
With Greater grief beeing in the Sight of Shore
With greater grief being in the sight of shore.
With Greater grief beeing in the Sight of Shore
39
Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Caſuall bee
Then seeing our lives so frail and
Gloss Note
subject to chance
casual be,
Then Seeing our lives Soe
Gloss Note
Fragile, weak; subject to change or decay, transient.
frail and
Gloss Note
Subject to chance.
Casuall bee
40
Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee.
Let me depend (dear God) on none but Thee.
Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee.
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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

This poem’s picturesque opening scene—a hill above a river valley, a moose munching quietly, her young skipping and playing—is darkly savaged when the moose is so foolish as to forego high ground and the light of day, out of envy of those in the shade beneath. The imagery is simultaneously naturalistic and moral, and the moose’s comeuppance speedy and grotesque: in the dark forest, she is “snatched,” “overpowered,” and “devoured” by a snake (again, uniting the naturalistic and the moral). The speaker then links this vivid image of a moose-stuffed serpent to more ordinary kinds of predation and, finally, a sequence of fairly banal complaints: “on this orb there’s no felicity”; “we are in a sea of sorrows tossed”; “when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost.” In the face of such relentless carnage and misery throughout the animal kingdom, it’s no surprise that the speaker’s final declaration of fealty is to God instead.
Line number 3

 Gloss note

valley
Line number 3

 Gloss note

pass
Line number 4

 Gloss note

goddess of spring
Line number 7

 Gloss note

shrewdly
Line number 12

 Gloss note

guards
Line number 17

 Gloss note

now at
Line number 18

 Gloss note

beneath the shade
Line number 27

 Gloss note

seize
Line number 28

 Gloss note

Cats were proverbially associated with sadness.
Line number 29

 Gloss note

attack suddenly
Line number 30

 Gloss note

nursing, nurturing
Line number 37

 Gloss note

The children of King Henry I (Henry Beauclerc), including his heir and many illegitimate children, drowned when their ship hit a rock near the shore of Normandy.
Line number 37

 Gloss note

lament
Line number 39

 Gloss note

subject to chance
Sorry, but there are no notes associated with any currently displayed witness.
X (Close panel)Elemental Edition
Elemental Edition
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[Emblem 27]
The Stately Moose
(Emblem 27)
Gloss Note
In the manuscript, Pulter’s emblems are numbered in the left margin alongside their first lines. This poem is emblem 27. As the poem is otherwise untitled, I have chosen to use the marginal number alongside the poem’s opening words (“The Stately Mooz”) as the title for this edition to reflect the emblem’s appearance in the manuscript.
27. The Stately Mooz
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
My main goal with editing this poem has been to preserve something of the texture and feel of reading the manuscript text while aiding clarity. For this reason, I have modernised u/v, i/j and long ‘s’, and the scribe’s ‘ff’ as ‘F’, but I have otherwise maintained the original spelling, punctuation and capitalisation. I have also silently lowered two words in superscript (“mounted” (l.1); “and” (l.11)), and expanded the poem’s one abbreviation (l.30) while italicising the supplied letter. To aid with clarity I have glossed words with their modern spellings where the manuscript’s spelling may hinder understanding. I have also glossed unfamiliar words with definitions from the OED, providing multiple possible definitions separated by semicolons where appropriate. Finally, I have provided explanatory notes to cultural and historical references.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
This poem’s picturesque opening scene—a hill above a river valley, a moose munching quietly, her young skipping and playing—is darkly savaged when the moose is so foolish as to forego high ground and the light of day, out of envy of those in the shade beneath. The imagery is simultaneously naturalistic and moral, and the moose’s comeuppance speedy and grotesque: in the dark forest, she is “snatched,” “overpowered,” and “devoured” by a snake (again, uniting the naturalistic and the moral). The speaker then links this vivid image of a moose-stuffed serpent to more ordinary kinds of predation and, finally, a sequence of fairly banal complaints: “on this orb there’s no felicity”; “we are in a sea of sorrows tossed”; “when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost.” In the face of such relentless carnage and misery throughout the animal kingdom, it’s no surprise that the speaker’s final declaration of fealty is to God instead.

— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
In “27. The Stately Mooz”, Pulter presents the titular moose as an ambiguous emblematic figure who occupies an unpredictable and unfeeling world. The moose starts on a secure hilltop, but she descends, driven by hunger, and then seeks shade from the scorching sun under trees that (unknown to her) are infested with deadly serpents. She is consequently devoured by one of the “Hugest” (l.23), most monstrous serpents. Unlike emblems such as The Porcupine (Emblem 13) [Poem 79] where the prideful porcupine is condemned or Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86] where the raccoons (really beavers) are praised for their exemplary teamwork, in “The Stately Mooz” Pulter neither condemns nor praises the moose’s actions. Rather, Pulter characterises the moose as a sympathetic but flawed figure whose “hard fate” (l.26) emblematises the “Casuall” (l.39) and difficult nature of postlapsarian existence.
Pulter understands moose as shrewd, practical animals. The moose is a positive example of parental love in The Indian Moose (Emblem 7) [Poem 73] where she loves all three of her calves equally and so uses her “policy” (l.7) to pragmatically place them in three different locations and thus protect them from predators. Pulter also presents this astuteness in “The Stately Mooz” where the moose “Politickly… doth the Feilds Survey” (l.7) for lions, tigers, leopards and bears and only leaves the hill once she believes herself, albeit falsely, “Secure” (l.13). Given the“Stately” moose’s eventual demise, her descent of the hill could symbolise a blameworthy moral decline to be avoided by the reader, but Pulter offers no direct caution against this action. Instead, Pulter presents the moose as being compelled by the practicality of hunger. Having “of the beautious prospect tane her fill” (l.2) the moose sensibly next “Considers… her diet” (l.5). Indeed, the emblem implies that eating downhill may be a physical necessity:
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
For Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
(ll.13–15)
Seventeenth-century descriptions of moose, or moose-like creatures such as elk, often allude to their difficulty in eating (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). In his bestiary The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (1607) Edward Topsell describes elk as having to walk “backward like a Sea-crab” while eating to avoid biting their own large upper lip.
Gloss Note
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T5r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised]
1 Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1637) characterises moose as “long legged” and thus needing to “kneel” to feed on grass, while the anonymous A Treatise of New England (1645) describes moose as “frequent[ing] the low rank grounds to feed upon long grass, by reason their fore feet are longer than their hinder feet”.
Gloss Note
Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an abstract of New England, composed in three books (Printed for Charles Green, 1637), sig. K1v. EEBO; A treatise of Nevv England published in anno Dom. 1637. And now reprinted (London, 1645), sig. A4r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised].
2 Pulter’s moose also has difficulty eating because “Nature” has placed her antlers so “low” that she cannot easily reach the grass. While Pulter does not mention the moose’s legs, the conjunction “For” implies that the moose may need to feed going “down” the hill. Perhaps her moose is also moving to the “low rank grounds” (“rank” meaning growing vigorously) and “long grass” at the bottom of the hill to compensate for her “low” antlers.
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “rank, adj., sense II.6”, last modified December 2023.
3 Alternatively, the continuous verb in “feeding down did go”, and again in “when in feeding Shee went down the Hill” (l.16), suggests the moose eats as she moves downhill. Interestingly, eating whilst facing or moving downhill would somewhat level the unevenness of overly-long front legs and thus allow the moose’s head to reach closer to the ground. Whatever the exact reasoning, Pulter clearly presents the moose’s descent of the hill as a physical necessity that is nonetheless undertaken cautiously and carefully. Pulter also offers a physical explanation for the moose’s retreat from the sun into the shade: “His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe / That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe” (ll.19–20). The moose’s initial shrewd caution and Pulter’s naturalistic justifications for the moose’s movements make her actions understandable to the reader. Thus, we are more likely to sympathise with the moose when the poem’s speaker parenthetically laments the “poor Beast” (l.24) and “her hard fate” (l.26). Indeed, the references to “Nature” (l.14) and “fate” confer a sense of inevitability onto the moose’s death that somewhat absolves her of culpability.
However, Pulter’s description of the moose’s movement out of the “Scald[ing]” sun and into “the Shades” is complicated by the fact that the scorching sun also makes the moose “envie” (l.18) those feeding beneath the trees. This is an odd detail to include as it does not seem to clearly contribute narratively or causally to the moose’s movement out of the sun which, as above, is directly prompted by the burning sun. On the one hand, the shade is a place of privacy in Pulter’s The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84] and of sanctuary in The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) [Poem 87] so to a reader of Pulter’s emblems it is understandable that the shade could represent a place of respite. Again, in The Invitation into the Country (Poem 2) [Poem 2] “shady groves” (l.38) are a key component of the ideal pastoral landscape of pre-Civil War Broadfield, Pulter’s country estate. Given these poems and Pulter’s opening description in “The Stately Mooz” of the “beautious prospect” (l.2) where “Floras Robe” (l.4) is ornamented with lace-like silver streams, the reader is as liable as the moose to misread or misinterpret the environment as a locus amoenus (a lovely or idyllic place). On the other hand, Pulter’s poetry is replete with light imagery and sunlight in particular often symbolises the divine (see, for example, The Eclipse (Poem 1) [Poem 1], Of Night and Morning (Poem 5) [Poem 5], The Center (Poem 30) [Poem 30]). The complement to these images is Pulter’s equally pervasive association of darkness and shade with misery, death, sin and hell (see, for example, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul (Poem 24) [Poem 24], My Soul’s Sole Desire (Poem 29) [Poem 29], The Center (Poem 30), and Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory (Poem 48) [Poem 48]). By leaving the hilltop and forsaking the “Sun” (l.17) for the “Shades” (l.20), is the moose forsaking the moral high ground and light of God for the darkness of sin, implied by her “envie”? If the moose’s actions are meant to be understood as sinful, then is Pulter using the epithet “Stately” (l.1) in the now obsolete sense of haughty or arrogant?
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “stately, adj., sense 3.a”, last modified September 2023.
4 This is how she seems to use the term in Universal Dissolution (Poem 6) [Poem 6] where a “stately cedar” is characterised as overly ambitious and proud (ll.23–25). If so, the moose may misread her environment not through an understandable error, but because she is too proud and thus assured of her own safety to recognise Pulter’s caution that “when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost” (l.36).
Pulter’s precise choice of serpents as the moose’s predator also seems to support the interpretation of the moose as sinful, with snakes being a common Christian symbol of the “Death & Hell” (l.33) the speaker explicitly links them to later in the poem. However, the serpent and moose is not the only example of animal predation Pulter offers in the emblem and the moose’s demise precipitates a list of more predators and prey: hawks trussing pheasant and partridges, cats catching mice, and foxes snatching lambs from their mothers (ll.27–30). Seventeenth-century accounts of New England make no mention of snakes attacking or eating moose (see Curation “Moose: Fact and Fiction”), potentially indicating that Pulter’s choice of serpents may be primarily symbolic. Yet, these same accounts demonstrate an understanding of moose as a species of, or at least akin to, deer. Significantly, an antipathy between snakes and deer is not unfounded (see Curation Serpents vs. Deer). For example, both Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History (1601) and Topsell give accounts of deer and snakes fighting. Furthermore, in his Latin emblem book Symbolorum et Emblematum ex Animalibus (1595), Joachim Camerarius uses the antipathy between deers and serpents for an emblem where the serpent-covered deer seeking water becomes a symbol for the Christian seeking God as the one means of salvation. Therefore, Pulter seems to synthesise accounts of New England with older natural histories and emblem tradition to flesh out her knowledge of the moose and its possible symbolic associations. Placing the pairing of moose and snake at the beginning of a longer list of predators and prey partially naturalises the image, complicating the serpent’s devouring of the moose as an emblem for the descent into and punishment of sin: pheasant, partridge, mice and especially the seemingly innocent “playing” (l.30) lambs are the unfortunate prey of a natural, albeit unsparing, order rather than of their own sinful ways.
The poem does not conclude with a call to avoid envy and sin, or with a recommendation to keep to the security of the high ground and divine light. Rather, by layering the natural brutality of animal predation and the symbolic punishment of sin, Pulter implicates the postlapsarian world as a whole in the emblem’s scope: “By which example wee may plainly See / That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie” (ll.31–32). The final ten lines of the poem are in first-person plural, involving both the speaker and reader in the emblem’s wretched world. Like the serpent, hawk, cat and fox, “Death & Hell” are continually “Watch[ing]” and stalking us, predators waiting to “devour” “Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies” (ll.33–34). By mentioning “Our Sinfull Souls”, Pulter evokes the human postlapsarian condition as inherently sinful. In A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44] Pulter describes the sun as able to scorch the speaker because of the biblical Fall that imbues humanity with sin (ll.77–80). In “The Stately Mooz”, the moose being scorched by the sun may indicate her, and by extension the reader’s, inherited fallen condition. Perhaps the fact that the sun scorches the moose is more emblematically significant than the moose entering the shade. Furthermore, perhaps the moose is not sinful because she is envious, but rather her enviousness is a symptom of her fallenness. The moose is sinful, but we nonetheless are expected to empathise with her flawed character because we too are fallen. As such, the emblem as a whole imagines the transitory, postlapsarian world as a relentless “Sea of Sorrows” (l.35) that can only end in death.
For the Royalist Pulter, this postlapsarian “Sea of Sorrows” is also a post-Civil War world. Alice Eardley dates the composition of Pulter’s emblems to between 1653 and 1658, during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.
Gloss Note
Alice Eardley, “Introduction”, in Poems, Emblems and the Unfortunate Florinda, by Hester Pulter (Toronto, Iter Press, 2014), 21.
5 While less explicitly political than some of Pulter’s other emblems, the adjective “Stately” (l.1) and adverb “Politickly” (l.7) place the poem in the realm of politics. Moreover, Pulter’s mention of the drowning of “Beauclarks Children” (l.37) references a shipwreck where King Henry I’s only legitimate male heir to the throne died, thus contributing to a civil war upon his death between Matilda, his only surviving legitimate child, and his nephew Stephen for the throne (see Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War). In the wake of the Civil War and Charles I’s execution, this story of English royalty in crisis may have particularly evoked Pulter’s Royalist sympathies. Finally, Pulter’s description of the moose’s “Stag like horns” is suggestive of the hunted harts and stags that so often represent the plight of Charles I in seventeenth-century poetry, including Pulter’s own verse (see Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter (Poem 10) [Poem 10], The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) and This Flying Fish (Emblem 25) [Poem 90]. See also Elizabeth Kolkovich’s Curation The Hunted Deer).
Gloss Note
See also Anne Elizabeth Carson, “The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King”, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45, no.3 (2005): 537–56.
6 Pulter’s moose is not hunted, but the fact that her forest is infested with “horrid Serpents” bears symbolic similarities to the many-headed, serpentine hydra that Pulter and other Royalists used to depict the Republican government (see This Huge Leviathan (Emblem 42) [Poem 107]. See also Victoria E. Burke’s Curation The Many Headed Hydra). As such, it is perhaps not too outlandish to suggest that the “Hugest” (l.23) serpent, described as a “Monster” (l.25), could emblematise Cromwell himself and (from a Royalist perspective) his sinful role in Charles I’s execution. In “The Stately Mooz”, the inevitability of predators catching prey, as well as the moose’s rapidly changing fortune, bear similarity to the overtly political emblem "This Flying Fish (Emblem 25)". In this reading, Charles I as the “Stately Mooz” becomes a sympathetic, although not flawless, victim of the “Monster” (l.25) Cromwell, but also secondarily of the relentlessly brutal, unpredictable world.
In the face of such a world, Pulter closes the emblem by enacting the “devotional turn” that Rachel Dunn identifies as characteristic of her emblems.
Gloss Note
Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book”, The Seventeenth Century 30, no.1 (2015): 63.
7 Rather than ending with a moral call to action (e.g., avoid envy or stay in God’s light), Pulter turns inward. Unable to resolve the world’s unpredictability, the speaker can only rely on God: “Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Casuall bee / Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee” (ll.39–40). It is this unpredictability that makes the moose such an ambiguous and complicated emblematic figure, straddling both sympathy and culpability: if the moose’s “hard fate” is the outcome of the changeable, uncontrollable world of animal predation, then how could her caution and pragmatism ever counteract this? Pulter cannot conclude with a call to emulate or condemn the moose, because the poem forces us all, including the speaker, to grapple with our own sinful, postlapsarian and mortal nature. Ultimately, “The Stately Mooz” is an emblem for the unavoidable transience and difficulty of our own existence. We cannot model the moose, Pulter suggests, because we are all already the moose, involved in an infelicitous and brutal world.


— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
1
27
Physical Note
poem follows end of the preceding one on same page, beginning two-thirds down
The Stately Mooz being ^mounted up the hill
The stately moose, being mounted up the hill,
The
Gloss Note
Noble, majestic; more negatively, haughty or arrogant; majestic in size, elegantly built; possessing a slow and dignified gait.
Stately
Gloss Note
Moose. This was a relatively new word in early modern English (OED first usage 1614) deriving from two Algonquian languages of North America.
Mooz being mounted up the hill
2
And of the beavtious proſpect tane her fill
And of the beauteous prospect taken her fill,
And of
Gloss Note
The beautiful view.
the beautious prospect
Critical Note
Taken, likely an alternate spelling of the elided form ta’en to preserve the metre by condensing two syllables to one.
tane her fill
3
Viewing the Rivers in the vale that Trace
Viewing the rivers in the
Gloss Note
valley
vale that
Gloss Note
pass
trace,
Viewing the Rivers in the vale that Trace
4
Inriching ffloras Robe like Silver Lace
Enriching
Gloss Note
goddess of spring
Flora’s robe like silver lace;
Gloss Note
Enriching.
Inriching
Gloss Note
Flora’s. The Roman Goddess of Flowers.
Floras Robe like Silver Lace
5
The next thing Shee Conſiders is her diet
The next thing she considers is her diet:
The next thing
Gloss Note
the Moose.
Shee Considers is her diet
6
How Shee may eat the fflowers and herbs in quiet
How she may eat the flowers and herbs in quiet.
How Shee may eat the Flowers and herbs in quiet
7
Then Politickly
Physical Note
the “S” is possibly written over a prior letter (or there is an ink transfer across the page with a descender)
Shee doth the ffeilds Survey
Then
Gloss Note
shrewdly
politicly she doth the fields survey
Then
Gloss Note
Shrewdly, skillfully.
Politickly Shee doth the Feilds Survey
8
To See if any cruell Beasts of prey
To see if any cruel beasts of prey–
To See if any cruell Beasts of prey
9
As Lion, Tiger, Leopard, or Bear,
As lion, tiger, leopard, or bear–
As Lion, Tiger, Leopard, or Bear,
10
Might her disturb, but to diſpell all fear
Might her disturb; but to dispel all fear,
Might her disturb, but to dispell all fear
11
Physical Note
“u” corrects earlier “n”
ffauns, Lambs
Physical Note
all but comma (and possibly comma) in different hand from main scribe
\, and \ Kids, did Skip about and play
Fawns, lambs, and kids did skip about and play
Fauns, Lambs, and Kids, did Skip about and play
12
Whilst their old weary Dams their Sentinels lay
Whilst their old weary dams, their
Gloss Note
guards
sentinels, lay.
Whilst their old weary
Gloss Note
Mothers.
Dams their
Gloss Note
Guards.
Sentinels lay
thus
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
13
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
Thus, being secure, she feeding down did go,
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
14
ffor Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
For Nature placed her stag-like horns so low
For Nature
Gloss Note
Placed.
plac’t her
Critical Note
A stag is a male deer, and often specifically a male red deer. Pulter’s moose is presented as female throughout, so this description introduces some gender ambiguity into the poem (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). The hunted stag was also a popular Royalist symbol for Charles I (see Elizabeth Kolkovich’s CurationThe Hunted Deer).
Stag like horns Soe low
15
That Shee could never have of graſs her ffill
That she could never have of grass her fill.
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
16
But when in feeding Shee went down the Hill
But when, in feeding, she went down the hill
But when in feeding Shee went down the Hill
17
Which lay full South, the Sun being now her zeneth
Which lay full south, the sun being
Gloss Note
now at
now her zenith,
Which lay full South, the Sun being now
Gloss Note
A zenith is the point in the sky directly overhead. The sun is “her zeneth” meaning it is directly over the moose’s head, perhaps indicating that it is midday (see A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44], l.67).
her zeneth
18
Which made her envie thoſe that fed bene’th
Which made her envy those that fed
Gloss Note
beneath the shade
beneath,
Which made her envie those that fed bene’th
19
His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe
His perpendicular beams did scald her so,
His
Gloss Note
At right-angle to the horizon, vertical. As the sun is directly over the moose’s head, its beams are beating down on her vertically.
Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe
20
That Shee Reſolv’d into the Shades to goe
That she resolved into the shade to go
That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe
21
Of Straight Armd Cedars, ffirrs, Cypres, Pine
Of straight-armed cedars, firs, cypress, pine,
Of Straight Armd Cedars, Firrs, Cypres, Pine
22
About whoſe branches horrid Serpents Twine
About whose branches horrid serpents twine.
About whose branches horrid
Critical Note
Serpents and deer were commonly considered natural enemies. See Curation Serpents vs. Deer.
Serpents Twine
23
One of the Hugest Slip’d down from a bough
One of the hugest slipped down from a bough
One of the Hugest Slip’d down from a bough
24
And Snatcht the Mooz (poor Beast) Shee knew not how
And snatched the moose (poor beast!) she knew not how.
And
Critical Note
Snatched. To suddenly snap or bite at something; or to seize or take hold of; or to remove quickly from sight. There is precedent in early modern natural histories for massive snakes capable of eating large animals like moose whole (see Curation “Serpents vs. Deer”), but it is also possible that the serpent is quickly grabbing the moose and dragging it away.
Snatcht the Mooz (poor Beast) Shee knew not how
25
Thus beeing by this Monſter over powr’d
Thus being by this monster overpowered
Thus beeing by this Monster over powr’d
26
(Oh her hard fate) Shee was by him devour’d
(O her hard fate!), she was by him devoured.
(Oh her hard fate) Shee was by him devour’d
27
Soe have I Seen a hawk A Pheſant truſs
So have I seen a hawk a pheasant
Gloss Note
seize
truss
Soe have I Seen a hawk A Phesant
Gloss Note
To seize or clutch in its talons.
truss
28
Or Patriges, Soe Melancholly Puſs
(Or partridges), so
Gloss Note
Cats were proverbially associated with sadness.
melancholy puss
Or
Gloss Note
Partridges.
Patriges, Soe
Critical Note
Cats were proverbially associated with melancholy. Cf. Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), sig.N3v, where a cat contributes “his melancholy” for the making of a human; William Shakespeare, The history of Henrie the Fourth [Henry IV, Part 1] (1598), sig.A4r, where Falstaff declares he is “as melancholy as a gyb Cat, or a lugd beare”. In modern editions of Henry IV, Part 1, the line appears around 1.2.69. In Josua Poole’s The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English poesie (1657) he suggests multiple epithets for “Cat” but “Melancholy” is first in the list (sig.F3r).
Melancholly Puss
29
Doth Mice Surpriſe, Soe ffoxes Snatch up Lambs
Doth mice
Gloss Note
attack suddenly
surprise, so foxes snatch up lambs
Doth Mice
Gloss Note
To attack suddenly; to capture, seize.
Surprise, Soe Foxes Snatch up Lambs
30
As they lie playing by their Uberous Dams
As they lie playing by their
Gloss Note
nursing, nurturing
uberous dams–
As they lie playing by their
Gloss Note
Supplying abundant milk or nourishment.
Uberous Damms
31
By which example wee may plainly See
By which example we may plainly see
By which example wee may plainly See
32
That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie
That on this orb there’s no felicity.
That on this
Gloss Note
The Earth.
Orb ther’s noe felicitie
33
ffor Death & Hell Combine, and Watch each hour
For Death and Hell combine and watch, each hour
For Death & Hell Combine, and Watch each hour
34
Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies to devour
Our sinful souls and bodies to devour;
Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies to devour
35
’ffor wee are in A Sea of Sorrows Tost
For we are in a sea of sorrows tossed,
For wee are in A Sea of Sorrows Tost
36
Physical Note
written over “ff” and other letters, likely “ffor”
And when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost
And when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost.
Physical Note
In the manuscript “And” is written over “ffor”. As the previous line also begins with “ffor” this could have been done to avoid repetition, or it could be the correcting of a mistranscription.
And when we’re most Secure
Gloss Note
we’re.
wee’r nearest lost
37
As Beauclarks Children did their wrack deplore
As
Gloss Note
The children of King Henry I (Henry Beauclerc), including his heir and many illegitimate children, drowned when their ship hit a rock near the shore of Normandy.
Beauclerc’s children did their wrack
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
Gloss Note
In 1120 three children of King Henry I, also known as Henry Beauclerc, including his only male heir, died in a shipwreck. See Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War.
As Beauclarks Children did their wrack deplore
38
With Greater grief beeing in the Sight of Shore
With greater grief being in the sight of shore.
With Greater grief beeing in the Sight of Shore
39
Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Caſuall bee
Then seeing our lives so frail and
Gloss Note
subject to chance
casual be,
Then Seeing our lives Soe
Gloss Note
Fragile, weak; subject to change or decay, transient.
frail and
Gloss Note
Subject to chance.
Casuall bee
40
Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee.
Let me depend (dear God) on none but Thee.
Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee.
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X (Close panel)Notes: Amplified Edition
Title note

 Gloss note

In the manuscript, Pulter’s emblems are numbered in the left margin alongside their first lines. This poem is emblem 27. As the poem is otherwise untitled, I have chosen to use the marginal number alongside the poem’s opening words (“The Stately Mooz”) as the title for this edition to reflect the emblem’s appearance in the manuscript.

 Editorial note

My main goal with editing this poem has been to preserve something of the texture and feel of reading the manuscript text while aiding clarity. For this reason, I have modernised u/v, i/j and long ‘s’, and the scribe’s ‘ff’ as ‘F’, but I have otherwise maintained the original spelling, punctuation and capitalisation. I have also silently lowered two words in superscript (“mounted” (l.1); “and” (l.11)), and expanded the poem’s one abbreviation (l.30) while italicising the supplied letter. To aid with clarity I have glossed words with their modern spellings where the manuscript’s spelling may hinder understanding. I have also glossed unfamiliar words with definitions from the OED, providing multiple possible definitions separated by semicolons where appropriate. Finally, I have provided explanatory notes to cultural and historical references.

 Headnote

In “27. The Stately Mooz”, Pulter presents the titular moose as an ambiguous emblematic figure who occupies an unpredictable and unfeeling world. The moose starts on a secure hilltop, but she descends, driven by hunger, and then seeks shade from the scorching sun under trees that (unknown to her) are infested with deadly serpents. She is consequently devoured by one of the “Hugest” (l.23), most monstrous serpents. Unlike emblems such as The Porcupine (Emblem 13) [Poem 79] where the prideful porcupine is condemned or Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86] where the raccoons (really beavers) are praised for their exemplary teamwork, in “The Stately Mooz” Pulter neither condemns nor praises the moose’s actions. Rather, Pulter characterises the moose as a sympathetic but flawed figure whose “hard fate” (l.26) emblematises the “Casuall” (l.39) and difficult nature of postlapsarian existence.
Pulter understands moose as shrewd, practical animals. The moose is a positive example of parental love in The Indian Moose (Emblem 7) [Poem 73] where she loves all three of her calves equally and so uses her “policy” (l.7) to pragmatically place them in three different locations and thus protect them from predators. Pulter also presents this astuteness in “The Stately Mooz” where the moose “Politickly… doth the Feilds Survey” (l.7) for lions, tigers, leopards and bears and only leaves the hill once she believes herself, albeit falsely, “Secure” (l.13). Given the“Stately” moose’s eventual demise, her descent of the hill could symbolise a blameworthy moral decline to be avoided by the reader, but Pulter offers no direct caution against this action. Instead, Pulter presents the moose as being compelled by the practicality of hunger. Having “of the beautious prospect tane her fill” (l.2) the moose sensibly next “Considers… her diet” (l.5). Indeed, the emblem implies that eating downhill may be a physical necessity:
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
For Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
(ll.13–15)
Seventeenth-century descriptions of moose, or moose-like creatures such as elk, often allude to their difficulty in eating (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). In his bestiary The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (1607) Edward Topsell describes elk as having to walk “backward like a Sea-crab” while eating to avoid biting their own large upper lip.
Gloss Note
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T5r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised]
1 Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1637) characterises moose as “long legged” and thus needing to “kneel” to feed on grass, while the anonymous A Treatise of New England (1645) describes moose as “frequent[ing] the low rank grounds to feed upon long grass, by reason their fore feet are longer than their hinder feet”.
Gloss Note
Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an abstract of New England, composed in three books (Printed for Charles Green, 1637), sig. K1v. EEBO; A treatise of Nevv England published in anno Dom. 1637. And now reprinted (London, 1645), sig. A4r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised].
2 Pulter’s moose also has difficulty eating because “Nature” has placed her antlers so “low” that she cannot easily reach the grass. While Pulter does not mention the moose’s legs, the conjunction “For” implies that the moose may need to feed going “down” the hill. Perhaps her moose is also moving to the “low rank grounds” (“rank” meaning growing vigorously) and “long grass” at the bottom of the hill to compensate for her “low” antlers.
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “rank, adj., sense II.6”, last modified December 2023.
3 Alternatively, the continuous verb in “feeding down did go”, and again in “when in feeding Shee went down the Hill” (l.16), suggests the moose eats as she moves downhill. Interestingly, eating whilst facing or moving downhill would somewhat level the unevenness of overly-long front legs and thus allow the moose’s head to reach closer to the ground. Whatever the exact reasoning, Pulter clearly presents the moose’s descent of the hill as a physical necessity that is nonetheless undertaken cautiously and carefully. Pulter also offers a physical explanation for the moose’s retreat from the sun into the shade: “His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe / That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe” (ll.19–20). The moose’s initial shrewd caution and Pulter’s naturalistic justifications for the moose’s movements make her actions understandable to the reader. Thus, we are more likely to sympathise with the moose when the poem’s speaker parenthetically laments the “poor Beast” (l.24) and “her hard fate” (l.26). Indeed, the references to “Nature” (l.14) and “fate” confer a sense of inevitability onto the moose’s death that somewhat absolves her of culpability.
However, Pulter’s description of the moose’s movement out of the “Scald[ing]” sun and into “the Shades” is complicated by the fact that the scorching sun also makes the moose “envie” (l.18) those feeding beneath the trees. This is an odd detail to include as it does not seem to clearly contribute narratively or causally to the moose’s movement out of the sun which, as above, is directly prompted by the burning sun. On the one hand, the shade is a place of privacy in Pulter’s The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84] and of sanctuary in The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) [Poem 87] so to a reader of Pulter’s emblems it is understandable that the shade could represent a place of respite. Again, in The Invitation into the Country (Poem 2) [Poem 2] “shady groves” (l.38) are a key component of the ideal pastoral landscape of pre-Civil War Broadfield, Pulter’s country estate. Given these poems and Pulter’s opening description in “The Stately Mooz” of the “beautious prospect” (l.2) where “Floras Robe” (l.4) is ornamented with lace-like silver streams, the reader is as liable as the moose to misread or misinterpret the environment as a locus amoenus (a lovely or idyllic place). On the other hand, Pulter’s poetry is replete with light imagery and sunlight in particular often symbolises the divine (see, for example, The Eclipse (Poem 1) [Poem 1], Of Night and Morning (Poem 5) [Poem 5], The Center (Poem 30) [Poem 30]). The complement to these images is Pulter’s equally pervasive association of darkness and shade with misery, death, sin and hell (see, for example, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul (Poem 24) [Poem 24], My Soul’s Sole Desire (Poem 29) [Poem 29], The Center (Poem 30), and Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory (Poem 48) [Poem 48]). By leaving the hilltop and forsaking the “Sun” (l.17) for the “Shades” (l.20), is the moose forsaking the moral high ground and light of God for the darkness of sin, implied by her “envie”? If the moose’s actions are meant to be understood as sinful, then is Pulter using the epithet “Stately” (l.1) in the now obsolete sense of haughty or arrogant?
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “stately, adj., sense 3.a”, last modified September 2023.
4 This is how she seems to use the term in Universal Dissolution (Poem 6) [Poem 6] where a “stately cedar” is characterised as overly ambitious and proud (ll.23–25). If so, the moose may misread her environment not through an understandable error, but because she is too proud and thus assured of her own safety to recognise Pulter’s caution that “when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost” (l.36).
Pulter’s precise choice of serpents as the moose’s predator also seems to support the interpretation of the moose as sinful, with snakes being a common Christian symbol of the “Death & Hell” (l.33) the speaker explicitly links them to later in the poem. However, the serpent and moose is not the only example of animal predation Pulter offers in the emblem and the moose’s demise precipitates a list of more predators and prey: hawks trussing pheasant and partridges, cats catching mice, and foxes snatching lambs from their mothers (ll.27–30). Seventeenth-century accounts of New England make no mention of snakes attacking or eating moose (see Curation “Moose: Fact and Fiction”), potentially indicating that Pulter’s choice of serpents may be primarily symbolic. Yet, these same accounts demonstrate an understanding of moose as a species of, or at least akin to, deer. Significantly, an antipathy between snakes and deer is not unfounded (see Curation Serpents vs. Deer). For example, both Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History (1601) and Topsell give accounts of deer and snakes fighting. Furthermore, in his Latin emblem book Symbolorum et Emblematum ex Animalibus (1595), Joachim Camerarius uses the antipathy between deers and serpents for an emblem where the serpent-covered deer seeking water becomes a symbol for the Christian seeking God as the one means of salvation. Therefore, Pulter seems to synthesise accounts of New England with older natural histories and emblem tradition to flesh out her knowledge of the moose and its possible symbolic associations. Placing the pairing of moose and snake at the beginning of a longer list of predators and prey partially naturalises the image, complicating the serpent’s devouring of the moose as an emblem for the descent into and punishment of sin: pheasant, partridge, mice and especially the seemingly innocent “playing” (l.30) lambs are the unfortunate prey of a natural, albeit unsparing, order rather than of their own sinful ways.
The poem does not conclude with a call to avoid envy and sin, or with a recommendation to keep to the security of the high ground and divine light. Rather, by layering the natural brutality of animal predation and the symbolic punishment of sin, Pulter implicates the postlapsarian world as a whole in the emblem’s scope: “By which example wee may plainly See / That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie” (ll.31–32). The final ten lines of the poem are in first-person plural, involving both the speaker and reader in the emblem’s wretched world. Like the serpent, hawk, cat and fox, “Death & Hell” are continually “Watch[ing]” and stalking us, predators waiting to “devour” “Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies” (ll.33–34). By mentioning “Our Sinfull Souls”, Pulter evokes the human postlapsarian condition as inherently sinful. In A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44] Pulter describes the sun as able to scorch the speaker because of the biblical Fall that imbues humanity with sin (ll.77–80). In “The Stately Mooz”, the moose being scorched by the sun may indicate her, and by extension the reader’s, inherited fallen condition. Perhaps the fact that the sun scorches the moose is more emblematically significant than the moose entering the shade. Furthermore, perhaps the moose is not sinful because she is envious, but rather her enviousness is a symptom of her fallenness. The moose is sinful, but we nonetheless are expected to empathise with her flawed character because we too are fallen. As such, the emblem as a whole imagines the transitory, postlapsarian world as a relentless “Sea of Sorrows” (l.35) that can only end in death.
For the Royalist Pulter, this postlapsarian “Sea of Sorrows” is also a post-Civil War world. Alice Eardley dates the composition of Pulter’s emblems to between 1653 and 1658, during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.
Gloss Note
Alice Eardley, “Introduction”, in Poems, Emblems and the Unfortunate Florinda, by Hester Pulter (Toronto, Iter Press, 2014), 21.
5 While less explicitly political than some of Pulter’s other emblems, the adjective “Stately” (l.1) and adverb “Politickly” (l.7) place the poem in the realm of politics. Moreover, Pulter’s mention of the drowning of “Beauclarks Children” (l.37) references a shipwreck where King Henry I’s only legitimate male heir to the throne died, thus contributing to a civil war upon his death between Matilda, his only surviving legitimate child, and his nephew Stephen for the throne (see Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War). In the wake of the Civil War and Charles I’s execution, this story of English royalty in crisis may have particularly evoked Pulter’s Royalist sympathies. Finally, Pulter’s description of the moose’s “Stag like horns” is suggestive of the hunted harts and stags that so often represent the plight of Charles I in seventeenth-century poetry, including Pulter’s own verse (see Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter (Poem 10) [Poem 10], The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) and This Flying Fish (Emblem 25) [Poem 90]. See also Elizabeth Kolkovich’s Curation The Hunted Deer).
Gloss Note
See also Anne Elizabeth Carson, “The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King”, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45, no.3 (2005): 537–56.
6 Pulter’s moose is not hunted, but the fact that her forest is infested with “horrid Serpents” bears symbolic similarities to the many-headed, serpentine hydra that Pulter and other Royalists used to depict the Republican government (see This Huge Leviathan (Emblem 42) [Poem 107]. See also Victoria E. Burke’s Curation The Many Headed Hydra). As such, it is perhaps not too outlandish to suggest that the “Hugest” (l.23) serpent, described as a “Monster” (l.25), could emblematise Cromwell himself and (from a Royalist perspective) his sinful role in Charles I’s execution. In “The Stately Mooz”, the inevitability of predators catching prey, as well as the moose’s rapidly changing fortune, bear similarity to the overtly political emblem "This Flying Fish (Emblem 25)". In this reading, Charles I as the “Stately Mooz” becomes a sympathetic, although not flawless, victim of the “Monster” (l.25) Cromwell, but also secondarily of the relentlessly brutal, unpredictable world.
In the face of such a world, Pulter closes the emblem by enacting the “devotional turn” that Rachel Dunn identifies as characteristic of her emblems.
Gloss Note
Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book”, The Seventeenth Century 30, no.1 (2015): 63.
7 Rather than ending with a moral call to action (e.g., avoid envy or stay in God’s light), Pulter turns inward. Unable to resolve the world’s unpredictability, the speaker can only rely on God: “Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Casuall bee / Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee” (ll.39–40). It is this unpredictability that makes the moose such an ambiguous and complicated emblematic figure, straddling both sympathy and culpability: if the moose’s “hard fate” is the outcome of the changeable, uncontrollable world of animal predation, then how could her caution and pragmatism ever counteract this? Pulter cannot conclude with a call to emulate or condemn the moose, because the poem forces us all, including the speaker, to grapple with our own sinful, postlapsarian and mortal nature. Ultimately, “The Stately Mooz” is an emblem for the unavoidable transience and difficulty of our own existence. We cannot model the moose, Pulter suggests, because we are all already the moose, involved in an infelicitous and brutal world.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Noble, majestic; more negatively, haughty or arrogant; majestic in size, elegantly built; possessing a slow and dignified gait.
Line number 1

 Gloss note

Moose. This was a relatively new word in early modern English (OED first usage 1614) deriving from two Algonquian languages of North America.
Line number 2

 Gloss note

The beautiful view.
Line number 2

 Critical note

Taken, likely an alternate spelling of the elided form ta’en to preserve the metre by condensing two syllables to one.
Line number 4

 Gloss note

Enriching.
Line number 4

 Gloss note

Flora’s. The Roman Goddess of Flowers.
Line number 5

 Gloss note

the Moose.
Line number 7

 Gloss note

Shrewdly, skillfully.
Line number 12

 Gloss note

Mothers.
Line number 12

 Gloss note

Guards.
Line number 14

 Gloss note

Placed.
Line number 14

 Critical note

A stag is a male deer, and often specifically a male red deer. Pulter’s moose is presented as female throughout, so this description introduces some gender ambiguity into the poem (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). The hunted stag was also a popular Royalist symbol for Charles I (see Elizabeth Kolkovich’s CurationThe Hunted Deer).
Line number 17

 Gloss note

A zenith is the point in the sky directly overhead. The sun is “her zeneth” meaning it is directly over the moose’s head, perhaps indicating that it is midday (see A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44], l.67).
Line number 19

 Gloss note

At right-angle to the horizon, vertical. As the sun is directly over the moose’s head, its beams are beating down on her vertically.
Line number 22

 Critical note

Serpents and deer were commonly considered natural enemies. See Curation Serpents vs. Deer.
Line number 24

 Critical note

Snatched. To suddenly snap or bite at something; or to seize or take hold of; or to remove quickly from sight. There is precedent in early modern natural histories for massive snakes capable of eating large animals like moose whole (see Curation “Serpents vs. Deer”), but it is also possible that the serpent is quickly grabbing the moose and dragging it away.
Line number 27

 Gloss note

To seize or clutch in its talons.
Line number 28

 Gloss note

Partridges.
Line number 28

 Critical note

Cats were proverbially associated with melancholy. Cf. Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), sig.N3v, where a cat contributes “his melancholy” for the making of a human; William Shakespeare, The history of Henrie the Fourth [Henry IV, Part 1] (1598), sig.A4r, where Falstaff declares he is “as melancholy as a gyb Cat, or a lugd beare”. In modern editions of Henry IV, Part 1, the line appears around 1.2.69. In Josua Poole’s The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English poesie (1657) he suggests multiple epithets for “Cat” but “Melancholy” is first in the list (sig.F3r).
Line number 29

 Gloss note

To attack suddenly; to capture, seize.
Line number 30

 Gloss note

Supplying abundant milk or nourishment.
Line number 32

 Gloss note

The Earth.
Line number 36

 Physical note

In the manuscript “And” is written over “ffor”. As the previous line also begins with “ffor” this could have been done to avoid repetition, or it could be the correcting of a mistranscription.
Line number 36

 Gloss note

we’re.
Line number 37

 Gloss note

In 1120 three children of King Henry I, also known as Henry Beauclerc, including his only male heir, died in a shipwreck. See Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War.
Line number 39

 Gloss note

Fragile, weak; subject to change or decay, transient.
Line number 39

 Gloss note

Subject to chance.
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[Emblem 27]
The Stately Moose
(Emblem 27)
Gloss Note
In the manuscript, Pulter’s emblems are numbered in the left margin alongside their first lines. This poem is emblem 27. As the poem is otherwise untitled, I have chosen to use the marginal number alongside the poem’s opening words (“The Stately Mooz”) as the title for this edition to reflect the emblem’s appearance in the manuscript.
27. The Stately Mooz
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.

— Charlotte Newcombe
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.

— Charlotte Newcombe
My main goal with editing this poem has been to preserve something of the texture and feel of reading the manuscript text while aiding clarity. For this reason, I have modernised u/v, i/j and long ‘s’, and the scribe’s ‘ff’ as ‘F’, but I have otherwise maintained the original spelling, punctuation and capitalisation. I have also silently lowered two words in superscript (“mounted” (l.1); “and” (l.11)), and expanded the poem’s one abbreviation (l.30) while italicising the supplied letter. To aid with clarity I have glossed words with their modern spellings where the manuscript’s spelling may hinder understanding. I have also glossed unfamiliar words with definitions from the OED, providing multiple possible definitions separated by semicolons where appropriate. Finally, I have provided explanatory notes to cultural and historical references.

— Charlotte Newcombe
This poem’s picturesque opening scene—a hill above a river valley, a moose munching quietly, her young skipping and playing—is darkly savaged when the moose is so foolish as to forego high ground and the light of day, out of envy of those in the shade beneath. The imagery is simultaneously naturalistic and moral, and the moose’s comeuppance speedy and grotesque: in the dark forest, she is “snatched,” “overpowered,” and “devoured” by a snake (again, uniting the naturalistic and the moral). The speaker then links this vivid image of a moose-stuffed serpent to more ordinary kinds of predation and, finally, a sequence of fairly banal complaints: “on this orb there’s no felicity”; “we are in a sea of sorrows tossed”; “when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost.” In the face of such relentless carnage and misery throughout the animal kingdom, it’s no surprise that the speaker’s final declaration of fealty is to God instead.

— Charlotte Newcombe
In “27. The Stately Mooz”, Pulter presents the titular moose as an ambiguous emblematic figure who occupies an unpredictable and unfeeling world. The moose starts on a secure hilltop, but she descends, driven by hunger, and then seeks shade from the scorching sun under trees that (unknown to her) are infested with deadly serpents. She is consequently devoured by one of the “Hugest” (l.23), most monstrous serpents. Unlike emblems such as The Porcupine (Emblem 13) [Poem 79] where the prideful porcupine is condemned or Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86] where the raccoons (really beavers) are praised for their exemplary teamwork, in “The Stately Mooz” Pulter neither condemns nor praises the moose’s actions. Rather, Pulter characterises the moose as a sympathetic but flawed figure whose “hard fate” (l.26) emblematises the “Casuall” (l.39) and difficult nature of postlapsarian existence.
Pulter understands moose as shrewd, practical animals. The moose is a positive example of parental love in The Indian Moose (Emblem 7) [Poem 73] where she loves all three of her calves equally and so uses her “policy” (l.7) to pragmatically place them in three different locations and thus protect them from predators. Pulter also presents this astuteness in “The Stately Mooz” where the moose “Politickly… doth the Feilds Survey” (l.7) for lions, tigers, leopards and bears and only leaves the hill once she believes herself, albeit falsely, “Secure” (l.13). Given the“Stately” moose’s eventual demise, her descent of the hill could symbolise a blameworthy moral decline to be avoided by the reader, but Pulter offers no direct caution against this action. Instead, Pulter presents the moose as being compelled by the practicality of hunger. Having “of the beautious prospect tane her fill” (l.2) the moose sensibly next “Considers… her diet” (l.5). Indeed, the emblem implies that eating downhill may be a physical necessity:
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
For Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
(ll.13–15)
Seventeenth-century descriptions of moose, or moose-like creatures such as elk, often allude to their difficulty in eating (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). In his bestiary The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (1607) Edward Topsell describes elk as having to walk “backward like a Sea-crab” while eating to avoid biting their own large upper lip.
Gloss Note
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T5r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised]
1 Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1637) characterises moose as “long legged” and thus needing to “kneel” to feed on grass, while the anonymous A Treatise of New England (1645) describes moose as “frequent[ing] the low rank grounds to feed upon long grass, by reason their fore feet are longer than their hinder feet”.
Gloss Note
Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an abstract of New England, composed in three books (Printed for Charles Green, 1637), sig. K1v. EEBO; A treatise of Nevv England published in anno Dom. 1637. And now reprinted (London, 1645), sig. A4r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised].
2 Pulter’s moose also has difficulty eating because “Nature” has placed her antlers so “low” that she cannot easily reach the grass. While Pulter does not mention the moose’s legs, the conjunction “For” implies that the moose may need to feed going “down” the hill. Perhaps her moose is also moving to the “low rank grounds” (“rank” meaning growing vigorously) and “long grass” at the bottom of the hill to compensate for her “low” antlers.
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “rank, adj., sense II.6”, last modified December 2023.
3 Alternatively, the continuous verb in “feeding down did go”, and again in “when in feeding Shee went down the Hill” (l.16), suggests the moose eats as she moves downhill. Interestingly, eating whilst facing or moving downhill would somewhat level the unevenness of overly-long front legs and thus allow the moose’s head to reach closer to the ground. Whatever the exact reasoning, Pulter clearly presents the moose’s descent of the hill as a physical necessity that is nonetheless undertaken cautiously and carefully. Pulter also offers a physical explanation for the moose’s retreat from the sun into the shade: “His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe / That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe” (ll.19–20). The moose’s initial shrewd caution and Pulter’s naturalistic justifications for the moose’s movements make her actions understandable to the reader. Thus, we are more likely to sympathise with the moose when the poem’s speaker parenthetically laments the “poor Beast” (l.24) and “her hard fate” (l.26). Indeed, the references to “Nature” (l.14) and “fate” confer a sense of inevitability onto the moose’s death that somewhat absolves her of culpability.
However, Pulter’s description of the moose’s movement out of the “Scald[ing]” sun and into “the Shades” is complicated by the fact that the scorching sun also makes the moose “envie” (l.18) those feeding beneath the trees. This is an odd detail to include as it does not seem to clearly contribute narratively or causally to the moose’s movement out of the sun which, as above, is directly prompted by the burning sun. On the one hand, the shade is a place of privacy in Pulter’s The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84] and of sanctuary in The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) [Poem 87] so to a reader of Pulter’s emblems it is understandable that the shade could represent a place of respite. Again, in The Invitation into the Country (Poem 2) [Poem 2] “shady groves” (l.38) are a key component of the ideal pastoral landscape of pre-Civil War Broadfield, Pulter’s country estate. Given these poems and Pulter’s opening description in “The Stately Mooz” of the “beautious prospect” (l.2) where “Floras Robe” (l.4) is ornamented with lace-like silver streams, the reader is as liable as the moose to misread or misinterpret the environment as a locus amoenus (a lovely or idyllic place). On the other hand, Pulter’s poetry is replete with light imagery and sunlight in particular often symbolises the divine (see, for example, The Eclipse (Poem 1) [Poem 1], Of Night and Morning (Poem 5) [Poem 5], The Center (Poem 30) [Poem 30]). The complement to these images is Pulter’s equally pervasive association of darkness and shade with misery, death, sin and hell (see, for example, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul (Poem 24) [Poem 24], My Soul’s Sole Desire (Poem 29) [Poem 29], The Center (Poem 30), and Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory (Poem 48) [Poem 48]). By leaving the hilltop and forsaking the “Sun” (l.17) for the “Shades” (l.20), is the moose forsaking the moral high ground and light of God for the darkness of sin, implied by her “envie”? If the moose’s actions are meant to be understood as sinful, then is Pulter using the epithet “Stately” (l.1) in the now obsolete sense of haughty or arrogant?
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “stately, adj., sense 3.a”, last modified September 2023.
4 This is how she seems to use the term in Universal Dissolution (Poem 6) [Poem 6] where a “stately cedar” is characterised as overly ambitious and proud (ll.23–25). If so, the moose may misread her environment not through an understandable error, but because she is too proud and thus assured of her own safety to recognise Pulter’s caution that “when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost” (l.36).
Pulter’s precise choice of serpents as the moose’s predator also seems to support the interpretation of the moose as sinful, with snakes being a common Christian symbol of the “Death & Hell” (l.33) the speaker explicitly links them to later in the poem. However, the serpent and moose is not the only example of animal predation Pulter offers in the emblem and the moose’s demise precipitates a list of more predators and prey: hawks trussing pheasant and partridges, cats catching mice, and foxes snatching lambs from their mothers (ll.27–30). Seventeenth-century accounts of New England make no mention of snakes attacking or eating moose (see Curation “Moose: Fact and Fiction”), potentially indicating that Pulter’s choice of serpents may be primarily symbolic. Yet, these same accounts demonstrate an understanding of moose as a species of, or at least akin to, deer. Significantly, an antipathy between snakes and deer is not unfounded (see Curation Serpents vs. Deer). For example, both Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History (1601) and Topsell give accounts of deer and snakes fighting. Furthermore, in his Latin emblem book Symbolorum et Emblematum ex Animalibus (1595), Joachim Camerarius uses the antipathy between deers and serpents for an emblem where the serpent-covered deer seeking water becomes a symbol for the Christian seeking God as the one means of salvation. Therefore, Pulter seems to synthesise accounts of New England with older natural histories and emblem tradition to flesh out her knowledge of the moose and its possible symbolic associations. Placing the pairing of moose and snake at the beginning of a longer list of predators and prey partially naturalises the image, complicating the serpent’s devouring of the moose as an emblem for the descent into and punishment of sin: pheasant, partridge, mice and especially the seemingly innocent “playing” (l.30) lambs are the unfortunate prey of a natural, albeit unsparing, order rather than of their own sinful ways.
The poem does not conclude with a call to avoid envy and sin, or with a recommendation to keep to the security of the high ground and divine light. Rather, by layering the natural brutality of animal predation and the symbolic punishment of sin, Pulter implicates the postlapsarian world as a whole in the emblem’s scope: “By which example wee may plainly See / That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie” (ll.31–32). The final ten lines of the poem are in first-person plural, involving both the speaker and reader in the emblem’s wretched world. Like the serpent, hawk, cat and fox, “Death & Hell” are continually “Watch[ing]” and stalking us, predators waiting to “devour” “Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies” (ll.33–34). By mentioning “Our Sinfull Souls”, Pulter evokes the human postlapsarian condition as inherently sinful. In A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44] Pulter describes the sun as able to scorch the speaker because of the biblical Fall that imbues humanity with sin (ll.77–80). In “The Stately Mooz”, the moose being scorched by the sun may indicate her, and by extension the reader’s, inherited fallen condition. Perhaps the fact that the sun scorches the moose is more emblematically significant than the moose entering the shade. Furthermore, perhaps the moose is not sinful because she is envious, but rather her enviousness is a symptom of her fallenness. The moose is sinful, but we nonetheless are expected to empathise with her flawed character because we too are fallen. As such, the emblem as a whole imagines the transitory, postlapsarian world as a relentless “Sea of Sorrows” (l.35) that can only end in death.
For the Royalist Pulter, this postlapsarian “Sea of Sorrows” is also a post-Civil War world. Alice Eardley dates the composition of Pulter’s emblems to between 1653 and 1658, during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.
Gloss Note
Alice Eardley, “Introduction”, in Poems, Emblems and the Unfortunate Florinda, by Hester Pulter (Toronto, Iter Press, 2014), 21.
5 While less explicitly political than some of Pulter’s other emblems, the adjective “Stately” (l.1) and adverb “Politickly” (l.7) place the poem in the realm of politics. Moreover, Pulter’s mention of the drowning of “Beauclarks Children” (l.37) references a shipwreck where King Henry I’s only legitimate male heir to the throne died, thus contributing to a civil war upon his death between Matilda, his only surviving legitimate child, and his nephew Stephen for the throne (see Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War). In the wake of the Civil War and Charles I’s execution, this story of English royalty in crisis may have particularly evoked Pulter’s Royalist sympathies. Finally, Pulter’s description of the moose’s “Stag like horns” is suggestive of the hunted harts and stags that so often represent the plight of Charles I in seventeenth-century poetry, including Pulter’s own verse (see Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter (Poem 10) [Poem 10], The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) and This Flying Fish (Emblem 25) [Poem 90]. See also Elizabeth Kolkovich’s Curation The Hunted Deer).
Gloss Note
See also Anne Elizabeth Carson, “The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King”, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45, no.3 (2005): 537–56.
6 Pulter’s moose is not hunted, but the fact that her forest is infested with “horrid Serpents” bears symbolic similarities to the many-headed, serpentine hydra that Pulter and other Royalists used to depict the Republican government (see This Huge Leviathan (Emblem 42) [Poem 107]. See also Victoria E. Burke’s Curation The Many Headed Hydra). As such, it is perhaps not too outlandish to suggest that the “Hugest” (l.23) serpent, described as a “Monster” (l.25), could emblematise Cromwell himself and (from a Royalist perspective) his sinful role in Charles I’s execution. In “The Stately Mooz”, the inevitability of predators catching prey, as well as the moose’s rapidly changing fortune, bear similarity to the overtly political emblem "This Flying Fish (Emblem 25)". In this reading, Charles I as the “Stately Mooz” becomes a sympathetic, although not flawless, victim of the “Monster” (l.25) Cromwell, but also secondarily of the relentlessly brutal, unpredictable world.
In the face of such a world, Pulter closes the emblem by enacting the “devotional turn” that Rachel Dunn identifies as characteristic of her emblems.
Gloss Note
Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book”, The Seventeenth Century 30, no.1 (2015): 63.
7 Rather than ending with a moral call to action (e.g., avoid envy or stay in God’s light), Pulter turns inward. Unable to resolve the world’s unpredictability, the speaker can only rely on God: “Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Casuall bee / Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee” (ll.39–40). It is this unpredictability that makes the moose such an ambiguous and complicated emblematic figure, straddling both sympathy and culpability: if the moose’s “hard fate” is the outcome of the changeable, uncontrollable world of animal predation, then how could her caution and pragmatism ever counteract this? Pulter cannot conclude with a call to emulate or condemn the moose, because the poem forces us all, including the speaker, to grapple with our own sinful, postlapsarian and mortal nature. Ultimately, “The Stately Mooz” is an emblem for the unavoidable transience and difficulty of our own existence. We cannot model the moose, Pulter suggests, because we are all already the moose, involved in an infelicitous and brutal world.


— Charlotte Newcombe
1
27
Physical Note
poem follows end of the preceding one on same page, beginning two-thirds down
The Stately Mooz being ^mounted up the hill
The stately moose, being mounted up the hill,
The
Gloss Note
Noble, majestic; more negatively, haughty or arrogant; majestic in size, elegantly built; possessing a slow and dignified gait.
Stately
Gloss Note
Moose. This was a relatively new word in early modern English (OED first usage 1614) deriving from two Algonquian languages of North America.
Mooz being mounted up the hill
2
And of the beavtious proſpect tane her fill
And of the beauteous prospect taken her fill,
And of
Gloss Note
The beautiful view.
the beautious prospect
Critical Note
Taken, likely an alternate spelling of the elided form ta’en to preserve the metre by condensing two syllables to one.
tane her fill
3
Viewing the Rivers in the vale that Trace
Viewing the rivers in the
Gloss Note
valley
vale that
Gloss Note
pass
trace,
Viewing the Rivers in the vale that Trace
4
Inriching ffloras Robe like Silver Lace
Enriching
Gloss Note
goddess of spring
Flora’s robe like silver lace;
Gloss Note
Enriching.
Inriching
Gloss Note
Flora’s. The Roman Goddess of Flowers.
Floras Robe like Silver Lace
5
The next thing Shee Conſiders is her diet
The next thing she considers is her diet:
The next thing
Gloss Note
the Moose.
Shee Considers is her diet
6
How Shee may eat the fflowers and herbs in quiet
How she may eat the flowers and herbs in quiet.
How Shee may eat the Flowers and herbs in quiet
7
Then Politickly
Physical Note
the “S” is possibly written over a prior letter (or there is an ink transfer across the page with a descender)
Shee doth the ffeilds Survey
Then
Gloss Note
shrewdly
politicly she doth the fields survey
Then
Gloss Note
Shrewdly, skillfully.
Politickly Shee doth the Feilds Survey
8
To See if any cruell Beasts of prey
To see if any cruel beasts of prey–
To See if any cruell Beasts of prey
9
As Lion, Tiger, Leopard, or Bear,
As lion, tiger, leopard, or bear–
As Lion, Tiger, Leopard, or Bear,
10
Might her disturb, but to diſpell all fear
Might her disturb; but to dispel all fear,
Might her disturb, but to dispell all fear
11
Physical Note
“u” corrects earlier “n”
ffauns, Lambs
Physical Note
all but comma (and possibly comma) in different hand from main scribe
\, and \ Kids, did Skip about and play
Fawns, lambs, and kids did skip about and play
Fauns, Lambs, and Kids, did Skip about and play
12
Whilst their old weary Dams their Sentinels lay
Whilst their old weary dams, their
Gloss Note
guards
sentinels, lay.
Whilst their old weary
Gloss Note
Mothers.
Dams their
Gloss Note
Guards.
Sentinels lay
thus
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
Facsimile Image Placeholder
13
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
Thus, being secure, she feeding down did go,
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
14
ffor Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
For Nature placed her stag-like horns so low
For Nature
Gloss Note
Placed.
plac’t her
Critical Note
A stag is a male deer, and often specifically a male red deer. Pulter’s moose is presented as female throughout, so this description introduces some gender ambiguity into the poem (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). The hunted stag was also a popular Royalist symbol for Charles I (see Elizabeth Kolkovich’s CurationThe Hunted Deer).
Stag like horns Soe low
15
That Shee could never have of graſs her ffill
That she could never have of grass her fill.
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
16
But when in feeding Shee went down the Hill
But when, in feeding, she went down the hill
But when in feeding Shee went down the Hill
17
Which lay full South, the Sun being now her zeneth
Which lay full south, the sun being
Gloss Note
now at
now her zenith,
Which lay full South, the Sun being now
Gloss Note
A zenith is the point in the sky directly overhead. The sun is “her zeneth” meaning it is directly over the moose’s head, perhaps indicating that it is midday (see A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44], l.67).
her zeneth
18
Which made her envie thoſe that fed bene’th
Which made her envy those that fed
Gloss Note
beneath the shade
beneath,
Which made her envie those that fed bene’th
19
His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe
His perpendicular beams did scald her so,
His
Gloss Note
At right-angle to the horizon, vertical. As the sun is directly over the moose’s head, its beams are beating down on her vertically.
Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe
20
That Shee Reſolv’d into the Shades to goe
That she resolved into the shade to go
That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe
21
Of Straight Armd Cedars, ffirrs, Cypres, Pine
Of straight-armed cedars, firs, cypress, pine,
Of Straight Armd Cedars, Firrs, Cypres, Pine
22
About whoſe branches horrid Serpents Twine
About whose branches horrid serpents twine.
About whose branches horrid
Critical Note
Serpents and deer were commonly considered natural enemies. See Curation Serpents vs. Deer.
Serpents Twine
23
One of the Hugest Slip’d down from a bough
One of the hugest slipped down from a bough
One of the Hugest Slip’d down from a bough
24
And Snatcht the Mooz (poor Beast) Shee knew not how
And snatched the moose (poor beast!) she knew not how.
And
Critical Note
Snatched. To suddenly snap or bite at something; or to seize or take hold of; or to remove quickly from sight. There is precedent in early modern natural histories for massive snakes capable of eating large animals like moose whole (see Curation “Serpents vs. Deer”), but it is also possible that the serpent is quickly grabbing the moose and dragging it away.
Snatcht the Mooz (poor Beast) Shee knew not how
25
Thus beeing by this Monſter over powr’d
Thus being by this monster overpowered
Thus beeing by this Monster over powr’d
26
(Oh her hard fate) Shee was by him devour’d
(O her hard fate!), she was by him devoured.
(Oh her hard fate) Shee was by him devour’d
27
Soe have I Seen a hawk A Pheſant truſs
So have I seen a hawk a pheasant
Gloss Note
seize
truss
Soe have I Seen a hawk A Phesant
Gloss Note
To seize or clutch in its talons.
truss
28
Or Patriges, Soe Melancholly Puſs
(Or partridges), so
Gloss Note
Cats were proverbially associated with sadness.
melancholy puss
Or
Gloss Note
Partridges.
Patriges, Soe
Critical Note
Cats were proverbially associated with melancholy. Cf. Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), sig.N3v, where a cat contributes “his melancholy” for the making of a human; William Shakespeare, The history of Henrie the Fourth [Henry IV, Part 1] (1598), sig.A4r, where Falstaff declares he is “as melancholy as a gyb Cat, or a lugd beare”. In modern editions of Henry IV, Part 1, the line appears around 1.2.69. In Josua Poole’s The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English poesie (1657) he suggests multiple epithets for “Cat” but “Melancholy” is first in the list (sig.F3r).
Melancholly Puss
29
Doth Mice Surpriſe, Soe ffoxes Snatch up Lambs
Doth mice
Gloss Note
attack suddenly
surprise, so foxes snatch up lambs
Doth Mice
Gloss Note
To attack suddenly; to capture, seize.
Surprise, Soe Foxes Snatch up Lambs
30
As they lie playing by their Uberous Dams
As they lie playing by their
Gloss Note
nursing, nurturing
uberous dams–
As they lie playing by their
Gloss Note
Supplying abundant milk or nourishment.
Uberous Damms
31
By which example wee may plainly See
By which example we may plainly see
By which example wee may plainly See
32
That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie
That on this orb there’s no felicity.
That on this
Gloss Note
The Earth.
Orb ther’s noe felicitie
33
ffor Death & Hell Combine, and Watch each hour
For Death and Hell combine and watch, each hour
For Death & Hell Combine, and Watch each hour
34
Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies to devour
Our sinful souls and bodies to devour;
Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies to devour
35
’ffor wee are in A Sea of Sorrows Tost
For we are in a sea of sorrows tossed,
For wee are in A Sea of Sorrows Tost
36
Physical Note
written over “ff” and other letters, likely “ffor”
And when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost
And when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost.
Physical Note
In the manuscript “And” is written over “ffor”. As the previous line also begins with “ffor” this could have been done to avoid repetition, or it could be the correcting of a mistranscription.
And when we’re most Secure
Gloss Note
we’re.
wee’r nearest lost
37
As Beauclarks Children did their wrack deplore
As
Gloss Note
The children of King Henry I (Henry Beauclerc), including his heir and many illegitimate children, drowned when their ship hit a rock near the shore of Normandy.
Beauclerc’s children did their wrack
Gloss Note
lament
deplore
Gloss Note
In 1120 three children of King Henry I, also known as Henry Beauclerc, including his only male heir, died in a shipwreck. See Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War.
As Beauclarks Children did their wrack deplore
38
With Greater grief beeing in the Sight of Shore
With greater grief being in the sight of shore.
With Greater grief beeing in the Sight of Shore
39
Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Caſuall bee
Then seeing our lives so frail and
Gloss Note
subject to chance
casual be,
Then Seeing our lives Soe
Gloss Note
Fragile, weak; subject to change or decay, transient.
frail and
Gloss Note
Subject to chance.
Casuall bee
40
Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee.
Let me depend (dear God) on none but Thee.
Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee.
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X (Close panel) All Notes
Amplified Edition
Title note

 Gloss note

In the manuscript, Pulter’s emblems are numbered in the left margin alongside their first lines. This poem is emblem 27. As the poem is otherwise untitled, I have chosen to use the marginal number alongside the poem’s opening words (“The Stately Mooz”) as the title for this edition to reflect the emblem’s appearance in the manuscript.
Transcription

 Editorial note

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

 Editorial note

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

 Editorial note

My main goal with editing this poem has been to preserve something of the texture and feel of reading the manuscript text while aiding clarity. For this reason, I have modernised u/v, i/j and long ‘s’, and the scribe’s ‘ff’ as ‘F’, but I have otherwise maintained the original spelling, punctuation and capitalisation. I have also silently lowered two words in superscript (“mounted” (l.1); “and” (l.11)), and expanded the poem’s one abbreviation (l.30) while italicising the supplied letter. To aid with clarity I have glossed words with their modern spellings where the manuscript’s spelling may hinder understanding. I have also glossed unfamiliar words with definitions from the OED, providing multiple possible definitions separated by semicolons where appropriate. Finally, I have provided explanatory notes to cultural and historical references.
Elemental Edition

 Headnote

This poem’s picturesque opening scene—a hill above a river valley, a moose munching quietly, her young skipping and playing—is darkly savaged when the moose is so foolish as to forego high ground and the light of day, out of envy of those in the shade beneath. The imagery is simultaneously naturalistic and moral, and the moose’s comeuppance speedy and grotesque: in the dark forest, she is “snatched,” “overpowered,” and “devoured” by a snake (again, uniting the naturalistic and the moral). The speaker then links this vivid image of a moose-stuffed serpent to more ordinary kinds of predation and, finally, a sequence of fairly banal complaints: “on this orb there’s no felicity”; “we are in a sea of sorrows tossed”; “when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost.” In the face of such relentless carnage and misery throughout the animal kingdom, it’s no surprise that the speaker’s final declaration of fealty is to God instead.
Amplified Edition

 Headnote

In “27. The Stately Mooz”, Pulter presents the titular moose as an ambiguous emblematic figure who occupies an unpredictable and unfeeling world. The moose starts on a secure hilltop, but she descends, driven by hunger, and then seeks shade from the scorching sun under trees that (unknown to her) are infested with deadly serpents. She is consequently devoured by one of the “Hugest” (l.23), most monstrous serpents. Unlike emblems such as The Porcupine (Emblem 13) [Poem 79] where the prideful porcupine is condemned or Raccoons (Emblem 21) [Poem 86] where the raccoons (really beavers) are praised for their exemplary teamwork, in “The Stately Mooz” Pulter neither condemns nor praises the moose’s actions. Rather, Pulter characterises the moose as a sympathetic but flawed figure whose “hard fate” (l.26) emblematises the “Casuall” (l.39) and difficult nature of postlapsarian existence.
Pulter understands moose as shrewd, practical animals. The moose is a positive example of parental love in The Indian Moose (Emblem 7) [Poem 73] where she loves all three of her calves equally and so uses her “policy” (l.7) to pragmatically place them in three different locations and thus protect them from predators. Pulter also presents this astuteness in “The Stately Mooz” where the moose “Politickly… doth the Feilds Survey” (l.7) for lions, tigers, leopards and bears and only leaves the hill once she believes herself, albeit falsely, “Secure” (l.13). Given the“Stately” moose’s eventual demise, her descent of the hill could symbolise a blameworthy moral decline to be avoided by the reader, but Pulter offers no direct caution against this action. Instead, Pulter presents the moose as being compelled by the practicality of hunger. Having “of the beautious prospect tane her fill” (l.2) the moose sensibly next “Considers… her diet” (l.5). Indeed, the emblem implies that eating downhill may be a physical necessity:
Thus beeing Secure Shee feeding down did goe
For Nature plac’t her Stag like horns Soe low
That Shee could never have of grass her Fill
(ll.13–15)
Seventeenth-century descriptions of moose, or moose-like creatures such as elk, often allude to their difficulty in eating (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). In his bestiary The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (1607) Edward Topsell describes elk as having to walk “backward like a Sea-crab” while eating to avoid biting their own large upper lip.
Gloss Note
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig.T5r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised]
1 Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1637) characterises moose as “long legged” and thus needing to “kneel” to feed on grass, while the anonymous A Treatise of New England (1645) describes moose as “frequent[ing] the low rank grounds to feed upon long grass, by reason their fore feet are longer than their hinder feet”.
Gloss Note
Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an abstract of New England, composed in three books (Printed for Charles Green, 1637), sig. K1v. EEBO; A treatise of Nevv England published in anno Dom. 1637. And now reprinted (London, 1645), sig. A4r. EEBO. [Spelling modernised].
2 Pulter’s moose also has difficulty eating because “Nature” has placed her antlers so “low” that she cannot easily reach the grass. While Pulter does not mention the moose’s legs, the conjunction “For” implies that the moose may need to feed going “down” the hill. Perhaps her moose is also moving to the “low rank grounds” (“rank” meaning growing vigorously) and “long grass” at the bottom of the hill to compensate for her “low” antlers.
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “rank, adj., sense II.6”, last modified December 2023.
3 Alternatively, the continuous verb in “feeding down did go”, and again in “when in feeding Shee went down the Hill” (l.16), suggests the moose eats as she moves downhill. Interestingly, eating whilst facing or moving downhill would somewhat level the unevenness of overly-long front legs and thus allow the moose’s head to reach closer to the ground. Whatever the exact reasoning, Pulter clearly presents the moose’s descent of the hill as a physical necessity that is nonetheless undertaken cautiously and carefully. Pulter also offers a physical explanation for the moose’s retreat from the sun into the shade: “His Perpendiculer beams did Scald her Soe / That Shee Resolv’d into the Shades to goe” (ll.19–20). The moose’s initial shrewd caution and Pulter’s naturalistic justifications for the moose’s movements make her actions understandable to the reader. Thus, we are more likely to sympathise with the moose when the poem’s speaker parenthetically laments the “poor Beast” (l.24) and “her hard fate” (l.26). Indeed, the references to “Nature” (l.14) and “fate” confer a sense of inevitability onto the moose’s death that somewhat absolves her of culpability.
However, Pulter’s description of the moose’s movement out of the “Scald[ing]” sun and into “the Shades” is complicated by the fact that the scorching sun also makes the moose “envie” (l.18) those feeding beneath the trees. This is an odd detail to include as it does not seem to clearly contribute narratively or causally to the moose’s movement out of the sun which, as above, is directly prompted by the burning sun. On the one hand, the shade is a place of privacy in Pulter’s The Elephant (Emblem 19) [Poem 84] and of sanctuary in The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) [Poem 87] so to a reader of Pulter’s emblems it is understandable that the shade could represent a place of respite. Again, in The Invitation into the Country (Poem 2) [Poem 2] “shady groves” (l.38) are a key component of the ideal pastoral landscape of pre-Civil War Broadfield, Pulter’s country estate. Given these poems and Pulter’s opening description in “The Stately Mooz” of the “beautious prospect” (l.2) where “Floras Robe” (l.4) is ornamented with lace-like silver streams, the reader is as liable as the moose to misread or misinterpret the environment as a locus amoenus (a lovely or idyllic place). On the other hand, Pulter’s poetry is replete with light imagery and sunlight in particular often symbolises the divine (see, for example, The Eclipse (Poem 1) [Poem 1], Of Night and Morning (Poem 5) [Poem 5], The Center (Poem 30) [Poem 30]). The complement to these images is Pulter’s equally pervasive association of darkness and shade with misery, death, sin and hell (see, for example, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul (Poem 24) [Poem 24], My Soul’s Sole Desire (Poem 29) [Poem 29], The Center (Poem 30), and Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory (Poem 48) [Poem 48]). By leaving the hilltop and forsaking the “Sun” (l.17) for the “Shades” (l.20), is the moose forsaking the moral high ground and light of God for the darkness of sin, implied by her “envie”? If the moose’s actions are meant to be understood as sinful, then is Pulter using the epithet “Stately” (l.1) in the now obsolete sense of haughty or arrogant?
Gloss Note
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “stately, adj., sense 3.a”, last modified September 2023.
4 This is how she seems to use the term in Universal Dissolution (Poem 6) [Poem 6] where a “stately cedar” is characterised as overly ambitious and proud (ll.23–25). If so, the moose may misread her environment not through an understandable error, but because she is too proud and thus assured of her own safety to recognise Pulter’s caution that “when we’re most Secure wee’r nearest lost” (l.36).
Pulter’s precise choice of serpents as the moose’s predator also seems to support the interpretation of the moose as sinful, with snakes being a common Christian symbol of the “Death & Hell” (l.33) the speaker explicitly links them to later in the poem. However, the serpent and moose is not the only example of animal predation Pulter offers in the emblem and the moose’s demise precipitates a list of more predators and prey: hawks trussing pheasant and partridges, cats catching mice, and foxes snatching lambs from their mothers (ll.27–30). Seventeenth-century accounts of New England make no mention of snakes attacking or eating moose (see Curation “Moose: Fact and Fiction”), potentially indicating that Pulter’s choice of serpents may be primarily symbolic. Yet, these same accounts demonstrate an understanding of moose as a species of, or at least akin to, deer. Significantly, an antipathy between snakes and deer is not unfounded (see Curation Serpents vs. Deer). For example, both Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History (1601) and Topsell give accounts of deer and snakes fighting. Furthermore, in his Latin emblem book Symbolorum et Emblematum ex Animalibus (1595), Joachim Camerarius uses the antipathy between deers and serpents for an emblem where the serpent-covered deer seeking water becomes a symbol for the Christian seeking God as the one means of salvation. Therefore, Pulter seems to synthesise accounts of New England with older natural histories and emblem tradition to flesh out her knowledge of the moose and its possible symbolic associations. Placing the pairing of moose and snake at the beginning of a longer list of predators and prey partially naturalises the image, complicating the serpent’s devouring of the moose as an emblem for the descent into and punishment of sin: pheasant, partridge, mice and especially the seemingly innocent “playing” (l.30) lambs are the unfortunate prey of a natural, albeit unsparing, order rather than of their own sinful ways.
The poem does not conclude with a call to avoid envy and sin, or with a recommendation to keep to the security of the high ground and divine light. Rather, by layering the natural brutality of animal predation and the symbolic punishment of sin, Pulter implicates the postlapsarian world as a whole in the emblem’s scope: “By which example wee may plainly See / That on this Orb ther’s noe felicitie” (ll.31–32). The final ten lines of the poem are in first-person plural, involving both the speaker and reader in the emblem’s wretched world. Like the serpent, hawk, cat and fox, “Death & Hell” are continually “Watch[ing]” and stalking us, predators waiting to “devour” “Our Sinfull Souls, and bodies” (ll.33–34). By mentioning “Our Sinfull Souls”, Pulter evokes the human postlapsarian condition as inherently sinful. In A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44] Pulter describes the sun as able to scorch the speaker because of the biblical Fall that imbues humanity with sin (ll.77–80). In “The Stately Mooz”, the moose being scorched by the sun may indicate her, and by extension the reader’s, inherited fallen condition. Perhaps the fact that the sun scorches the moose is more emblematically significant than the moose entering the shade. Furthermore, perhaps the moose is not sinful because she is envious, but rather her enviousness is a symptom of her fallenness. The moose is sinful, but we nonetheless are expected to empathise with her flawed character because we too are fallen. As such, the emblem as a whole imagines the transitory, postlapsarian world as a relentless “Sea of Sorrows” (l.35) that can only end in death.
For the Royalist Pulter, this postlapsarian “Sea of Sorrows” is also a post-Civil War world. Alice Eardley dates the composition of Pulter’s emblems to between 1653 and 1658, during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.
Gloss Note
Alice Eardley, “Introduction”, in Poems, Emblems and the Unfortunate Florinda, by Hester Pulter (Toronto, Iter Press, 2014), 21.
5 While less explicitly political than some of Pulter’s other emblems, the adjective “Stately” (l.1) and adverb “Politickly” (l.7) place the poem in the realm of politics. Moreover, Pulter’s mention of the drowning of “Beauclarks Children” (l.37) references a shipwreck where King Henry I’s only legitimate male heir to the throne died, thus contributing to a civil war upon his death between Matilda, his only surviving legitimate child, and his nephew Stephen for the throne (see Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War). In the wake of the Civil War and Charles I’s execution, this story of English royalty in crisis may have particularly evoked Pulter’s Royalist sympathies. Finally, Pulter’s description of the moose’s “Stag like horns” is suggestive of the hunted harts and stags that so often represent the plight of Charles I in seventeenth-century poetry, including Pulter’s own verse (see Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter (Poem 10) [Poem 10], The Hunted Hart (Emblem 22) and This Flying Fish (Emblem 25) [Poem 90]. See also Elizabeth Kolkovich’s Curation The Hunted Deer).
Gloss Note
See also Anne Elizabeth Carson, “The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King”, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45, no.3 (2005): 537–56.
6 Pulter’s moose is not hunted, but the fact that her forest is infested with “horrid Serpents” bears symbolic similarities to the many-headed, serpentine hydra that Pulter and other Royalists used to depict the Republican government (see This Huge Leviathan (Emblem 42) [Poem 107]. See also Victoria E. Burke’s Curation The Many Headed Hydra). As such, it is perhaps not too outlandish to suggest that the “Hugest” (l.23) serpent, described as a “Monster” (l.25), could emblematise Cromwell himself and (from a Royalist perspective) his sinful role in Charles I’s execution. In “The Stately Mooz”, the inevitability of predators catching prey, as well as the moose’s rapidly changing fortune, bear similarity to the overtly political emblem "This Flying Fish (Emblem 25)". In this reading, Charles I as the “Stately Mooz” becomes a sympathetic, although not flawless, victim of the “Monster” (l.25) Cromwell, but also secondarily of the relentlessly brutal, unpredictable world.
In the face of such a world, Pulter closes the emblem by enacting the “devotional turn” that Rachel Dunn identifies as characteristic of her emblems.
Gloss Note
Rachel Dunn, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book”, The Seventeenth Century 30, no.1 (2015): 63.
7 Rather than ending with a moral call to action (e.g., avoid envy or stay in God’s light), Pulter turns inward. Unable to resolve the world’s unpredictability, the speaker can only rely on God: “Then Seeing our lives Soe frail and Casuall bee / Let mee depend (dear God) on none but thee” (ll.39–40). It is this unpredictability that makes the moose such an ambiguous and complicated emblematic figure, straddling both sympathy and culpability: if the moose’s “hard fate” is the outcome of the changeable, uncontrollable world of animal predation, then how could her caution and pragmatism ever counteract this? Pulter cannot conclude with a call to emulate or condemn the moose, because the poem forces us all, including the speaker, to grapple with our own sinful, postlapsarian and mortal nature. Ultimately, “The Stately Mooz” is an emblem for the unavoidable transience and difficulty of our own existence. We cannot model the moose, Pulter suggests, because we are all already the moose, involved in an infelicitous and brutal world.
Transcription
Line number 1

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poem follows end of the preceding one on same page, beginning two-thirds down
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 Gloss note

Noble, majestic; more negatively, haughty or arrogant; majestic in size, elegantly built; possessing a slow and dignified gait.
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Moose. This was a relatively new word in early modern English (OED first usage 1614) deriving from two Algonquian languages of North America.
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The beautiful view.
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Taken, likely an alternate spelling of the elided form ta’en to preserve the metre by condensing two syllables to one.
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valley
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pass
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goddess of spring
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Enriching.
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Flora’s. The Roman Goddess of Flowers.
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the Moose.
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Line number 7

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the “S” is possibly written over a prior letter (or there is an ink transfer across the page with a descender)
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shrewdly
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Shrewdly, skillfully.
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Line number 11

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“u” corrects earlier “n”
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Line number 11

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all but comma (and possibly comma) in different hand from main scribe
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guards
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Mothers.
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Guards.
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Placed.
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 Critical note

A stag is a male deer, and often specifically a male red deer. Pulter’s moose is presented as female throughout, so this description introduces some gender ambiguity into the poem (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction). The hunted stag was also a popular Royalist symbol for Charles I (see Elizabeth Kolkovich’s CurationThe Hunted Deer).
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now at
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A zenith is the point in the sky directly overhead. The sun is “her zeneth” meaning it is directly over the moose’s head, perhaps indicating that it is midday (see A Solitary Discourse (Poem 44) [Poem 44], l.67).
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beneath the shade
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At right-angle to the horizon, vertical. As the sun is directly over the moose’s head, its beams are beating down on her vertically.
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Serpents and deer were commonly considered natural enemies. See Curation Serpents vs. Deer.
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Snatched. To suddenly snap or bite at something; or to seize or take hold of; or to remove quickly from sight. There is precedent in early modern natural histories for massive snakes capable of eating large animals like moose whole (see Curation “Serpents vs. Deer”), but it is also possible that the serpent is quickly grabbing the moose and dragging it away.
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seize
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To seize or clutch in its talons.
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Cats were proverbially associated with sadness.
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Partridges.
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Cats were proverbially associated with melancholy. Cf. Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), sig.N3v, where a cat contributes “his melancholy” for the making of a human; William Shakespeare, The history of Henrie the Fourth [Henry IV, Part 1] (1598), sig.A4r, where Falstaff declares he is “as melancholy as a gyb Cat, or a lugd beare”. In modern editions of Henry IV, Part 1, the line appears around 1.2.69. In Josua Poole’s The English Parnassus, or, A helpe to English poesie (1657) he suggests multiple epithets for “Cat” but “Melancholy” is first in the list (sig.F3r).
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attack suddenly
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To attack suddenly; to capture, seize.
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nursing, nurturing
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Supplying abundant milk or nourishment.
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The Earth.
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Line number 36

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written over “ff” and other letters, likely “ffor”
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Line number 36

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In the manuscript “And” is written over “ffor”. As the previous line also begins with “ffor” this could have been done to avoid repetition, or it could be the correcting of a mistranscription.
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we’re.
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The children of King Henry I (Henry Beauclerc), including his heir and many illegitimate children, drowned when their ship hit a rock near the shore of Normandy.
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lament
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In 1120 three children of King Henry I, also known as Henry Beauclerc, including his only male heir, died in a shipwreck. See Curation Shipwrecks and Civil War.
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subject to chance
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Fragile, weak; subject to change or decay, transient.
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Subject to chance.
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