We might supplement Leah Knight and Wendy Wall’s excellent Elemental Edition of “This Vast Leviathan (Emblem 12)” by emphasizing the paradoxical relationship between consumption and corruption throughout the poem. On its surface, the poem’s “leviathan” is a straightforward reference to the divine sea creature depicted in the Hebrew Bible whose name etymologically means “twisted” or “coiled” (Hirsch et al.). Pulter extends this visceral metaphor to portray a monstrous body that dramatizes the geography and ecological cycles of Nature itself with its representations of “floods,” “sands,” and the earthly fields in which there is “labor at the plough.” Not only should we follow Knight and Wall’s injunction to track the poem’s “shifting pronouns” and its depiction of the “dizzyingly unstable” identities of various animals, but we should also strive to apprehend its representation of the macro- and microcosms of the natural world. These extend from the vast reaches of oceans in which swim “shoals of fishes” to the smaller spaces between crocodile “teeth” as well as other vivid examples that emphasize scalar relationships between animalistic bodies and civic order. In other words, Pulter’s vast leviathan represents a monolithic body made of a polyphony of material forces: social, biological, and political.
Modern readers will note, then, that Pulter’s “This Vast Leviathan” anticipates what Thomas Hobbes would argue elsewhere in his famous treatise of a similar name: Leviathan, published in 1651. One of Hobbes’ primary contentions in Leviathan is that “Men are moved by appetites and aversions,” which comprise the seminal forces that urge and inform man’s “Will” and “Deliberation.” From this initial postulate, Hobbes suggests that understanding the complex organization of political society depends on the recognition of the simple mechanisms that move human bodies, from the inner workings of sense organs to those controlling the effluvia of emotions and cognition. Whether or not Pulter was familiar with Hobbes’ influential work when writing her poetry, it is against this materialist context that “The Vast Leviathan” presents an alternative reckoning with a multitude of social and theological concerns including class hierarchies, the relationship between humans and animals, and the sovereignty of God over all creation. Whereas the grand conclusion of Hobbes’ Leviathan is that all men necessarily struggle against each other for eminent power in political society, Pulter not only finds recourse in the ultimate sovereignty of God but indeed suggests that all oppositional struggles can be considered as mutual dependencies organized by Nature that likewise involve the perpetual contestation between vital appetite and worldly corruptions.
The tension between the divine as represented through nature and animals, on one hand, and Pulter’s tempering attitude towards monarchs, on the other, thus complicates what Alice Eardley calls the poet’s “vehemently Royalist” sympathies (346), suggesting that Pulter’s politics extend beyond the particularity of a specific court and advance a more philosophical consideration of sovereignty in the abstract. Notably, while “This Vast Leviathan (Emblem 12)” lacks clear references to any specific monarch, a later poem in the manuscript, This Huge Leviathan (Emblem 42) [Poem 107] seems to take direct aim at Oliver Cromwell who rises “from the vulgar” common crowd to rule an unruly populace. Regardless of which ruler was in power at the time of the composition of these two emblems, Pulter’s political commentary evinces the stark contradictions inherent in the enormous yet limited influence that may be held by a human leader when compared to the grand or even spiritual sovereignty invoked by the figure of the leviathan. Further explaining the parallel between excessive consumption as typified by aristocracy and bodily corruption as represented by laboring subjects and animals in decay, Emma Rayner identifies that a strain of melancholia runs through Pulter’s poetry not only in relation to its nostalgia for Charles I but also in its mourning for figures in Pulter’s life such as her daughter Jane, who in 1646 died of smallpox (81). While the unknown relationship between the chronology of these events and the often undated composition of Pulter’s poetry complicates our capacity to read the emblems against them in any straightforward way, these biographical details still provide some illumination of the historical and interpersonal pressures that inform Pulter’s thematic tendency toward biopolitical discourses. Even without a clear sense of Pulter’s political motives, however, we readers may interpret significant meanings from the temporal and spatial slippages in Pulter’s verse as well as her reference to animals and the natural world throughout. Indeed, the scalar shifts employed by Pulter in the myriad images throughout “This Vast Leviathan” corroborate Liza Blake’s arguments in “Hester Pulter’s Particle Physics and the Poetics of Involution,” in which the author suggests that the conceptual meaning of “leviathan” to “coil” or “twist” might be compared to Pulter’s thematic emphasis on “involution.” As Blake puts it, to “involve” is “to wrap, envelop, and enfold; to (transitively) wind something into a spiral; but also to entwine, to join by winding … to implicate … to entangle” (71). In this way, the implicated terms of “involve”-ment and “leviathan” etymologically emphasize the interdependence between nature and species as well as the interdependence between economic and political classes.
Thus, Pulter arguably participates in a longer tradition in Early Modern literature in which representations of the sea as well as sea monsters are used to interrogate social, economic, and political systems. In Shakespeare’s Pericles, for instance, the titular character survives a shipwreck and laments, “Alas, the sea hath cast me on the rocks, / Wash’d me from shore to shore, and left my breath / Nothing to think on but ensuing death” (Pericles 2.1.5–7). One of the fishermen who finds him remarks, “Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: he plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him and at last devours them all at a mouthful” (Pericles 2.1.29–33). These lines express a politically and economically involved entanglement between the poor fishermen and a temporarily washed-up prince that is mediated through not only nature but also the sea creatures which inhabit and devour it. Likewise, as Dan Brayton has persuasively argued in an analysis of the “royal” fish in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, “Whales feature prominently in cultural narratives … in mediating the relationship of humanity with nature, and they do so under the weight of a cultural history that vacillates betweens a threatening alterity and an uncanny resemblance: whales are both monstrous and strangely familiar” (48). John Donne’s Metempsychosis (1601) also makes use of the theme of monstrous consumption in relation to whales and their capacity to represent an inextricable interconnection between humans and nature: “So on his backe lyes this whale wantoning, / And in his gulfe-like throat, sucks every thing / That passeth neare. Fish chaseth fish, and all, / Flyer and follower, in this whirlepoole fall; …” (XXXIII, lines 4–7).
For Pulter’s “This Vast Leviathan,” this involutional interplay with creatures is perhaps most strikingly narrated in the lines that speak of a crocodile’s “Mouth” into and out of which flies a “Wren” hoping to goad the reptile into eating the “Ichneumon,” which is a rat or mongoose which the wren considers as “foe.” In this poetic scene, Pulter leaves open the crocodile’s “gapeing” maw to redirect the reader’s attention to the wren’s own consumption of the “Putred flesh” between the crocodile’s teeth into her “Lothed Intralls.” In effect, readers are presented with a creature eating a creature eating a creature, all of which occupy what appear to be disproportionate positions of power but all of which are also ultimately relegated to the same biological needs. In stressing the chiasms between life and death, world and body, or rich and poor, Pulter’s poem adds moral nuance to the Shakespearean view of the world seen in Hamlet’s humbling reminder to his uncle, King Claudius, of the cyclic mortality of men: “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of the worm … to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (Hamlet 4.3.24–7).
For this reason, readers may also appreciate the irony produced by the poem’s own materiality as a textual object that has been prepared for readerly consumption by an entangled and overlapping set of editorial efforts, even as said efforts could be said to have “corrupted” Pulter’s original version of the poem. The Pulter Project lays bare the coiled connections between these efforts in its functionality that allows readers to compare editions of poems side by side along with the manuscript, which itself is a scribal transposition of Pulter’s original work. That is, the poem itself might be considered a “Vast Leviathan, Whose Breathing blows” in the sense that its textual force has propagated throughout the centuries, conscripting readers and editors alike in the productive play of literary meaning.
To this end, one final observation that this Amplified Edition seeks to highlight in its preservation of Early Modern spellings regards the variant forms of “lyes” and “lies” in lines 3 and 4. In these lines—“See whose fair Consort in Salt Pickle lyes / To feast the Jews or else their Talmond lies”—the lyes/lies could be interpreted as the same word that were made with variant spellings either via an unintentional mistake or else as an intentionally unresolved confusion passed on by the scribe who has transposed the original manuscript for us. That is, given the available evidence which suggests Pulter first wrote the poems in the 1640s and 50s but that an unidentified scribe produced the manuscript extant today, it is unclear whether Pulter intended those lines to end differently or if this was a consequence of scribal transposition. If the former, especially in the case where Pulter may have overseen the transpositions herself, we might consider another interplay of contradictions in Pulter’s verse, where the caustic alkaline solution invoked by salty “lyes” runs in direct contrast to the “lies” associated with feasts. If the latter, however, we readers have ostensibly witnessed yet another cyclic twist of the leviathan, where “lyes” and “lies” are words uneasily shared both by Pulter and the unknown scribe, with a single letter altered for no discernible reason beyond scribal whim or else leviathanic fate.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
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