This is one of two poems in Pulter’s manuscript written during her pregnancy and lying-in with her fifteenth child, her son John, in 1648. It can be read in this way as a companion poem to Universal Dissolution, Made When I Was with Child, of my 15th Child, my Son, John, I Being, Everyone Thought, in a Consumption, 1648 [Poem 6]. The pregnancy and birth of John are likely to have been the last of Pulter’s confinements; she was 43 years old, and the two poems together intimate her ill health both before and after the delivery. “This Was Written 1648, When I Lay in with my Son John” has been copied into Pulter’s manuscript in 1655, as the extended title indicates. Pulter and her son had both survived the “great weakness” of the pregnancy, birth, and lying-in, the period of recuperation after the delivery. Like “Universal Dissolution,” this extended lyric can be associated with the mode of complaint, the extended and virtuosic expression of woe that Pulter engages in several of her lyrics. But the lyric turns rapidly away from bewailing the frail body and sickness as a motive of woe and instead becomes a flight of fancy: an allusive and analogical exploration of the cosmos. The poet-speaker’s “thoughts being free” to “take their flight” (3), her poetic “fancy” raises her so high that she is able to look back down on the Earth and see it as “another star” (19-20). She traverses a poeticised cosmos, reflecting on personified and mythologised planets, before her “affrighted fancy” (49) is abruptly drawn down to witness the dawn's routing of Night and her troupe of monstrous offspring. These offspring—including Error, the Fates, Horror, Despair, and Sorrow—are the product of Night's “sable womb” (63), in a hellish parody of earthly childbirth. But the poem concludes with Night and her associates displaced by dawn which, as so often in Pulter’s poems, brings comfort (see the multiple “Aurora” poems). Pulter’s speaker turns from the earthly pain and sorrow of her lying-in (“as in my bed I lay,” the poem's opening scenario) towards a heavenly future of singing godly “lays”; that is, the heavenly songs for which her own poems are a preparation. For Pulter’s recurrent imagery of heavenly lays, see Sarah C. E. Ross, “Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints: ‘Then will I hallelujahs ever sing,’” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20.2 (2020), 99-119.
Several rich critical discussions of the lyric explore the relationships in it among pregnancy, melancholy, and poetic production. Amanda Zoch explores its articulation of the “felt mortality” of early modern women’s experience of pregnancy (“Rewriting the Lying-In: Hester Pulter, Katherine Philips, and the Felt Mortality of Pregnancy,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 15.1 [2020]: 3-25). Ruth Connolly locates it in seventeenth-century discourses of poetic production as pregnancy and childbirth, asking “What does it matter if the ‘pregnant poet’ is actually pregnant?” (“Hester Pulter’s Childbirth Poetics,” Women’s Writing, 26.3 [2019]: 282-303 [282]) Connolly sees the poem as an assertion of a maternal poetics, one that claims “a powerful and reciprocal link between women’s intellectual creativity and authority and their experience of their bodies” (4). Alice Eardley approaches the poem through its articulation of melancholy, the planet Saturn, under whose influence Pulter describes herself as having been born, determining the prevailing mood of much of Pulter’s work. Eardley links Pulter’s melancholy with the particular travails of pregnancy and childbirth, and (in an argument that shares much with Connolly’s later piece) explores its relationship to prevailing tropes of male poetic productivity. For Eardley, the emphasis on pregnancy in Pulter’s poetry recasts the trope of the male melancholic genius, enabling her to “rewrite her own personal, and feminine, grief as the expression of a superior intellect” (“‘Saturn [whose aspects soe sads my soul]’: Lady Hester Pulter’s Feminine Melancholic Genius,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, IV: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 2002–2006, ed. Michael Denbo [Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008], pp. 239–52). Emma Rayner extends further the exploration of Pulter’s Saturnine sadness and female expression of melancholy. In conjunction with the freedom and flight of the speaker’s poetic “fancy,” she emphasises the materiality of Pulter’s female melancholy, and the inescapability of “the female body, that vessel of woe” (“Monumental Melancholy in John Webster and Hester Pulter,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 60.1 [2020]: 67-89 [79]).
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall
Comparison Tool
Sources 
