Hester Pulter – “The Circle [1]”

Editorial statement:

I have modernized spellings especially at the end to render the rhyming pairs even more intuitive. I haven’t changed the archaic grammar (“didst” & “doth”, and “shouldst” & “shall”), because they carry specific indication of perspectives, (second person and third person respectively), while the former is associated with God and the latter with natural elements used as symbols or imageries. Nouns are also capitalized only when the narrator mentions or directly addresses God, (Thee, Thou). Since the verse is written in iambic tetrameter and rhymes in AABB, it has a self-explanatory and coherent structure, thus I didn’t add punctuations except for a colon after “Trust me” for introducing another subject. Generally, I tend to preserve an archaic overtone while rendering the text flexible for the readers to interpret.

Headnote:

Lady Hester Pulter (c.1607–1678) was the daughter of James Ley, the first Earl of Marlborough in 1626, and the wife of Arthur Pulter, a minor member of the gentry in Hertfordshire. During the 1640s and the 1650s, Pulter began writing 130 folios of poetry under the pen name Hadassas, another name for the biblical Esther. Many of her poems address some of the most urgent issues confronting early modern England, from the political turmoil of the English Civil Wars, scientific developments, to the social status of women. In addition, her poetry also reveals extensive contemporary reading in literary and religious works, as well as wide-ranging intellectual interest from natural philosophy, astrology, esoteric traditions and alchemy (Archer 2).

Her work spans various genres, and has close association with the events of her life: pregnancy, illness, deaths of her children. A concern for her children is one of the preoccupations, since Pulter has given birth to 15 children but only outlived two of them. With the mixing of the themes with in “Poems breathed forth,” Christian (2012) believes Lady Pulter would have her audience think that the losses of her children and royalists, are connected through the destruction of the earth that resulted from the English Civil War. The intensely emotional and confessional style of her occasional and devotional poetry is particularly unusual for its time.

The Circle [1]

In sighs and tears there is no end
 My soul on heaven alone depend
 Sighs like the air doth clouds condense* (chemistry) to liquefy from a gaseous state Which tears from our sad eyes dispense 5 Trust me: in sighs there is no ease
 No more than wind doth calm the seas And tears (ah me) descend in vain
 To sighs they rarefy* again
 to make (esp. air) thin; the antonym of condense In this sad circle I run round
 10 Till giddily I tumble down
 But should poor I suspire* to air to sigh or breathe I know the sad fruits of despair
 Or should I into tears dissolve
 What horror would my soul involve* to entangle in difficulties, perplexity 15 Then gracious God in Thee I’ll trust Although Thou crumble me to dust* original, formative elements 
 No grief shall so emergent* be
 unexpectedly To separate my soul from Thee
 Of nothing Thou didst me create 20 And shouldst Thou now annihilate Abrupt, or consummate my story, Oh let it be unto Thy glory.

Title] ‘The Circle’ is a recurring theme or figure in Putler’s work. She has composed four poems with the same title ‘The Circle’ (Manuscript pp.71-72, 76, 80, 104), revealing her preoccupation with various forms of transformation and revolution (alchemical, political, astronomical, and personal). The first one here opens with a metaphorical water cycle, to discuss the cycle of despair and faith.

1-4] The first circle in this poem is the endless cycle of grief that “[has] no end”. The speaker imagines her emotions and their physical manifestations climatically, which is closely connected by the chemical sense of “condense”: just as air condenses into rain clouds, her sighs also liquefies into tears, and both processes are repeated again and again. The convention of using hyperbolic meteorological images for emotions is often influenced by Petrarch and subsequently seen in many English versions and translations, including Thomas Wyatt’s sonnet “My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness” and Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella.

5-8] While describing the “endless” nature of her grief, she introduces another important aspect, its difficulty and “no ease”. The line that highlights the vanity of tears, is itself infused with a sigh (the interjection “ah me”). Note how she forms and closes the first cycle with one antonym pair “condense”/ “rarefy”, while enhancing the association between “sighs and tears” with air and wind.

9-14] Like variation in musical works, the narrator recycles previously used motifs and keywords including “sad”, “soul”, “tears” to form a new section about sorrow, which again reminds us of the cycle established in the opening. Apart from formal features that conjures up the image of “The Circle”, she also uses the diction “tumble”, which means to roll about on the ground.

15 Then gracious God ... I’ll trust] The turn to God at breaks the cycle of grief and forges another cycle: the believer’s continuity with God, in the sense that she was created by God and could be annihilated by God.

16 Although … dust] The phrase has a Biblical origin from Genesis 2:7: ‘And the Lord God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ The notion that Adam is made of dust is as important as the fact that he will return into, as in Genesis 3:19 ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’. In alchemical texts ‘dust’ was used to describe ‘the whitened, purified body of the Stone attained through sublimation’. See Abraham, Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, p. 62 (qtd. Archer 13). In other poems by Pulter about transformation, similar ideas of dissolution, condensation and dust take on a more specifically alchemical meaning, though the alchemical connotation of dust as purified matter is easily mistaken for the ashes or dregs of the transformation.

19 Of … create] Refers to the idea that God create the universe ex nihilo (from nothing) which was a point of theological doctrine and debate. By evoking this concept, Pulter is endorsing God’s power in the face of major philosophical controversy in the seventeenth century.

20-22] “annihilate” has theological connotations, meaning the destruction of both soul and the body; “abrupt” (to break off, to interrupt suddenly, to curtail) was fairly recent in being used as a verb; “consummate” could mean “put an end to” or in Biblical sense “to perfect”, “to complete”. While “story” here is a metaphor for her life narrative, “glory” (from the Latin gloria, “fame, renown”) is used to describe the manifestation of God's presence as perceived by humans according to the Abrahamic religions. Thus, as Professor Leah and Wall (2018) suggests, the speaker’s initial portrayal of her human weakness, represented by the mercurial emotional responses, ‘is finally countered by her confident expression of trust in God and contentment that even his annihilation of her shall be to his glory’.

Work Cited

Archer, Jayne. “A ‘Perfect Circle’? Alchemy in the Poetry of Hester Pulter.” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005).

Christian, Stefan G. The Poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?–1678): An Annotated Edition, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ann Arbor, 2012. ProQuest, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1240643123?accountid=15181.

Knight, Leah and Wendy Wall, gen. eds. The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. 2018. http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu

Pulter, Hester. Poems breathed forth by the nobel Hadassas, University of Leeds Library, ​Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32