"Shee was another World"

In 1996, a grad student at Leeds University was going through a job lot of uncataloged manuscripts—odds and ends picked up at auction—when he came across a small brown-leather-bound book in a curly 1650s hand.  Within were over 120 poems “Breathed forth by the Noble Hadassas” and on the flip side of the pages, upside-down and back-to-front, an unfinished prose romance, “The Unfortunate Florinda.”

Here is the epigraph:




He had discovered Lady Hester Pulter (ca 1607–1678), an unknown poet of the 17th century.

Her scant biography will give you no idea of her attainments.  Her father, a Lord Chief Justice and Lord High Treasurer, was created Earl of Marlborough under Charles I.  She was born in Ireland, and was married at thirteen or maybe fifteen to one Arthur Pulter of Broadfield Hall, near Cottered in Hertfordshire.  She bore him fifteen children; thirteen of them died.  She lived in isolation and perpetual mourning, for her children and her king, in a flintily Puritan county.  She gardened a great deal.  Some of her long circumstantial headnotes may suggest mere complaint and conventional piety.

“This was written 1648, when I Lay Inn, with my Son John, beeing my 15 Child, I beeing soe weak, that in Ten dayes and Nights I never moved my Head one Jot from my Pillow, out of which great weaknes, my gracious God restored me, that I still Live to magnifie his Mercie.”

The poetry is something else.

In spirit, the poet rises from her sickbed:

Up to that Spheir where Nights Pale Queen doth run
Round the Circumference of the Illustrious Sun
Her Globious Body Spacious was and Bright
That Half alone that from Sols Beams had light
The other was imured in shades of Night
Nor did shee seem to mee as Poets fain
Guiding her Chariot with A silver Rein
Attir’d like som fair Nimph or Virgin Queen
With naked Neck and Arms and Robes of Green
Love sick Endimion oft hath thus her seen
But as my thoughts about her Orb was Hurld
I did perceive Shee was another World
Thus beeing in my Fancie raised soe fare
This World apear’s to mee another star
And as the Moon a Shadow Casts and Light
Soe is our earth the Empres of their Night

Wait, did she just imagine seeing earthrise from an orbit round the moon?  She did. 

Hers is a Copernican universe; she nods to the Galilean moons as she flies past:

Next Jupiter that Mild Auspicious Starr
I did perceive about his Blazing Carr
Four bright Atendents always hurrid Round...

Yet Pulter is no luftmensch.  In a fiercer political vein, she writes of a kingdom overrun with locusts: 

Then ibis came and did these worms destroy,
But with his putrid filth he ten times more
Afflicted them than they were e’er before.

The ibis, she notes in the margins, is Cromwell, shovelling up and shitting out corruption.

So:  a melancholic, a Copernican, a Galilean, an impassioned Royalist, a political satirist—oh yes, and a botanical alchemist:

View but this tulip, rose, or gillyflower,
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
These flowers into their chaos were retired
Till human art them raised and reinspired
With beating, macerating, fermentation,
Calcining, chemically, with segregation;
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
Shut up the ashes under Hermes’s seal;
Then, with a candle or a gentle fire,
You may reanimate at your desire
These gallant plants; but if you cool the glass,
To their first principles they’ll quickly pass:
From sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
Then, seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
To recreate a Virbius of a flower,
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
Into our cause? Our God will reinspire
Our dormant dust, and keep alive the same
With an all-quick’ning, everlasting flame.
Then, though I into atoms scattered be,
In indivisibles I’ll trust in Thee.
Then let this comfort me in my sad story:
Dust is but four degrees removed from glory

[...]

Then at thy dissolution patient be:
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.


An alchemist who wants to know:  in what incarnate fraction of myself, what atom, does the soul reside?  All of them at once?  Donne calls upon “you numberless infinities / Of souls” and bids them “to your scattered bodies go.”  Pulter imagines herself as the multitude, her own one scattered body as infinities of atoms, her indivisible ubiquitous soul awakening, “I know not how.”  And she’s read (at least) a tiny bit of kabbala: 

Dear Death, dissolve these mortal charms,
And then I’ll throw myself into thy arms;
Then thou may’st use my carcass as thou lust,
Until my bones (and little luz) be dust:
Nay, when that handful is blown all about,
Yet still the vital salt will be found out;
And when the vapor is breathed out in thunder
Unto poor mortals’ loss, or pain, or wonder,
And all that is in thee to atoms turned,
And even those atoms in this orb is burned,
Yet still that God that can annihilate
This all, and it of nothing recreate,
Even He that hath supported me till now,
To whom my soul doth pray and humbly bow,
Will raise me unto life. I know not how.

That “little luz” (the notes inform us) “is a ridiculous fable, which the Cabalists relate of a certaine Vertebra ... which they have termed Luz, out of which as from a seed, the Bones shal be regenerated and spring up at the General Resurrection.”

Pulter’s constant theme is of liberation by dissolution.  Over and again, she envisions rising out of her confinement (and confinements) as a cloud of atoms, out which of which will come another self, another world.  It’s her own paradoxical belief, a Lucretian mysticism

For I no liberty expect to see
Until to atoms I dispersed be,
Then being enfranchised, free as my verse,
I shall surround this spacious universe,
Until by other atoms thrust and hurled
We give a being to another world.

Nine