Poetry For All Transcript for Episode 20: Hester Pulter, “View But This Tulip” Joanne: Hello, I’m Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I’m Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And this is Poetry For All. Abram: In this podcast, we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and read it one more time. Joanne: And today we are -delighted- to have Wendy Wall as our guest. Wendy Wall is the Avalon Professor of the Humanities and professor of English at Northwestern University. She is the author of multiple books that focus on early modern literature and culture. And most recently, she is the co-creator with Leah Knight of “The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making.” This is an online project, which presents the scientific, religious, political, and personal poetry of 17th century writer Hester Pulter. Today, Wendy is here to discuss Hester Pulter’s poem “View But This Tulip.” Wendy, thank you so much for joining us today. Wendy: Thank you Joanne and Abram, for letting me be on your podcast to talk about a poet that I find so amazing, and a poem that I really love. Abram: Well that’s so great. Could you tell us a little bit about who Hester Pulter was, and what inspired you to create this project? Wendy: Sure! No one knew that Hester Pulter existed, until quite recently. It was a graduate student, actually, at the University of Leeds library, working on a digital project, that found a manuscript in their collection that no one had really noticed. He opened it, and it had 120 amazing poems about science, religion, grief, politics, and an unfinished romance. This book had lain hidden, unknown, maybe in somebody’s attic, for 300 years. So I found it amazing that there was this woman in the mid-17th century who was really in the vanguard of intellectual movements, knew about current, up to date science, had an amazing poetic ability…and we don’t know about her because she didn’t circulate her poems! So Hester Pulter was a woman born in 1605. She got married at age 15. She had 15 children– Joanne: Wow… Wendy: ...13 of whom died before her. Think about that. So that means she was pregnant 11 years. She was a very interesting woman who described herself as living in seclusion. She was the religious and political minority in her country, because she was a Royalist. So she was living at this time of English Civil War, the rise of science, the beginning of modern philosophy, and she was avidly interested in all of these things. And yet, we didn’t know she existed until quite recently. Abram: That’s amazing. And so now we have the Pulter Project, which we’ll link to on the podcast website so you can check this out for yourself. It’s an amazing online project that makes her poems available with head notes, and curated, and with all kinds of ways into these poems. But to give you a taste of that, we thought we would just introduce one of her poems today. So, Wendy, would you be willing to read for us, what is her 105th poem, “View But This Tulip”? Wendy: Sure. “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 By Nature’s paths, but God from death and night Can raise this flesh to endless life and light. Then, my impatient soul, contented be, For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see. After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow, Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow. As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies, Incapable of quick’ning till it dies, So into dust this flesh of mine must turn And lie a while forgotten in my urn. Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give Their treasures up, my body too shall live: Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire, Where men revive, then straight of life despair; But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite And ne’er involvéd be with death and night, But live in endless pleasure, love, and light. Then hallelujahs will I sing to Thee, My gracious God, to all eternity. Then at thy dissolution patient be: If man can raise a flower, God can thee.” ((Elemental Edition, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall)) Joanne: Oh, that was a beautiful reading, thank you so much. One of the things that occurs to me, and you know, our listeners may or may not have the text of this poem in front of them, but this is categorized as an “emblem.” The title of the poem is “View But This Tulip,” but it’s also called “Emblem 40.” I wonder if you could talk to us about what that means. How is this poem an emblem? Wendy: Yeah, that’s a great question. An emblem is usually seen as a didactic poem, a poem that teaches a lesson. And it usually has an image, that was in the book, printed, or drawn in the manuscript, and then a motto that kind of summed up the image. And then a short poem that resolved something, or gave you the meaning of it. What’s so interesting to me is that Pulter saw these poems as emblems, but they’re called “naked emblems.” They don’t have an image that precedes them. Joanne: The reason that interests me is because of course, emblems are so tied to, as you say didacticism and teaching, but also they’re a source of powerful religious meditation in this time period in which she’s writing. Right? And that interplay between word and image becomes so important, for someone who’s trying to understand their own doubts about religion, and faith, and the afterlife. Wendy: Absolutely. And that’s one reason I find Pulter very interesting in general. But also in this poem, she takes scientific and religious issues, and puts them together. So the idea of whether you could prove something by observation, by looking at it, by empirical concensus, was a huge part of the rise of modern science at this time. But she’s trying to tell her reader “DO this”, imperative, “VIEW but this tulip,” and you can see something that will give you confidence that God can resurrect our bodies after our death. That we need not fear a sense of loss because all will be gathered together. And you need to have faith in it by doing something. Looking, making, doing a science experiment in some ways. Abram: And just so readers are clear, can we walk through a little bit of what her scientific experiment here is? So the first fourteen lines are really that experiment. She’s got these flowers, she’s got macerating, fermentation, calcining chemically with segregation. What is happening in the first fourteen lines here? What is she doing with these flowers? Wendy: Well, she’s giving kind of a recipe. Right? You could almost do this. She’s taking a flower that has been fading, that’s been picked. She’s showing all the different ways you can alter it materially to try to save it. So you beat it up, to macerate, to soak in a liquid, you’re kind of making a cocktail. You would muddle it. So she’s muddling the flower, and then she’s fermenting it. Calcining is reducing something down to its basic chalk, or ashes. Usually with fire. And so she’s basically distilling it. This is something that, you would say ‘oh, could a woman really know about this?’ Actually, women did forms of these kinds of chemical experiments when they were doing their household labor. So a lot of recipes for medicines and foods have them doing calcining and macerating, and fermentation. Abram: That’s great. So then when she holds a candle towards her, a gentle fire to it, she says “you may animate these flowers at your desire.” And so she is transforming them, but in a certain sense, she’s keeping them alive. Wendy: And people did this with varying degrees of success. Sometimes people thought the plant would actually revitalize, and sometimes people thought that it would put out an image of the flower. It wasn’t completely clear how it worked. *she laughs* But, people did try it. This wouldn’t have been seen as crazy science, or pseudoscience, this would have been seen as alchemy moving into chemistry. Abram: Yeah. Joanne: Wow, okay, that’s really helpful. Because I read this poem a number of times, with a little bit of skepticism, I thought to myself, I kill plants all the time, and I have -never- been able to bring them back to life. This seems like a little bit of a reach. *All Laugh* Abram: What it does do, it raises the question of how much hope there really is in this poem? I mean, I do think there’s a way in which you could read this poem as incredibly confident. Saying of course God can raise the body and the soul and put me back together, and bring me on into immortality, of course. But on the other hand as we were noting before, there isn’t actually a flower to look at, at the beginning of the poem. It’s a naked emblem. There’s no flower there, there’s no illustration there. So has she really done it? Has she really brought a plant back to life? Wendy: Yeah, Abram. I think the fact that we have the last line, “if man can raise a flower, God can thee.” And you think, what if man can’t raise a flower? *laughs* Abram: Right! *laughs* Wendy: Does that mean we’re stuck and don’t get to have a resurrection? So that word “if” is very prominent in the last line. Joanne: Even so, if as we said at the beginning, the flower is a kind of emblem, but also in the Renaissance, people referred to poems as posies and as flowers, and collections of poems as gardens of various delights and so forth. She’s made a flower with the poem. Like, there’s something about the poem itself, that she has brought to life, that at least gives us some kind of hope. Wendy: Yeah, and actually Joanne, that’s the reading I prefer. I like the confident, triumphant reading, where she says “VIEW but this tulip,” and when the reader gets to the end, the reader is holding this poem, that is, as you say in the Renaissance, a posy, called a flower. And she has made this flower, and it can be read over and over. And of course, the story of her biography is very relevant here. Her poems seem to have come back to life after being dead for 300 years. We didn’t know they existed. They could have just laid in oblivion forever if somebody hadn’t found them in their attic in England and put them up for auction. So in some ways, the flower has lived on, and when she says “view but this flower” in that bossy, imperative way, where you tell the reader what to do, even if she starts to doubt, and try to convince her soul at the end, "you will see the body again," there is a way in which I feel that there is a kind of triumph. Abram: Yeah. Joanne: It’s beautiful. Abram: So this is about, I don’t know, say, 50-ish lines long? And I’m sort of curious if we could talk about the way that it’s structured? Where are its turning points? How would we read where she’s making transitions? Wendy: Yeah, I think that you might have already mentioned one of the key turning points. That’s when she takes the emblem, meaning the thing you’re supposed to see, and interprets it. At line 15, she says ‘then, seeing that I can revive a flower, why should we’ meaning you and me and the reader, all of us mortals, why should we fear? So there is a turning point there, but if you keep reading the poem, it keeps using the word “then.” Then, THEN! It’s like eight times it starts a line with ‘then.’ So every time you think that you’ve finished the project, there's another step in the sequence. You know, ‘then my impatient soul, contented be’ she says in line 27. And I like to think of Hester Pulter in general, as very concerned with cycling, with transformations where you would turn to something, pick it up, and remake it. You kind of slightly tweak it or twist it. So in her poems, she’ll frequently have a poem, and then she’ll return to that same title, twenty poems later, and kind of return to the theme. Worry it again. Test it. Try a different metaphor. And so in this poem, I really like to see the rhymes as a way that she created language units. Like a rhyme is like a little atom, and she calcines it, and reduces it, and then brings it back again in the middle of the poem. So if you look at the beginning of the poem, there’s these rhymes in lines 3 and 4. “These flowers into their chaos were retired, ‘til human art then raised and reinspired.” So we have retired, reinspired. Then I notice formally, that she returns to that rhyme, which is a little unusual, in the middle of the poem, lines 17 and 18, so that it’s retire instead of retired, and reinspire instead of reinspired, and that’s right when she’s saying the pivotal moment “Why should we fear? Though sadly we retire into our cause,” So in other words, she’s saying we can be resurrected, even though we were the makers in the first part of the poem, we can be the object remade by God, and she returns to the words that she remakes. I really like that kind of cycling, back to the beginning of the poem to revivify it and resurrect it. Joanne: And what I love about some of the lines and passages that you’re describing, is for me, the excitement of this poem is actually how dramatic it is. So yes, it’s meditative. Yes, in some ways it’s a series of commands and arguments, but it’s very performative to me. Because, it starts by a mode of address that’s addressing a “you”. “But if you cool the glass, to their first principles, they’ll quickly pass,” then there’s this sort of plural “why should we fear, though sadly we retire into our cause,” and then very quickly, she shifts to the “I”, and she stays on the first person perspective for much of the rest of the poem. “Then though I and to atom’s scattered be, in indivisibles I’ll trust in thee, then let this comfort me in my sad story.” It becomes very personal, very quickly. Wendy: Yeah, I love that too. I think it becomes increasingly personal, as she tries to say “okay, I’ve written this didactic poem, I’ve said that I should have faith that my body will not fester in my grave, because, you know, this isn’t really a poem about whether the soul will escape the body and be eternal. She knows that will happen. She just can’t figure out how God is gonna come back and get her body at the final judgment in Christian theology. How am I gonna get my body back, right? The idea that your body goes to dirt, and dirt is eaten by worms, and worms are eaten by fish, and men eat fish. This is something that Shakespeare worried about, John Dunn worried about. Well then, where was your body when God needed to get it at the judgment day? It’s been recycled through all these peoples’ gullets. And you know, where are you? And she’s worried about getting her body back, right? At the end, after this personal doubt and turning the poem to herself, she turns to her soul to say, ‘don’t worry, you will reunite with the soul’. And then finally, Joanne, you’ve talked about how it turns to the personal, the last lines turn back to the reader, right? “Then at the dissolution, patient be, if man can raise a flower, God can thee.” So it’s either the reader or her own body, and you don’t know. You simply don’t know at that point. You know, who she’s trying to console. Abram: When it comes to this key sort of thematic element, of being divided from your body and how are you going to get your body back, the word she uses is “indivisibles, I’ll trust in thee”, indivisible of course, was the word for atoms at the time. So, she’s saying, ‘I’ll be scattered into many different atoms, but atoms themselves cannot be scattered into anything else.’ On the other hand, she’s also in effect saying, ‘I am indivisible,” that the soul and the body won’t finally be divided, I’ll be reunited, precisely because the body is made up of indivisibles.’ Wendy: Oh I love that reading! I love the idea of indivisible not only as an atom, but as the final union of body and soul that’s gonna happen, in this poem. I just love that Pulter is showing off here, like she did with the calcining, she wants to show off in her poems that she knows Galileo’s theories of astronomy. How did she know that? It was only in Latin. And it hadn’t even been published for her to read. We never would have thought a woman living where she lived would have had access to some of these concepts. She’s really interested in atomism, in so many of her poems. She wants to throw in there, “though I am to scattered atoms be, in indivisibles I’ll trust in thee,” to show that she knows the debates that are going on. About whether Aristotle was right, or whether these other classical thinkers about atomism were right. And she kind of gets in there as she’s declaring a kind of triumphant faith in God. And if you look at the last lines of the poem, it’s been in couplets. But suddenly it’s like she gets really tricky, and wants to show off a little here, and there’s the triplet. She has three rhyming lines, ‘reunite’, ‘night’, ‘light’, right? So she’s drawing out the conclusion, she’s deferring the ending, and then instead of the couplet, she shows off again, I say show off, but I mean that in a positive sense. She’s dexterous in her ability to go back and get a piece of language. So she goes back to the middle of the poem and finds the rhyming lines, “though I into atoms scattered be, in indivisibles I’ll trust in thee” and she makes a quatrain. The, eternity, thee, and thee are the last lines of the poems. We have three rhyming lines and then four. To kind of just amplify the way that Joanne was describing her technical ability to make a poem. Which is a way of staving off death. Staving off loss. Joanne: Mhm. Wendy: Like keeping it going in some ways. Abram: That’s awesome. And just thinking about that. Keeping it going. Staving off death. Some of these lines feel like they could or should be the end of the poem. “In indivisibles I trust in thee.” Period. That could be the end. But instead we get this next line. “Then let this comfort me in my sad story.” And then we come to another ending. “But God from death and night can raise his flesh to endless life and light.” Period. The end. Except it keeps going. “Then,” but the way that she comes to the ending, as you say, is this amplification of three rhymes in a row, then four rhymes in a row, so we now really know we're coming to the ending. And what I love about that ending, is apart from all those large words at the beginning, this simplicity at the end. Those three monosyllabic words. “God can thee.” You know you’ve come to the end, when you end on this really powerful short, three word summation of the poem itself. Wendy: Yeah, I love that. I love that idea that the poem keeps ending, and then starting again. Because of course that's what we've been talking about. The resurrection of something. When it’s come to its terminal point. And then you start over. You create a different material form. This goes back to our two readings. I mean, either the starting again is doubt, it’s like “let me talk myself into believing”, or it’s more like what Joanne is suggesting, where it’s kind of rhetorically taking control and amplifying and proliferating it more, to show human confidence in what you can do in the face of doubt. I think both readings are beautifully staged in this poem. Joanne: With all that we’ve talked about, I wonder if we could ask you to read the poem one more time. So we can think about the things that you’ve addressed Wendy: Sure, now I’m wondering if I’m going to read it and what’s going to happen to it in its next carnation. “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 By Nature’s paths, but God from death and night Can raise this flesh to endless life and light. Then, my impatient soul, contented be, For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see. After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow, Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow. As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies, Incapable of quick’ning till it dies, So into dust this flesh of mine must turn And lie a while forgotten in my urn. Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give Their treasures up, my body too shall live: Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire, Where men revive, then straight of life despair; But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite And ne’er involvéd be with death and night, But live in endless pleasure, love, and light. Then hallelujahs will I sing to Thee, My gracious God, to all eternity. Then at thy dissolution patient be: If man can raise a flower, God can thee.” ((Elemental Edition, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall)) Abram: Woo! I love it. Joanne: *laughs* Abram: Thank you so much for reading that. Wendy: Was there anything different that you heard in that reading? Because I felt like Abram’s “God can thee,” felt very, that summation kinda came out in the second reading. Abram: I heard the “if” extra loud this time. *All laugh* Wendy: We convinced each other. Abram: That’s right! *All laughing* Abram: Well to learn more about Hester Pulter and the Pulter Project, you can visit PulterProject.Northwestern.Edu Joanne: We also hope that you’ll remember to subscribe to the Poetry For All podcast via Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, or any other provider. The last time we checked, 6,500 people had downloaded episodes of Poetry For All! That is a LOT of listeners! We would love to know who you are! Who are these people that are listening to us? *All laugh* Good God! I mean, you know. We’d like to know what your experiences have been like, so please write a review, so we know how you’re doing. We hope too that you’ll follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Wendy, thank you so much for joining us today. Wendy: Oh thank you! And if I can add; the Pulter Project is an ongoing, growing collaboration. We invite you, the listener, to edit a poem and send it in! And have it reviewed. Abram: Awesome! Wendy: And we are getting more and more poems by the week. Abram: That’s awesome. That’s awesome, I love it. Well, thank you all for listening! Wendy: Thank you so much for having me on this podcast, I learned so much from it. And I really enjoyed talking to you about this poem. Joanne: Thank you, Wendy. Abram: Thank you.