This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John (Poem 45)

Sad, sick, and lame, as in my bed I lay,
Lest pain and passion should bear all the sway,
My thoughts being free, I bid them take their flight
Above the gloomy shades of death and night.
They, overjoyed with such a large commission,
Flew instantly, without all intermission,
Up to that sphere where night’s pale queen doth run
Round the circumference of the illustrious sun.
Her globious body spacious was, and bright;
That half alone that from Sol’s beams had light;
The other was immured in shades of night.
Nor did she seem to me as poets feign:
Guiding her chariot with a silver rein,
Attired like some fair nymph or virgin queen,
With naked neck and arms and robes of green.
Lovesick Endymion oft hath thus her seen;
But as my thoughts about her orb was hurled,
I did perceive she was another world.
Thus being in my fancy raised so far,
This world appeared to me another star;
And as the moon a shadow casts and light,
So is our Earth the empress of their night.
Next, Venus, usher to the night and day,
Her full-faced beauty to me did display;
Sometimes she wanéd, then again increase,
Which in our humors cause or war or peace.
My fancy next to Mercury would run,
But craftily he popped behind the sun.
A wonder ’tis, the medium being so bright,
His splendency should be obscured by light.
Nor could I Sol’s refulgent orb descry:
His radiant beams dazzled my tender eye;
And now my wonder is again renewed,
That he, enlightening all, could not be viewed.
Yet to my reason this appeared the best:
That he the center was of all the rest
The planets, all like bowls still trundling round
The vast circumference of his glorious mound;
He, resting, quickens all with heat and light,
And by the Earth’s motion makes our day or night.
Next Jupiter, that mild auspicious star:
I did perceive about his blazing car
Four bright attendants always hurried round;
Next flagrant Mars, where no such moons are found;
Then Saturn (whose aspects so sads my soul)
About whose orb two sickly Cynthias roll;
Then on the fixed stars I would have gazed,
But their vast brightness so my mind amazed
That my affrighted fancy downward flew
Just as the Hours Aurora’s curtain drew,
At which the ugly wife of Acheron
Bid drive, and slashed her drowsy monsters on;
With her there went her firstborn brat, old Error,
And fierce Eumenides, poor mortals’ terror,
Who with their snakes, and whips, and brands, were hurled
To strike amazement to the lower world;
Being scared themselves at the approach of light,
To our antipodes they took their flight.
Sin’s curséd offspring with their dam did trace,
That most prodigious, incestuous race:
Pale, ghastly, shuddering Horror, lost Despair,
And sobbing Sorrow, tearing off her hair:
These of her sable womb were born and bred,
And from the light with her now frighted fled;
And then my maids my window curtains drew,
And, as my pain, so comforts did renew.
Unto the God of truth, light, life, and love,
I’ll such lays here begin shall end above.

-- Hester Pulter (nee Ley; pen-name Hadassah) (1605-1678), English poet who wrote extensively about childbirth and marriage. Located at The Pulter Project from Northwestern University. Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall. Found at https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ae/this-was-written-in-1648-when-i-lay-in-with-my-son-john/ 

Headnote for this poem:

Paralyzed on what might be your death bed, what could you do but think? Pulter—immobile after delivering her fifteenth child—defies paralysis and pain by exerting paradoxical control over her otherwise free thoughts: free from all but her bidding, anyhow. With god-like power she commands their almost angelic flight beyond the sickroom, first to join the speeding orbit of the moon. From this vantage, her astronomical discoveries counter other poetic claims: Pulter’s moon is no mythological goddess, for instance, but “another world” from which the Earth itself appears (quite radically) to be a moon. Her fancy spirals further yet to other astral bodies on which her reasoning proves informed by recent science; by dawn, however, the very illuminations of this flight of fancy prove overwhelming, and her dazzled thoughts are curtailed to her curtained bedroom, just as a classicized Night is driven out with her allegorical children (Error, Horror, Despair, Sorrow), all terrified of the coming light. The poem ends with an early modern version of that most paradoxical of endings: “To be continued…”—in this case, a promise underwritten by Pulter’s dedication of such verse to the deity whose various lights she is by turns informed, delighted, and frightened by.

As noted in the introduction about her:

Pulter gave birth to eight daughters and seven sons over the course of almost a quarter of a century (between 1624 and 1648). Evidence from the poems suggests more than one of these pregnancies and births was associated with periods of serious illness and associated confinement. All but two of these fifteen children predeceased Pulter, and a number of their deaths are mourned in her verse. Her own death is also anticipated and indeed often welcomed in many poems as a relief from earthly suffering, both physical (in references to her sick and aging body) and mental (not only grief but a more general melancholy and anxious insomnia). Pulter’s poems also show her taking comfort in a God roughly recognizable as the one endorsed by the Church of England, a spiritual position conforming neatly with her secular politics, or even inseparable from them. Theologically, her focus is most frequently on eschatology: especially her own eventual reunion with her soul and God in heaven at the Day of Judgment, long after her death and (often vividly imagined) corporeal dissolution.

Image: A Birth Scene (Lying In), Master of Charles of Durazzo (Francesco_di_Michele)  c. 1410 Harvard Art Museum