“My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble”: Hester Pulter’s Apostrophe to the Soul

Abstract

The poems of Hester Pulter (1605–1678) provide insight into the religion and politics of a woman writing through the English Civil Wars and Republic. This paper focuses on Pulter’s use of the apostrophe to the soul and on her abstention from employing disciplinary metaphors that so often characterise devotional poetry. In merging the devotional apostrophe to the soul with complaint, Pulter effectively jettisons the penitential aspects of these approaches, creating a hybrid form in which her body provides comfort to her grieving soul. Pulter thus creates a form of devotional poem that relies on an aesthetics of comfort instead of discipline. By utilising the affordances of the apostrophe – its ability to bring the speaker and its addressee into a relation with one another – Pulter enacts a spiritual unification and in so doing makes implicit claims about the emotional and spiritual efficacy of poetry.