15 “Aurora” (1640-1660)
with an Introduction by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (from The Pulter Project)
Hester Pulter
Introduction
“Aurora [1]” is the first of several poems so named. Pulter attends often, and often ardently, to this classical figure of the dawn, identified elsewhere in her work as the mother of Astraea: a figure in her turn associated by Pulter primarily with truth, rather than justice, as is more conventional. Here, the speaker’s sensuous admiration of Aurora’s luminous beauty and entourage of feminine powers is interrupted by the amorous, then rapacious, pursuit of dawn by the blazing sun god. This allegory rapidly turns gory, with the god lashing his horses until they rain blood on Earth. When the sun god’s illumination is, inevitably, succeeded by the darkness of Night and her misery-making offspring, the poem’s focus shifts from the astral and mythological to something much more personal. The speaker’s vulnerability to nocturnal terrors makes her long for escape through death—quite paradoxically, since visions of death are among the very terrors she seeks to escape. This paradox suggests one way in which, as she says of her dark and distorted visions, “of my reason, straight they make a rape.” But the speaker, in the end, seizes power back from both darkness and the excesses of the sun when she imagines herself, in death, “far outshin[ing] the day,” and the poem’s classical figuration is reconfigured in praise of a biblical God, in a vein congruent with much of Pulter’s devotional verse.
“Aurora”
Lovely Aurora, O how heavenly fair
Does she appear with her disheveled hair
Pearled over with odors of the early East—
How infinitely she doth our senses feast!
She needs no gems her snowy neck to adorn,
For what can luster add unto the morn?
Her right hand holds forth light unto our view;
The other sprinkles aromatic dew
On Flora’s fragrant, various-colored flowers,
Attended by a train of fleeting Hours
Drawn by white palfreys, first of that kind,
Now since produced by snuffing up the wind;
Thus, as in silver coach she’s hurled,
She both enlightens and perfumes the world.
Then after hurries that illustrious star
Who rides, triumphant, in his blazing car,
Before whose face shines forth perpetual day,
Exhaling and expelling mists away,
And to her throws his wanton amorous eyes;
But like a virgin coy, she, blushing, flies.
He, filled with love and rage for her disdain,
Upon his foaming horses lays his rein,
Gaining Olympus’s top with furious speed,
Lashing their pampered sides until they bleed.
When these vermilion drops to Earth descend
They amaze poor mortals, fearing they portend
Unto some ancient monarchy confusion,
Or, to some Hydrian monster, dissolution,
When, oftentimes, the cause is from above:
From radiant Delius’s frantic fits of love,
Who follows her with heat and greater light,
Leaving this horoscope to horrid Night,
Whose furious issue straight their curls unrolls
To lash and torture poor afflicted souls.
Anathemized are those that do delight
To add afflictions to the afflicted wight;
And of her spurious breed (no doubt) they be
That look with joy on others’ misery.
Oft times they crawl into my trembling breast,
That I choose strangling rather than such rest;
Sometimes they take advantage of my fear:
Then strange Cimmerian sights seem to appear
Unto my troubled fancy; then again
They take advantage from my grief or pain,
Presenting death in his most horrid shape:
Then, of my reason, straight they make a rape;
Then my sad soul doth see before her eye
Some of my friends (aye me) that late did die,
Whose loss fills my poor heart so full of grief
That nought but death can give my soul relief—
For then I placed shall be in such a sphere,
Where Night’s associates I shall never fear.
O, if I once could lose these rags of clay,
Then I (poor I) should far outshine the day;
Then that great God, that ancient is of days,
Should be the Alpha and Omega of my praise.
Source:
“Aurora” edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall from The Pulter Project licensed by CC BY-NC-SA
