Using The Pulter Project to Construct Meaning in “The Indian Moose (Emblem 7)” and “The Stately Moose (Emblem 27)”
“We take this material [a unique leather-bound manuscript, poems of political, personal, religious, scientific] and make something new. We invite you to continue in the making,” The Pulter Project homepage announces. Under the “THE PULTER PROJECT” header, the subtext “Poet in the Making” further emphasizes the opportunity to participate “in the making” of Hester Pulter herself. Upon entering the site and scrolling downward in space through a constellation of aurora, planetary, and other such extraterrestrial-themed poems, I discovered two poems with one of the most grounded, earthly subjects: the moose. In delving into Pulter’s poetry through “The Indian Moose (Emblem 7)” and “The Stately Moose (Emblem 27),” which use the moose as a launch-point to meditate on such themes as parenting and chaos, I have found that I am, as the site suggests, able to capitalize on the rich resources made available by Pulter Project editors to participate “in the making” of Pulter herself. In this essay, I argue that the editors’ choices do not create fixed meanings or implications for Pulter’s poetry; rather, to use The Pulter Project effectively, readers are encouraged to combine the editorial framework with their own efforts and curiosities in order to construct Pulter as an author, to build “a” Pulter upon the editorial foundation provided. In other words, the website enables readers to forge connections between and amongst Pulter’s poems in a customizable learning environment driven by individual curiosity rather than providing linear, editor-driven (top-down) guidance. The Pulter Project is not a passive experience; it is an interactive process. In presenting how my own efforts and curiosities interacted with the editorial framework, I show that to reap the benefit of the editors’ work–to achieve interpretation and/or meaning of Pulter’s poems and herself as an author–reader participation is required.
Before selecting the moose emblems in the index, I could see the poems’ titles, first lines, and tags describing themes that the editors have identified within them, which preliminary data helped me to contextualize the poems before delving into close reading. Tags describing “The Indian Moose” include: ANIMAL, PARENT, REPRODUCTION, DIVISION, SUN, SIGHT, preparing me for what to look for in the poem. Tags describing “The Stately Moose” include ANIMAL, RIVER, MYTHOLOGY, FOOD, PARENT, NATURE, SUN, TREES, PLANTS, VIOLENCE, DEATH, HELL, SIN, SORROW, GRIEF, HISTORY, and PRAYER, indicating “The Stately Moose” might, according to the editors, be the more complex poem, at least in terms of thematic variety, as well as the more biblically related poem, due to its additional tags of HELL, SIN, and PRAYER. Tags both poems have in common–ANIMAL, PARENT, and SUN–helped me to forge connections between the poems before reading them: namely, that both poems would focus on parenting through animals, with the sun perhaps operating as a symbol to ground the poem to this earth, beneath celestial objects constructed by God, not man. Clicking on ANIMAL and PARENT revealed these are the only poems that Pulter Project editors have associated with these tags. (I am wondering if this is an oversight, which might be addressed later, because the index contains other poems with animal titles and, according to the site Curations that I read for background context, many of Pulter’s poems are parent-themed focusing on outliving 13 of her 15 children.) As for the SUN tag, nine poems (including these) come up, showing that, were I interested (which for this paper I am not), I could examine all the instances in which the sun appears and how it operates in Pulter’s poetry holistically.
Differences and similarities in the ways the editors (Leah Knight and Wendy Wall for “The Indian Moose” Elemental Edition, Millie Godfery and Sarah Ross for the Amplified Edition, and Helen Smith for “The Stately Moose” Elemental Edition) approach Pulter and these, her moose-related poems, kind(s) of readership(s) that the editors envision, and how the editors speak to those readers through the types of information provided in headnotes and glosses influenced my reading of the poems by allowing me to inhabit two reading personas, moving from inexperienced to experienced. The Pulter Project defines an Elemental Edition as targeted toward “those encountering Pulter for the first time,” suggesting they “might start with the Elemental Editions, with their modernized text and relatively simple annotations” (Knight). An Amplified Edition, each of which is “governed by its own principles and more extensive annotation,” conversely, is for “those ready for more” (Godfery). “It is through the act of comparison with the amplified edition that the reader can fully understand the way that poems come to life for readers as a product of a particular editor’s handiwork—how poems are ‘made’ for readers by their authors but also by other textual producers” (Godfery). By comparing the introductory and advanced editions of “The Indian Moose,” and the introductory edition of “The Indian Moose” with that of “The Stately Moose,” I found these descriptions of the editorial approaches to be sound, delivering well-targeted headnotes and glosses to both levels of readers so that it was in fact helpful to read the Elemental Edition first.
“The Indian Moose” is presented in Elemental and Amplified Editions, while “The Stately Moose” is presented in an Elemental Edition but does not have an Amplified Edition–yet; the editors “welcome you to propose one” (Smith). Despite the fact that “The Stately Moose” does not have an Amplified Edition, I still benefited from viewing it in the Comparison Tool, because I could toggle the version to show the transcription next to the Elemental Edition to see what specifically the Elemental editors updated from the transcription: which included for the most part, for instance, uncapitalizing words such as “Greater grief” and “Seeing” and updating archaic spelling “Casuall bee” to “casual be” (lines 38-39), and adding punctuation such as periods (line 32). Toggling on and off transcription notes and Elemental Edition notes renders these editorial choices even more explicit/transparent. Toggling on and off the Poem Index and clicking the Previous and Next buttons allowed me to view the poem within the context of Pulter’s poetry, by viewing an ordered list of her poems and moving linearly through them.
Neither poem has what The Pulter Project calls a Curation (which, if available, would be accessible on the far right of the index of poems page under the Curations column), meaning the project does not currently “offer of verbal and visual materials” such as “sources, analogues, and glimpses into earlier or subsequent cultural phenomena” that “invite contemplation of different ways in which a particular poem might be contextualized” and “might play into possible readings of a given poem” (Wall). This indicates that, for whatever reason, the editors did not prioritize these two poems for such in-depth analysis. Perhaps as the project grows, these gaps might be filled-in later.
Further, although “The Stately Moose” does not have an Amplified Edition, reading the Amplified Edition of “The Indian Moose,” which I had decided would serve as its companion poem simply due to their titles and keywords as identified above, enriched my understanding of “The Stately Moose.” The four-paragraph, scholarly toned Amplified Edition of “The Indian Moose” builds on the one-paragraph, more colloquial foundation of the Elemental Edition, which opens with a question: “What can we learn from the parenting habits of moose, apes, and eagles?” (Knight). The Amplified Edition does not bother with this device to pull readers in, assuming they are already interested, simply stating “Pulter’s focus in this poem is on parental love and the equal ‘manifest[ation]’ of this to one’s children (line 16)” and directing them to a specific line in which this occurs (Godfery). While the Elemental Edition states outright that Pulter “proffers two lessons” from the moose in this poem, (1) that “we should show all our children ‘equal love’” and (2) like the moose, a parent should never put “her eggs in one basket” but distribute “her offspring widely so they cannot be attacked at once.” The editors offer one (biographical) potential reason: Pulter’s “far-flung daughters and her desire to bring them home” to make “their distance seem more strategic, and thus more bearable” (Knight). Loving one’s offspring equally would mean that though some die off, as several of Pulter’s did, this might minimize grief in that one’s “favorite” child could not then be lost; whoever remains is equal in rank to whoever was lost.
Beyond thematic concerns, the Amplified Edition contextualizes “The Indian Moose” within Pulter’s poetic system and the universe in which she wrote by providing specific examples of her other poems (such as “The Invitation into the Country” and “Come, My Dear Children (Emblem 2)”) and other authors (William Wood, whose depiction of the Indian moose in New England’s Prospect we learn Pulter draws on, Pilny, and Aesop), a launch-point for further exploration, should the reader be so inclined (again, for this paper I was not, but this background knowledge enhanced my appreciation of the poem).
Though the editors only provided a one-paragraph introductory note for “The Stately Moose,” the context provided for “The Indian Moose,” outlined above, enhanced my reading of this (violent, chaos-ridden) poem. Building on the editors’ choices, I was able to make a connection to see the Stately Moose as an offspring, or daughter, of the Indian Moose. The moose is consistently referred to as “she,” perhaps drawing a connection with Pulter’s previously identified “far-flung” daughters. This Stately Moose, consumed by a serpent–which even the moose “knew not how”–is perhaps one of the Indian Moose’s offspring who “three young at once doth bear” and whose “policy” places “every one a mile asunder.” Both poems open with the moose thinking strategically, which connection the editorial glosses make apparent: the Indian Moose’s “policy” (#7) foreshadows the later emblem’s (#27) way of “politicly” surveying the fields to look for “cruel beasts of prey.” The glosses highlight and define both terms as strategic.
The bodies of both poems forge a throughway across the animal kingdom. In “The Indian Moose,” other (less virtuous) types of parents such as apes and eagles, and in “The Stately Moose,” other (more predictable) types of prey such as mice and lambs are examined, culminating in what the editors (of “The Indian Moose” Amplified Edition) refer to as a “psalmic turn,” or shift from exterior circumstances to the interior (soul), with the last line of “The Indian Moose”–“Then, O, that counsel let me ever take”–and the last line of “The Stately Moose” similarly invoking “Let me depend (dear God) on none but Thee.” While the earlier emblem focuses on taking advice, the later, more chaos-ridden and violent poem outlining the unpredictable death of one moose offspring, focuses on dependence. The chaos of the later poem emphasizes the advice of the earlier emblem to love all children equally; for if “… on this orb there’s no felicity … / For we are in a sea of sorrows tossed, / And when we’re most secure, we’re nearest lost” (Knight), then even turning the strategic “policy” of “The Indian Moose” into tactical action (“politicly she doth the fields survey”) does not ensure survival. Rather, this belief serves to mitigate suffering by admitting no matter what precautions one takes, chaos still reigns; one must not feel “secure” in one’s actions but, rather, trust in a power higher than one’s self.
This psalmic reading of both poems was made possible first by the “Indian Moose” Elemental and Amplified editors, then by my own curiosity as a reader into both moose-related poems, and ability to forge this connection between them. With the site’s user experience as my classroom/environment and the editors as my teacher/guide, I was able to construct “a” Pulter: a deeply contemplative author able to take a wild, strange-looking animal from across the Atlantic to zoom out and construct meaning within the context of the animal kingdom, and ultimately to zoom back inward to the origin of this moose meditation, the poet’s own interiority, consistently concerned with and thinking about elemental issues such as parenting and survival in a chaotic world. Deeply spiritual, Pulter’s emblems about moose end up directing her readers, and herself, inward and toward her God.
Works Cited
Godfery, Millie, and Sarah C.E. Ross, eds. “The Indian Moose (Emblem 7),” by Hester Pulter. (Poem 73, Amplified Edition). In The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, 2018. http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ae/the-indian-moose-emblem-7.
Knight, Leah, and Wendy Wall, eds. “The Indian Moose (Emblem 7),” by Hester Pulter. (Poem 73, Elemental Edition). In The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, 2018. http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ee/the-indian-moose-emblem-7.
Smith, Helen, ed. “The Stately Moose (Emblem 27),” by Hester Pulter. (Poem 92, Elemental Edition). In The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, 2018. http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ee/the-stately-moose-emblem-27.
“The Indian Moose (Emblem 7) | Compare Editions.” The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, 2018, http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/vm/the-indian-moose-emblem-7.
“The Stately Moose (Emblem 27) | Compare Editions.” The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, 2018, http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/vm/the-stately-moose-emblem-27.
Wall, Wendy. “Talking to Death” (Curation, Poem 1). In The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall. 2018. http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu.
