Female Poets: Hester Pulter

Hester Pulter (1605–1678) was a 17th-century English poet and writer whose work was largely unknown until rediscovered in the 20th century. She wrote deeply personal and reflective poetry, often exploring themes like grief, religion, politics, and the cosmos. She was an English aristocrat, poet, and intellectual whose work remained hidden for centuries. Born into a wealthy and politically connected family, she married Arthur Pulter and spent much of her adult life in relative isolation at their estate in Hertfordshire. This seclusion, coupled with personal tragedies—such as the loss of many of her fifteen children—deeply influenced her writing.In her manuscript, she combines personal grief and spiritual meditation with reflections on national politics, monarchy, and apocalyptic visions.

One of her most striking features as a poet is her voice as a woman writing from the margins of political and literary life. She often meditates on gender, mortality, and her sense of isolation, yet her imagination is vast—ranging from intimate laments to celestial journeys. In poems like “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” or “The Revolution”, she explores confinement—both literal and metaphorical—with a proto-feminist edge.

Her only known manuscript, seemingly lay unread, perhaps stored in an attic, for over 250 years. Poems Breathed Forth by the Nobly Born H.P., was rediscovered in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds and has since gained critical attention, positioning her as a significant voice in early modern literature.

Of  Night and Morning

Night’s like the grave, wherein we lie forlorn;

The blesséd Resurrection’s like the morn,

When, leaving sin and darkness, these our eyes

Shall see the sun of righteousness arise

In glory, conquering death and night,

That we may live in everlasting light.

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

What’s it like to be dead—and then not? These three couplets comprise Pulter’s answer in a single sentence and form her shortest complete poem. Βut the poem’s focus here becomes the contrast between our experience of the grave and the experience of the end of time in the anticipated resurrection of souls. The latter will—in one fell swoop just like this verse—swap sin, darkness, death, and night for righteousness, glory, life, and light. The perhaps deliberately simplistic similes in the first couplet thus open up and out to encompass, in only four more lines, the poet’s largest and most longed-for vision of a world beyond this one.

Sources: The Pulter Project