Which of the those two definitions do you think makes the most sense here: is she telling her soul to firm itself up or settle itself, or to dissolve? How do you support your decision (what else in this poem or in her other poem supports her choice)?

The next two questions are about Hester Pulter’s poem “The Universal Dissolution,” which ends with the following six lines:

But these and all the fixèd orbs of light

Shall be involved once more in horrid night.

Like robes, the elements shall folded lie

In the vast wardrobe of eternity.

Then my unsettled soul be more resolved,

Seeing all this universe must be dissolved.

1. Our best friend the OED tells us that the verb “resolve” could mean to settle, decide, or determine (definition 17.a), or it could mean to melt or dissolve (definition 1.a). Which of the those two definitions do you think makes the most sense here: is she telling her soul to firm itself up or settle itself, or to dissolve? How do you support your decision (what else in this poem or in her other poem supports her choice)?

2. The elements are the four fundamental building blocks of nature (earth, air, water, fire) that some premodern authors thought made up all of nature. Analyze the image of the middle two lines of this passage: what does it mean to think that at the end of everything and the dissolution of the elements, the elements will be folded like robes in the wardrobe or closet of eternity? What difference does it make to her cosmological vision to introduce a domestic metaphor here (a metaphor almost set in the house)?

3. Both Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Traherne imagine worlds within our worlds via mundane things: Cavendish posits a world in an earring, and Traherne posits a world in a puddle. What is each one’s purpose in imagining these worlds within worlds?

4. Discuss the relationship between the two different “worlds” or planes of existence depicted in Herbert’s “Artillery”. Does the speaker of the poem imagine himself as separate from but equal to God, or subordinated? What do you think it means when the speaker says in the last line, “I am but finite, yet thine infinitely.”