Pregnant Possibilities, or the Forms of Hester Pulter's Verse Futures

When the sole surviving manuscript of Hester Pulter (b.1605Pulter (b., d.1678) ) was re-discovered at the end of the 20 th century, scholars were immediately taken by Pulter's inscription, in her devotional, elegiac, and emblematic verse, of imagined futures associated with an expected liberation from confining circumstances.This paper accounts for some of those circumstances as they are explored in the verse and examines the formal potential of pregnancy as a phenomenon of possible futurity (and future possibility) which informed Pulter's personal embodiment for over a quarter of a century and shaped her vision in a host of poems.Through an engagement with eggs, embryos, wombs, nests, and related configurations of containment and care -as well as an attention to processes of parturition, parenting, patience, protection, and perfection -Pulter's verse invests itself in material states that anticipate and advocate for transformation into something other, more, beyond, and better.In this way, Pulter's devout if elliptical speculations on the afterlife are brought down to earth, not least in depictions of the generative power of nesting and gestating bodies: both hers and those of a host of non-human creatures enfolded, through her emblematic verse, into formations of the future.