ANNE BRADSTREET: COLONIAL POETRY

Poetry was one of the most cultivated genres in the America of this period, as it was
also in the Old World. Even though the poetical topics gathered any worry
generated by the daily life, it is the puritanical poetry of religious character the one
that most proliferated and major popularity reached. In this type of society, religious
dogmas constituted a fundamental matter of literary expression and, as in other
artistic areas, the Bible was the principal source of motives and images, itself model
and justification of the tasks of versification; thus the didactic doctrinal shape of the
17th-century poetry and the thematic uniformity of the production of this period. If
the poem dealt with the individual and of his relation with God, the Value of the
composition resided in the divine revelation and not in the experience of the poetical
subject.

There were several types of poetical compositions. In the first type predominates the
didactic rhetoric and encloses a basically mnemonic end (learning the alphabet by
means of rhymes). The second group devoted to the versification of historical
contents considered too heroic to be treated in prose (Edward Johnson's Wonder-
Working Providence). The third type was formed by the elegies written in
commemoration of the death, of important persons or of less famous others in which
the reader was reminded of the briefness and the senselessness of one’s life. A
fourth type grouped the translations in verse of books or Biblical fragments. The fifth
type is formed by the compositions of a basically didactic topic as Michael
Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom. Finally, it is necessary to emphasize a sixth group
of poetical compositions in which fits the most personal, meditative and reflexive
poetry that found its most important cultivators in Anne Bradstreet and Edward
Taylor.

The advocates of Ann Bradstreet continue to construct an image of her as a cultural

rebel, who produced poetry in spite of religious and social forces against her as a
woman, and as a Puritan. Similarly, when the poems of Edward Taylor were
discovered and published in the late 1930s, many literary historians explained that
his self- conscious artistry violated Puritan doctrines, and that his poetic impulses
suggested that, he was by temperament more Catholic or Anglican than Puritan.

Bradstreet's productions were attributed to the leisure available to a woman of her

high social standing, and Taylor's to the quiet life of his wilderness parish of
Westfield, Massachusetts. To be sure, there are many valid historical reasons for
assuming the term Puritan poetry to be an oxymoron.

Scholars generally agree that the three most productive and important poets in
seventeenth-century New England were Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth,
and Edward Taylor. Anne Bradstreet's (c. 1612-72) The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up
in America, published in London in 1650, remains the first extant book of poetry by
an inhabitant of the Americas. Born in Northampton, England, Bradstreet was
educated by her father, Thomas Dudley, steward to the Earl of Lincoln, in the earl's
library, where father and daughter read extensively the classics as well as the writers
of the English Renaissance.
Sailing aboard the Arbella with John Winthrop in 1630, the Bradstreets and Dudleys
experienced great hardships during the three-month journey, which continued
during the first years in New England. Shocked at the difficult conditions in
Massachusetts and by the high rate of sickness and death among the colonists, Anne
confided to her diary that she missed the comforts of England and that her "heart
rose" with resistance to the new world and new manners" of America. Bradstreet at
the time counted 18 years of age, and from a life of certain luxury and social and
cultural sophistication came to know the adversities and big penuries of the colony.
Both his Father and his husband became governors of Massachusetts. Although
Bradstreet had eight children, it is necessary to underline the hostility with which the
puritanical society considered the women who dare show some intellectual or
literary interest. Bradstreet was conscious of the frame in which she lived, as her
verses testify in "The Prologue".

Bradstreet was always a devoted and dutiful Christian, but she often questioned and
privately rebelled against certain dogmas of Puritanism and the strong patriarchal
authority in New England.

One source of personal frustration for Bradstreet and a context for illuminating
certain subtleties of her poetry is the situation of women in seventeenth-century
New England and England. From medieval times, the church and state
has systematically subordinated women through both custom and law, and the
Protestant revolt was especially male-centered, as demonstrated by the rejection of
the Catholic's emphasis on the importance of the Virgin Mary.

If the social and economic aspects of the Puritan revolution had provided an
opportunity for women to gain in social and political status in Massachusetts, that
opportunity was dashed with the antinomian affair in 1630s, for Anne Hutchison
became a symbol for decades after of the dangers of a woman's intellectual and
verbal powers. Similar opinions about the necessarily finite role of women remained
fixed well into the end of the century, and found frequent expression during the
Salem witchcraft trials.

Given this limiting context, it is remarkable that Bradstreet was able to write poetry,
have it published, and be reviewed for her talent during her time. Perhaps her
unusual degree of freedom was the ironic result of having the influence of two
political figures in her immediate family, her father and her husband.

As Puritans were taught to do, Bradstreet frequently examined her conscience to

discover her sins and shortcomings. When she did not have a child between 1630
and 1633, she was convinced that her own spiritual failings had caused God to make
her barren. What is clear in her poetry, however, is a frequent tension between a
passion for the material world, natural beauty, books, home, and family, and the
countervailing Christian dictum that the world is corrupt and vile, and vastly
incomparable to the love of Christ.

Her collection of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published
in London by his brother-in-law, in 1650, without her knowledge (consent), and
the second edition, with some added poems entitled Several Poems with a Great
Variety of Wit, appeared in Boston six years after her death.

Though her poems follow Elizabethan models and show the influence of Edmund
Spenser, Philip Sydney, Guillaume Du Bartas and Walter Raleigh, in her process of
maturation as poet and specially in the deep poetical reflection on Nature of
"Contemplations", Bradstreet left behind these poetical models and outlined what for
some critics turned out to be luminous glimpses of the English romanticism and the
North American transcendentalism.

The poems that nowadays may appear to be more attractive are those that delve into
domestic, familiar and loving topics. The principal reason is that in these a clear faith
struggle is revealed, an agonizing ambiguity of the poetical voice before the
doctrinal dogmas and her own emotions of the heart. Therefore, in the life of the
poetess, his domestic vicissitudes turn out to be important poetical topics, since they
rise over its literality and serve to justify the God's presence.

Though warmly received in London, the volume, The Tenth Muse actually contains
none of the poems, on which Bradstreet reputation currently depends. She
composed her more complex poetry over the next two decades, and these works
were collected six years after her death, in a volume entitled Several Poems (1678).

The first section of the Tenth Muse includes four long poems, known as the
quaternions and titled "The Four Elements", "The Four Humors of Man", "The Ages
of Man", and "The Four Seasons." Demonstrating Bradstreet's broad learning, these
works engage a range of historical and philosophical discourses and include
elaborations on anatomy, astronomy, cosmology, physiology, and Greek
metaphysics.

The second and expanded edition of her works, Several Poems (1678), provided the
first publication of what had become Bradstreet's best known poems. Although she
died before this work was published, she was able to correct many errors that had
appeared in those works first published in the hastily produced Tenth Muse, and she
added a new open, "The Author to Her Book". In "The Author to Her Book",
Bradstreet notices her reaction before the publication of The Tenth's Muse. In this
poem she uses metaphors inspired by the maternity to express the distress and
dissatisfaction with his political creature, to which noble and well-meaning friends
have stolen of her side and showed to the world, without bearing in mind that it was
“dressed in rags”.

In Several Poems, there are verses relating to her personal illnesses, elegies on the
deaths on her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, love poems to her husband, and a
poem on the burning of her house.

As the century progressed, Puritan poets strayed from the didactic imperative, and
Bradstreet later poems reflect this development. Her love poems to her husband are
in fact completely free of religious instruction, and frankly acknowledge her desire
for him when he is abroad. In "To My Dear and Loving Husband", she expresses
the love for the husband with sensual and mundane images, reaching in some
moment passionate extremes that have not much to do with the puritanical dictums
relative to the matrimonial love, as John Winthrop proposes in "A Model of Christian
Charity": "I wish my son may never set, but burn / Within the Cancer of my glowing
breast," and in another, "I, with many a deep sad groan / Bewail my turtle true ...
Return my Dear, my joy, my only Love / ... Let's still remain but one, till death
divide."

Many of Bradstreet's later poems also reveal the tension and anxiety she felt when
she had to accept with pious resignation the tragedy of the death of a loved one or
the loss of her property. Her sense of resentment toward God is barely concealed in
some of these poems although her speaker always becomes reconciled to divine
justice in the end. The poem she wrote after her house burned down in 1666 reveals
most clearly the conflict between human attachment to the things of this world and
the indifference required by Puritan doctrine. In "Here Follows Some Verses upon
Burning Our House", she recalls in detail a whole series of dear material possessions,
destroyed in the fire of her home. Along almost 30 verses she lists all the lost objects,
mute witnesses of her existence, until, before the danger of being carried out by the
nostalgia of earthly things and, therefore, of the ephemeral things, she stops to think
about the pretense of the mundane things.

The reader cannot help but suspect that the next time the speaker passes the ruins
she will dream again of the times and treasures she had "loved". In her meditations,
Bradstreet correspondingly reflected on her difficulty in rejecting the physical world,
concluding that only the knowledge of death rather than religious doctrine compels
people to look forward to eternity.

In "In Reference to Her Children", 23 June, 1659, she suggests not only the idea of the
maternal love towards his children, but the mother's concept as God. Here the
poetical voice of the Mother does an inventory of the destination of the different sons
and daughters, since they have been born until they leave the maternal nest to fly
and to discover new worlds by themselves. She never mentions the existence of the
Father. It is she who raises and educates them, and the one that expects to be
remembered after her death. The surprising thing is that according to the puritanical
conception it is the father and not the mother the representative figure of the
authority and divine power.

In these poems, Bradstreet seems to use the poetry as the only means of
transcending, more than of expressing, the daily reality that stifled her in her
woman's condition of writer. What actually counts is the personal history of the
poetical voice: the marital love, the children’s births, the filial love, and death. It is
true that she writes within the frames of a puritan aesthetics in which the value of
the poem only resides in its doctrinal efficiency. Her major achievement,
nevertheless, is to trespass this threshold to become the first poetical voice of the
North American literature.