Anne Bradstreet Essay
In the three poems Anne Bradstreet writes in memory of her grandchildren−Elizabeth, Anne, and Simon−she expresses grief and sorrow and doubts the intention of God’s will. Her emotion evolves in each poem from quiet acceptance to thinly veiled sarcasm. This progression represents Bradstreet’s ongoing struggle to embrace the traditional Puritanical view of accepting God’s will as final explanation of all things. Throughout her life, Bradstreet suffers her share of personal tragedy, and in the Puritan tradition, she attributes it to evidence of God’s will. Leonard Unger notes: “For the Puritan, of course, every personal trial had its theological significance” (100). However, in dealing with the deaths of her grandchildren, it is her intense
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grief and overwhelming sense of loss that compel her to question, and at times challenge, the meaning of God’s will, consciously knowing this is against the Puritan doctrine. The elegies reflect Bradstreet’s effort in trying to balance her struggle to accept, understand, and define her devotion to her family and the physical world against the spiritual definition of God and the expectations of her faith. Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, both in style and substance, embodies who she is as a person: a Puritan, a woman, a wife, a mother, and a poet. Unger notes, “Bradstreet was aware that she was a woman poet, not just a poet,” (114) and that “She wrote of her family and of the issues that touched her closely at home” (115). The “domestic” poem allows Bradstreet more freely to express her feelings. Kenneth Requa claims Bradstreet a better poet within her personal work because it most truthfully represents how she relates to the world—as a woman, wife, and mother. Requa believes the results are evident in Bradstreet’s private poetry and that “speaking as a private poet is so sufficiently close to her domestic vocation that she is comfortable in the private role” (11). Bradstreet’s comfort level in writing about personal experience is apparent, and as Wendy Martin notes, this allows her to be “considerably more candid about her spiritual crises, her deep attachment to her family, and her love of mortal life” (17). Bradstreet reserves her personal poems for a small, trusted audience of family and close friends. Writing for this audience creates a safe environment in which she can reveal her thoughts and feelings without the threat of judgment or criticism. It is within this “comfort zone” that Bradstreet writes these three heartfelt elegies and expresses the deeply personal and spiritual conflict she suffers in trying to understand the meaning of her grandchildren’s deaths. The first elegy, “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old,” Anne Bradstreet begins with tender emotion and sorrowful farewells. Her tone is melancholy, her sadness apparent. Beyond Bradstreet’s poignant farewells, there is the actual physical structure of the poem to consider. Unger states, “It is clear that the structure of the stanzas is meant to be symmetrical,” (109). He describes what he believes Bradstreet’s desired effect: “In both [stanzas], the first four lines capture human confusion and sorrow. The last three [lines in each stanza] locate the spiritual essence that provides consolation” (109). Unger considers this symmetry effective in representing Bradstreet’s attempt of trying to find logic in Elizabeth’s death and her realization that “One cannot reason from experience to God” (109). Beginning with the first stanza, the pattern of human confusion and sorrow appears in the first four lines when Bradstreet writes repeated farewells and reveals her uncertainty in understanding Elizabeth’s death: Farewell dear babe, my heart’s too much content, Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye, Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent, Then ta’en away unto eternity (lines 1-4).
Bradstreet is sad that her beloved granddaughter, Elizabeth, should have such a short time on earth and is confused when suddenly and inexplicably she is forever taken away. Looking at the second stanza, in the first four lines Bradstreet focuses on the life cycle of nature, speaking in terms of mature growth—a contrast to the short life of Elizabeth: By nature trees do rot when they are grown, And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall, And corn and grass are in their season mown, And time brings down what is both strong and tall (8-11).
Bradstreet finds it logical that trees eventually rot; ripe fruit falls; corn and grass mown—their life cycle complete and death expected. What Bradstreet cannot comprehend is why God would not allow Elizabeth a full and long life as He allows nature. Enveloped within this confusion, Bradstreet reveals her shy question of God’s will. As Unger indicates, it is within the last three lines of each stanza Bradstreet accepts her human frailty and receives comfort from accepting God’s will. This expressed in the first stanza when Bradstreet writes the last three lines: “Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate, / Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate, / Sith thou are settled in an everlasting state” (5-7). In terms of religion, Bradstreet understands her granddaughter’s fate—to be with God—is much greater than remaining on earth. Martin comments that Bradstreet is aware of the Puritan woman’s duty is “to assist her family in the service of God,” (69) and “To love them for their own sake would indicate a dangerous attachment to this world” (69). However, Bradstreet’s heart aches for the physical being of Elizabeth, illustrating the conflict she has in quelling her tendency to place a higher importance on physical life than on spiritual life. In the second stanza, Bradstreet expresses in the final three lines a spiritual comfort and understanding when she accepts God’s acts as beyond the logic capable of mere human beings. She ends the poem: “But plants new set to be eradicate, / And buds new blown to have so short a date, / Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate” (12-14). Bradstreet understands that God needs no reason. His authority so great, He alone chooses the fate of all living things. According to Puritan theology, God’s will is unquestionable, and she at last defers to the wisdom of His ever-knowing power. This pattern, a tug-of-war between the devotion to her faith and her human need for rational explanation, is successful in contributing to the emotional power of this elegy. Four years following the death of Elizabeth, Bradstreet is again grief-stricken by the loss of a second grandchild, Anne. In the elegy Bradstreet dedicates to her, “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet, Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old,” she becomes more forthright in tone, but again finds herself submitting to the greater power of God. However, Bradstreet does not begin this poem with tender farewells, her accusation put forth immediately: “The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight” (2). She directly charges heaven for her sadness and in doing so indirectly blames God. Accusation alternates with retraction as Bradstreet then deflects that statement by later in the poem calling herself a fool: “More fool then I to look on that was lent / As if mine own, when thus impermanent” (13-14). Bradstreet places the blame back on herself for her foolish expectations of thinking that Anne belongs to this life, when in fact she belongs to God. This is another example of the great effort Bradstreet puts forth in trying to reconcile her feelings between the natural world and the spiritual world. In the closing lines Bradstreet writes: “Meantime my throbbing heart’s cheered up with this: / Thou with thy Savior art in endless bliss” (17-18). Through rote obedience, Bradstreet claims comfort by the thought that Anne is now with God; although, this attempt to balance her grief against her trust in God expressed with reluctant resignation. Tragically, Bradstreet’s grandson, Simon, dies just five months following the death of her granddaughter, Anne. It is this third poem, “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet, Who Died on 16 November, 1669, Being But a Month, and One Day Old,” that is most powerful in illustrating the culmination of Bradstreet’s deep sorrow and intense frustration in her continued search for the meaning of her grandchildren’s deaths. Bradstreet’s anger is palpable. Her grief is acute and raw. She now intends her accusations to be understood and deliberately ends the alternating pattern of shy questioning and submissive acceptance of God’s will, a method used in the two previous elegies to mask her challenge of God. Bradstreet barely contains her anger and outrage when she blatantly charges God for her grandchildren’s deaths and openly questions his goodness when she writes: “Three flowers, two scarcely blown, the last i’ th’ bud, / Cropped by th’ Almighty’s hand; yet is He good” (3-4). She cannot find wisdom or greater meaning in God’s decision. She cannot reconcile the supposed goodness of God with the tragic deaths of her three grandchildren: a good God would not inflict such pain and sorrow. Bradstreet’s voice is marked with strained piety that barely conceals her contempt of a God who would intend the death of a child to serve as a lesson to her. Pamela Shelton comments on this when writes, “In poems mourning the deaths of grandchildren, she finds it more difficult to accept the God that she, as a Puritan, must love and obey: she writes with bitter irony about a God who kills children in order to test adults.” Bradstreet fills her lines with dark sarcasm and takes less care in her attempts to mask her accusations. Shelton notes what she considers the most powerful lines in this elegy: “Later, mourning her grandson Simon Bradstreet, the word ‘say’ is chillingly ironic: ‘Such was [God 's] will, but why, let 's not dispute, / With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust, / Let 's say he 's merciful, as well as just.’ Here Bradstreet cannot connect her roles of grandmother and Puritan; she can only go through the gesture—write the poem in which she tries to trust God—of reconciling her personal experience with her religious faith.” In this elegy, Bradstreet seems not as cautious in camouflaging her accusations; in fact, her tone is unmistakably condescending.
However, she strategically constructs her phrases and carefully chooses her words, successfully conveying her sense of betrayal without crossing the dangerously thin line that separates piety and heresy within the Puritanical society. She demonstrates this by naming him merciful and just, albeit without sincerity or conviction. In Bradstreet’s closing lines, it is revealing that she does not refer to Simon being with God. Instead she writes, “Go pretty babe, go rest with sisters twain” (11). Bradstreet finds comfort not from the thought that Simon is with God, but that he is now with his sisters. Here she is outright refusing to accept comfort from a God who she deems unjust and unfair. Anne Bradstreet reveals through these three moving elegies dedicated to her beloved grandchildren the emotional and spiritual journey she traveled in seeking answers to her questions of faith. These poems symbolize Bradstreet’s mourning the loss of her grandchildren and the conflict she experiences in attempting to define her faith in God and in the Puritan religion. According to Martin, “Anne Bradstreet finally managed to believe in God,” (76) but, “her faith was based on a profound desire to remain connected to life, whether in this world or the next”
(76).
I declare the Honor Pledge.
Works Cited
Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. 17, 69, 76. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Requa, Kenneth A. “Anne Bradstreet’s Poetic Voices.” Early American Literature 9:1 (Mar 1974):11. Literary Reference Center. EBSCOhost. Hamden Public Lib., Hamden, CT. Sep 6, 2008 .
Shelton, Pamela. “Anne (Dudley) Bradstreet.” Feminist Writers. St. James Press, 1996. Biography Resource Center. MI: Gale, 2008. Hamden Public Lib., Hamden, CT. Sep 6, 2008. .
Unger, Leonard, ed. “Anne Bradstreet.” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement I, Part I. 98-117. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979.
grief and overwhelming sense of loss that compel her to question, and at times challenge, the meaning of God’s will, consciously knowing this is against the Puritan doctrine. The elegies reflect Bradstreet’s effort in trying to balance her struggle to accept, understand, and define her devotion to her family and the physical world against the spiritual definition of God and the expectations of her faith. Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, both in style and substance, embodies who she is as a person: a Puritan, a woman, a wife, a mother, and a poet. Unger notes, “Bradstreet was aware that she was a woman poet, not just a poet,” (114) and that “She wrote of her family and of the issues that touched her closely at home” (115). The “domestic” poem allows Bradstreet more freely to express her feelings. Kenneth Requa claims Bradstreet a better poet within her personal work because it most truthfully represents how she relates to the world—as a woman, wife, and mother. Requa believes the results are evident in Bradstreet’s private poetry and that “speaking as a private poet is so sufficiently close to her domestic vocation that she is comfortable in the private role” (11). Bradstreet’s comfort level in writing about personal experience is apparent, and as Wendy Martin notes, this allows her to be “considerably more candid about her spiritual crises, her deep attachment to her family, and her love of mortal life” (17). Bradstreet reserves her personal poems for a small, trusted audience of family and close friends. Writing for this audience creates a safe environment in which she can reveal her thoughts and feelings without the threat of judgment or criticism. It is within this “comfort zone” that Bradstreet writes these three heartfelt elegies and expresses the deeply personal and spiritual conflict she suffers in trying to understand the meaning of her grandchildren’s deaths. The first elegy, “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old,” Anne Bradstreet begins with tender emotion and sorrowful farewells. Her tone is melancholy, her sadness apparent. Beyond Bradstreet’s poignant farewells, there is the actual physical structure of the poem to consider. Unger states, “It is clear that the structure of the stanzas is meant to be symmetrical,” (109). He describes what he believes Bradstreet’s desired effect: “In both [stanzas], the first four lines capture human confusion and sorrow. The last three [lines in each stanza] locate the spiritual essence that provides consolation” (109). Unger considers this symmetry effective in representing Bradstreet’s attempt of trying to find logic in Elizabeth’s death and her realization that “One cannot reason from experience to God” (109). Beginning with the first stanza, the pattern of human confusion and sorrow appears in the first four lines when Bradstreet writes repeated farewells and reveals her uncertainty in understanding Elizabeth’s death: Farewell dear babe, my heart’s too much content, Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye, Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent, Then ta’en away unto eternity (lines 1-4).
Bradstreet is sad that her beloved granddaughter, Elizabeth, should have such a short time on earth and is confused when suddenly and inexplicably she is forever taken away. Looking at the second stanza, in the first four lines Bradstreet focuses on the life cycle of nature, speaking in terms of mature growth—a contrast to the short life of Elizabeth: By nature trees do rot when they are grown, And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall, And corn and grass are in their season mown, And time brings down what is both strong and tall (8-11).
Bradstreet finds it logical that trees eventually rot; ripe fruit falls; corn and grass mown—their life cycle complete and death expected. What Bradstreet cannot comprehend is why God would not allow Elizabeth a full and long life as He allows nature. Enveloped within this confusion, Bradstreet reveals her shy question of God’s will. As Unger indicates, it is within the last three lines of each stanza Bradstreet accepts her human frailty and receives comfort from accepting God’s will. This expressed in the first stanza when Bradstreet writes the last three lines: “Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate, / Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate, / Sith thou are settled in an everlasting state” (5-7). In terms of religion, Bradstreet understands her granddaughter’s fate—to be with God—is much greater than remaining on earth. Martin comments that Bradstreet is aware of the Puritan woman’s duty is “to assist her family in the service of God,” (69) and “To love them for their own sake would indicate a dangerous attachment to this world” (69). However, Bradstreet’s heart aches for the physical being of Elizabeth, illustrating the conflict she has in quelling her tendency to place a higher importance on physical life than on spiritual life. In the second stanza, Bradstreet expresses in the final three lines a spiritual comfort and understanding when she accepts God’s acts as beyond the logic capable of mere human beings. She ends the poem: “But plants new set to be eradicate, / And buds new blown to have so short a date, / Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate” (12-14). Bradstreet understands that God needs no reason. His authority so great, He alone chooses the fate of all living things. According to Puritan theology, God’s will is unquestionable, and she at last defers to the wisdom of His ever-knowing power. This pattern, a tug-of-war between the devotion to her faith and her human need for rational explanation, is successful in contributing to the emotional power of this elegy. Four years following the death of Elizabeth, Bradstreet is again grief-stricken by the loss of a second grandchild, Anne. In the elegy Bradstreet dedicates to her, “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet, Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old,” she becomes more forthright in tone, but again finds herself submitting to the greater power of God. However, Bradstreet does not begin this poem with tender farewells, her accusation put forth immediately: “The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight” (2). She directly charges heaven for her sadness and in doing so indirectly blames God. Accusation alternates with retraction as Bradstreet then deflects that statement by later in the poem calling herself a fool: “More fool then I to look on that was lent / As if mine own, when thus impermanent” (13-14). Bradstreet places the blame back on herself for her foolish expectations of thinking that Anne belongs to this life, when in fact she belongs to God. This is another example of the great effort Bradstreet puts forth in trying to reconcile her feelings between the natural world and the spiritual world. In the closing lines Bradstreet writes: “Meantime my throbbing heart’s cheered up with this: / Thou with thy Savior art in endless bliss” (17-18). Through rote obedience, Bradstreet claims comfort by the thought that Anne is now with God; although, this attempt to balance her grief against her trust in God expressed with reluctant resignation. Tragically, Bradstreet’s grandson, Simon, dies just five months following the death of her granddaughter, Anne. It is this third poem, “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet, Who Died on 16 November, 1669, Being But a Month, and One Day Old,” that is most powerful in illustrating the culmination of Bradstreet’s deep sorrow and intense frustration in her continued search for the meaning of her grandchildren’s deaths. Bradstreet’s anger is palpable. Her grief is acute and raw. She now intends her accusations to be understood and deliberately ends the alternating pattern of shy questioning and submissive acceptance of God’s will, a method used in the two previous elegies to mask her challenge of God. Bradstreet barely contains her anger and outrage when she blatantly charges God for her grandchildren’s deaths and openly questions his goodness when she writes: “Three flowers, two scarcely blown, the last i’ th’ bud, / Cropped by th’ Almighty’s hand; yet is He good” (3-4). She cannot find wisdom or greater meaning in God’s decision. She cannot reconcile the supposed goodness of God with the tragic deaths of her three grandchildren: a good God would not inflict such pain and sorrow. Bradstreet’s voice is marked with strained piety that barely conceals her contempt of a God who would intend the death of a child to serve as a lesson to her. Pamela Shelton comments on this when writes, “In poems mourning the deaths of grandchildren, she finds it more difficult to accept the God that she, as a Puritan, must love and obey: she writes with bitter irony about a God who kills children in order to test adults.” Bradstreet fills her lines with dark sarcasm and takes less care in her attempts to mask her accusations. Shelton notes what she considers the most powerful lines in this elegy: “Later, mourning her grandson Simon Bradstreet, the word ‘say’ is chillingly ironic: ‘Such was [God 's] will, but why, let 's not dispute, / With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust, / Let 's say he 's merciful, as well as just.’ Here Bradstreet cannot connect her roles of grandmother and Puritan; she can only go through the gesture—write the poem in which she tries to trust God—of reconciling her personal experience with her religious faith.” In this elegy, Bradstreet seems not as cautious in camouflaging her accusations; in fact, her tone is unmistakably condescending.
However, she strategically constructs her phrases and carefully chooses her words, successfully conveying her sense of betrayal without crossing the dangerously thin line that separates piety and heresy within the Puritanical society. She demonstrates this by naming him merciful and just, albeit without sincerity or conviction. In Bradstreet’s closing lines, it is revealing that she does not refer to Simon being with God. Instead she writes, “Go pretty babe, go rest with sisters twain” (11). Bradstreet finds comfort not from the thought that Simon is with God, but that he is now with his sisters. Here she is outright refusing to accept comfort from a God who she deems unjust and unfair. Anne Bradstreet reveals through these three moving elegies dedicated to her beloved grandchildren the emotional and spiritual journey she traveled in seeking answers to her questions of faith. These poems symbolize Bradstreet’s mourning the loss of her grandchildren and the conflict she experiences in attempting to define her faith in God and in the Puritan religion. According to Martin, “Anne Bradstreet finally managed to believe in God,” (76) but, “her faith was based on a profound desire to remain connected to life, whether in this world or the next”
(76).
I declare the Honor Pledge.
Works Cited
Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. 17, 69, 76. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Requa, Kenneth A. “Anne Bradstreet’s Poetic Voices.” Early American Literature 9:1 (Mar 1974):11. Literary Reference Center. EBSCOhost. Hamden Public Lib., Hamden, CT. Sep 6, 2008 .
Shelton, Pamela. “Anne (Dudley) Bradstreet.” Feminist Writers. St. James Press, 1996. Biography Resource Center. MI: Gale, 2008. Hamden Public Lib., Hamden, CT. Sep 6, 2008. .
Unger, Leonard, ed. “Anne Bradstreet.” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement I, Part I. 98-117. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979.