Anne Bradstreet Themes

Anne Bradstreet, one of the world’s most well known female Puritan writers, is known for her poems that are rich in detail and imagery, reflecting her passions and her faith. One of the most powerful and thought-provoking themes that she uses throughout her works is the comparison between life on earth and the afterlife, expressed by her thoughts and feelings that she so delicately laces in between the two ideas, tying the comparisons together.
Bradstreet made it clear in her literary works that she had a strong love for her earthly life, delighting in her husband and children, in the life they had together, as well as their home. However, she had an even stronger love for God, and her faith was what saw her through the trials she endured on earth. In one of her most well known poems, Upon the Burning of
She ends it by saying that “Time [is] the fatal wrack of mortal things,” (stanza 33, line 1), stating that time will end all things earthly, except “he whose name is grav’d in the white stone,” (stanza 33, line 7) for they will be the ones to accept God’s grace in their hearts and receive His love and mercy and His gift of eternal life.
Many of Bradstreet’s poems reflect her love for this world and the next, but truly it is Contemplations that is the backbone of the theme. In the poem, as she meditates on God’s glory and the beautiful earth He created for man, she expresses a kind of conflict that many can relate to of the struggle between the love of the earthly world and the eternal world. Not only does the poem give readers a direct insight into her exact feelings, but also she expresses them in a way where she successfully addresses the ideal state of being for all Christians: being able to love the world without being of