[In the following excerpt, Rosenfeld discusses Bradsteet's "Contemplations" in terms of its similarities with the works of later Romantic poets.]

On first reading, the thirty-three stanzas of "Contemplations" seem to be held together very loosely, if at all, but a closer reading begins to reveal certain patterns of imagery and ideas within the poem. The seasonal metaphor is one of these and contributes significantly to both form and meaning. A second pattern, the daily cycle of morning and night, with its attendant periods of light and dark, obviously ties in closely with the yearly cycle of the seasons. The progression of natural images—directing the poet's vision from tree to sun to river to bird to stone—is a third and needs to be examined carefully. A fourth element of structural and thematic importance involves the elaborate switches in narrative and dramatic time. A fifth concerns the noticeable contrasts between Classical and Biblical allusions. A sixth has to do with tone and mood and the varied uses of the lyrical and elegiac modes together with the larger form of the narrative. All of these factors help to make the poem the rich and complex work that it is. They also lend the poem unity, although it is a unity that is not easily apparent and only becomes so when one isolates some of the patterns of form and meaning and examines them, at first, somewhat apart.

Anne Bradstreet's use of the seasonal metaphor—which moves the poem from autumn through winter to a temporarily realized season of eternal spring and summer—is an anticipation of the English Romantic poets and inevitably provokes parallels with Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. As with those poets, her seasons are both physical and spiritual and participate in the same cycle of the waning and revival of life. As more than one critic has already pointed out, several of her lines on the seasons resemble some of the most memorable lines in the poems of Shelley and Keats, a factor that may permit us to read her poetry in the light of what we have learned from theirs.

Particularly appropriate—and helpful—in this connection is the place of the poet as the central figure in the drama of seasonal change. For it is the threat to the poet in his vocation as poet and not just as mortal man that is always crucial in the Romantic's evocation of the seasons. That is true for the Wordsworth of the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," for the Coleridge of "Dejection: An Ode," for the Shelley of "Ode to the West Wind," for the Keats of the great odes—and for the Anne Bradstreet of "Contemplations." A significant part of her poem's theme (and one finds it also in the poems just cited) has to do with the challenge to the imagination of the poet's heavy and constant sense of time, flux, and a final oblivion. A major portion of this theme in "Contemplations" is carried by the seasonal metaphor.

The poem actually begins with it—"Some time now past in the autumnal tide" (1)—and from this point on it is pervasive, appearing explicitly in at least a third of the stanzas and implicitly in many of the others. The poet invokes it immediately when, walking alone in the woods of an autumn day, she quietly gives herself up to the splendid scene and is moved to remark: "More heaven than earth was here, no winter and no night" (2). She is moved by the majesty of the trees and particularly by one "stately oak" which, with its height and strength, seems to defy and transcend a "hundred winters … or [a] thousand." But the lines that most fully express the poet's attachment to the metaphor of the seasons appear later, in stanzas 18 and 28:

When I behold the heavens as in their prime,
And then the earth (though old) still clad in green,
The stones and trees, insensible of time,
Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen;
If winter come and greenness then do fade,
A spring returns, and they more youthful made;
But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid.     (18)

The dawning morn with songs thou dost prevent,
Sets hundred notes unto thy feathered crew,
So each one tunes his pretty instrument,
And warbling out the old, begin anew,
And thus they pass their youth in summer season,
Then follow thee into a better region,
Where winter's never felt by that sweet airy legion.     (28)

The Shelleyan note is inescapable in the first of these stanzas, the Keatsian in the second. Anne Bradstreet seems to share with these poets a consciousness of the rejuvenescence of life, of the chance to recover from the old to make always new beginnings, which comes with the cycle of the "Quaternal seasons," as she refers to them in an earlier stanza (6). Stanza 18 ends, however, on a pessimistic note about man's ability to participate in the seasonal cycle, and at this point we have a departure from the later Romantic poet's affirmation of seasonal death and rebirth. Anne Bradstreet was of another age, after all, and she is nowhere closer to that age than here, where she qualifies a strong personal impulse towards Romantic beliefs with the traditional Christian assertion of man's mortality:

By birth more noble than those creatures all,
Yet seems by nature and by custom cursed,
No sooner born, but grief and care makes fall
That state obliterate he had at first;
Nor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again,
Nor habitations long their names retain,
But in oblivion to the final day remain.     (19)

Theseus' famous speech in A Midsummer-Night's Dream about the imagination giving to airy nothing "a local habitation and a name" is echoed here, and its implications are that the poet has suffered not only a reversal of her commitment to the seasonal metaphor but of the very quality of her imagination. For although the poem goes on to affirm that "man was made for endless immortality" (20), the kind of immortality referred to and pursued is that of orthodox Christianity and not Romantic renewal on earth. Christianity's idea of resurrection after death is based, in part, upon the symbolism of the seasonal cycle, but its final goal is transcendence of all natural forms to eternal life beyond. A prose passage in Anne Bradstreet's "Meditations Divine and Moral" helps to make this point emphatic:

The spring is a lively emblem of the resurrection: after a long winter we see the leafless trees and dry stocks (at the approach of the sun) to resume their former vigor and beauty in a more ample manner than what they lost in the autumn; so shall it be at that great day after a long vacation, when the Sun of righteousness shall appear; those dry bones shall arise in far more glory than that which they lost at their creation, and in this transcends the spring that their leaf shall never fail nor their sap decline.

This is a graceful description of familiar Christian doctrine and represents, one imagines, what Anne Bradstreet would have claimed to be her final religious position on the questions of life, death, and immortality.

Does it also represent her deepest responses as a poet, one wonders? The question must be asked, and not just for "Contemplations" but for other of her poems as well. For if one closely reads "The Flesh and the Spirit," "Verses upon the Burning of Our House," the elegies on Sidney, Du Bartas, and Elizabeth, the poems to her husband, and "Contemplations," it soon becomes clear that the currents within the poetry itself seem too often to run counter to a position of religious orthodoxy. And if it is finally unfair to throw Anne Bradstreet fully into the camp of the Romantics, so too is it unfair to cast her completely as a traditionally believing "Puritan" poet.

Several critics have called attention to "the clash of feeling and dogma" in her poetry, to the struggle between "how she really feels instead of how she should feel," and that is precisely what we are faced with here. This struggle adds character and strength to her poetry, and one should not attempt to dismiss it, as is sometimes done, by seeing it as merely an incidental flaw in an otherwise clearly defined position of either staunch Puritanism or rebellious Romanticism. The poetry itself does not fully resolve these tensions in either direction, after all, but instead gains much of its vitality and interest from the existence of what Blake called the warring contraries.

In "Contemplations" one finds the war of the contraries everywhere: in the early assertion but later retreat from the seasonal metaphor; in the dualities of morning and night; light and dark; the present earth and a future heaven; rapt speech and an imposed silence. Phoebus and the God of the Puritan's Bible are opposed here, as are their related values, which may be designated, in the poem's own terms, as "this world of pleasure" (32) as against the promised joys "of an eternal morrow" (30). In the end, the will towards "divine translation" (30) appears to triumph, but one suspects a large share of its victory is doctrinaire, imposed from without, rather than earned naturally from within, the poem.

So much of "Contemplations" seems, in fact, to issue from what Anne Bradstreet calls "the feeling knowledge" (6) of the world that one begins to doubt the legitimacy for her poetry of some of the less inspired religious assertions that appear within it. One cannot ignore their presence, of course, but too often the merely traditionally rendered religious passages pale before some of the more deeply felt lyrical passages in praise of Phoebus and the things of the earth. It is hard to be moved, for instance, by a triplet such as this:

But sad affliction comes and makes him see
Here's neither honour, wealth, nor safety;
Only above is found all with security.     (32)

whereas one is moved by this:

Thy presence makes it day, thy absence night,
Quaternal seasons caused by thy might:
Hail creature, full of sweetness, beauty, and delight.     (6)

Anne Bradstreet's apostrophe to the sun is worthy of Shelley and expresses some of the same elegance of line and imaginative strength that one finds in Shelley at his best. In contrast, her verses on man's earthly afflictions and promise of security beyond are flat and awkward. The second triplet is graceful, the feeling, inspired; in the first, the language is clumsy, the sentiment, unconvincing and seemingly untrue.

If one weighs the merit of these two sets of verses by Anne Bradstreet's affection for "the feeling knowledge," it is obvious that, no matter what her position as a prominent member of the Puritan faith community, as a poet she was more a worshipper of Phoebus than of Christ. Her loveliest lines in "Contemplations" are written in praise of the sun god, whom she addresses as "a strong man" and "a bridegroom," and who moved her to a position of near adoration:

Then higher on the glistering Sun I gazed,
Whose beams was shaded by the leavie tree;
The more I looked, the more I grew amazed,
And softly said, "What glory's like to thee?"
Soul of this world, this universe's eye,
No wonder some made thee a deity;
Had I not better known, alas, the same had I.     (4)

This is poetry written from a high level of inspired awe and strong feeling, but the concluding line tends to deflate these qualities of spirit considerably and represents a retreat from them. This initial surge and subsequent reversal of voice and vision is typical not only of this passage but of the poem as a whole, and in observing it one becomes aware of a fundamental pattern in "Contemplations" that largely defines both the poem's form and meaning.

The poet's imagination belonged to the earth and the sun who reigned over it, reviving "from death and dullness" (5) not only the earth's heart but hers as well. The demands of a Puritan religious consciousness, however, apparently did not permit so free and exuberant an indulgence of the imagination and dictated instead its own terms of worship. The poet is consequently turned away from her initial sources of inspiration in the natural world to thoughts of what instead she should be praising. The results for the poetry are, as expected, not good:

My great Creator I would magnify,
That nature had thus decked liberally;
But Ah, and Ah, again, my imbecility!     (8)

Stuttering—and—ultimately—silence come instead of praise. The displacement of elevated feeling by an overpowering sense of religious duty issues in a collapse of the imagination. The same poet whose senses are earlier described as "rapt" by the "delectable view" of an autumn day and who sees and can sing the sun "so full of glory" (7) is brought to silence when forced to praise her Maker: "I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays" (9).

In a letter to her children accompanying her book of poems, Anne Bradstreet wrote that the aim of her poetry was "to declare the truth, not to set forth myself, but the glory of God." There is no reason to doubt that that was her conscious intention, but she could no more apply it consistently and programmatically in her poetry than could Milton. Her song is a song of praise, but she could only sing well what her imagination, and not her moral consciousness, responded to faithfully. When the latter intruded from without, the poetry collapsed from within. When this happens in "Contemplations" her resources as a lyric poet are stunned, and, rendered "mute," she literally has no voice left to sing her hymn of glory.

Brought to the point of silence, then, the poem can either end here in a defeat of the imagination or try to find new direction. It attempts the latter, and with stanza 10 a major turn occurs that complicates the poem exceedingly in terms of both form and meaning.

In its first nine stanzas the poem is essentially a dramatic lyric, but stanzas 10 through 17 are purely narrative. There is also a significant time change, from present to past. The seasonal metaphor is dropped altogether, and the times of day which earlier prevailed, morning and afternoon, now become "perpetual night" (17). Phoebus and all other references to a radiant earth disappear and are replaced by the Biblical stories of Adam and Eve (11–12), Cain and Abel (13–15), and somber reflections of "the virgin earth … cloyed" with the draught of too much blood (14). Man's fallen state and the general vanity of all human endeavor are described in a mood that has shifted radically from one of a reflective and rapt lyricism to that of a heavy brooding that approaches the dirge. The former themes of vitality, immediacy, buoyancy, and pleasure have gone out of the poem, and instead one has references to sin, death, vanity, and despair.

The poem has obviously undergone an extreme change in all respects, a change that one can account for and understand only in terms of what happens in the poem to the imagination. The poet alert and fully alive when her imagination is indulged is brought first to a stammering silence and then carried in a drift towards death when her imagination is forced to turn away from the natural sources of its inspiration. The outward pressures of dogma separate her from her chosen bridegroom Phoebus and the delights of the earth and instead bring her to recall guiltily the fates of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. Like Eve, she "sighs to think of Paradise. And how she lost her bliss" (12). Like Cain, she is "branded with guilt and crushed with treble woes" (15). She defines Cain's struggle as one between "deep despair" and a "wish of life" (15), and that is exactly her own situation at this point in the poem; and, within the frame of the long narrative section, it is the death wish and not the "wish of life" that prevails….

"Contemplations" does not collapse entirely with the collapse of its initial Romanticism, though, and Anne Bradstreet was resourceful enough to seek out new figures to continue the poem. The tree was her first important image, valued for its majesty, strength, and longevity. It was conceived chiefly as a symbol of stasis and an intimation of eternity (3). But the tree functions only as a secondary symbol in the poem, for in gazing upward at it (4), the poet first glimpsed above the leaves the splendid sun which, apotheosized as Phoebus, in turn became the poem's dominant figure. The several lyrical stanzas then devoted to Phoebus are a celebration of life's potency, beauty, glory, and light, but these are not the values that the poet's imagination is allowed to indulge. Phoebus is defeated, and with his removal from the poem, the poet returns to the tree momentarily, only to discover that, "I once that loved the shady woods so well, Now thought the rivers did the trees excell" (21). The river, different in symbolic value altogether from either the tree or the sun, is adopted as the poem's new figure, and with its steady flow and flux represents the poem's redirection: the race towards death. It is, accordingly, highly prized by the poet:

Thou emblem true of what I count the best,
O could I lead my rivulets to rest,
So may we press to that vast mansion, ever blest.     (23)

A peaceful yet determined death is the new goal, and the river, which is able to press on, despite hindrances, to that "beloved place," is an appropriate symbol. It also contains that oldest of traditional Christian symbols of immortality, the fish, and two rather mediocre stanzas (24–25) are devoted to describing different fishes, all of whom know instinctively how to glide to "unknown coasts." The passages on the fish are not a high point of lyrical description, but they do serve to bring the poet back to her fondness for Classical allusions, this time to Thetis, Neptune, and, most importantly, Philomel (26)….

The central image in the final stanza—the engraved white stone—is, as has often been pointed out, based on a verse from Revelation, and appears to end the poem with a lesson on holy dying. No doubt that is how Anne Brad-street intended it, and the Scriptural reference implies such a reading. At the same time this final stanza is replete with echoes of Shakespeare, and consequently additional interpretations also suggest themselves:

O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomp's all laid in th' dust
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape times rust;
But he whose name is graved in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.     (33)

Two centuries later Shelley was to write lines similar to these in his famous sonnet on Ozymandias. The Romantic poet and the Puritan poet shared a common sense of mortal decay and the futility of monuments against the tyranny of time.

The greatest poet to give voice to these themes, though, saw poetry itself as an imperishable monument against time, and his own magnificent achievement has proved him correct. Shakespeare, who was one of Anne Bradstreet's favorite authors, frequently exerted a noticeable influence on her work, and that is surely the case here in the final stanza of "Contemplations." It is so not only in reference to her lines on time and oblivion, which recall several of Shakespeare's sonnets, but also in reference to the form and meaning of her concluding couplet.

An exceptional formal consideration must be noted first, and that is that only here in the thirty-three stanzas of "Contemplations" does Anne Bradstreet end with a couplet and not a triplet. This is a highly suggestive factor and tends to reinforce our suspicions that she was ending her poem with Shakespeare as well as the Bible very much in mind. If indeed that is the case, then Anne Bradstreet's imagination is engaged once again in this poem in a battle of contraries, this time between two notions of immortality. The Christian hope for a "divine translation" to "an eternal morrow" (30) is unquestionably strong, but so too is the Shakespearian will towards fame. In a sense Anne Bradstreet is composing her epitaph in these final lines, and she is doing so both as a devoted Christian and a dedicated poet. The two come more closely together here than elsewhere in the poem, and one cannot easily assign them priorities. Nor is it necessary to do so, but only to hold them both in mind.

For while Anne Bradstreet found her image of the white stone in Revelation, she engraved it after the manner of Shakespeare. It ends her poem on both a religious and an aesthetic note, each of which is able to transcend "time the fatal wrack of mortal things" in a sublime way. If we still remember Anne Bradstreet and recall her wish to have her dry bones arise in glory, it is because she was finally poet enough to live in her verse and secure the fame that good poetry provides.