"What we need to realize now," said Robert Daly in 1978 [in God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry], "is that … Puritan orthodoxy was conductive to the production of poetry, and that Bradstreet's poetry is illuminated by an understanding of the theology which structured the experiences her poetry expressed." Daly argued that Bradstreet remained faithful to her tradition in that she celebrated the sensible world while consistently ascending to a celebration of its Creator through her contemplations of the world. But Bradstreet's orthodoxy, as it emerges in her devotional poetry, goes even beyond her attitude toward the world and poetic uses of it. What she does in her Andover Manuscript poems is not only to draw on the themes and emphases of Puritan theology but to adopt the rhetorical techniques and voice of the Psalms as the Puritans understood them. Her imitation of the Psalms—in technique, stance, and thematic patterns—indicates her ability to work comfortably within her tradition, searching for a poetic language that God would accept.

That Anne Bradstreet's poetry reflects the influence of the Psalms—the Book of Psalms as well as the Bay Psalm Book—has been generally acknowledged. Her indebtedness to the psalm tradition is, however, far greater than an imitation of the metrics of the Bay Psalm Book translations or the diction and imagery found in the Book of Psalms. The Andover Manuscript poems, written as reflections on intensely personal events in her life, show a more comprehensive reliance on the Psalm tradition than has hitherto been acknowledged. For Bradstreet, the psalter and the Puritan tradition surrounding it prove conducive to the production of poetry and provide her with a voice to imitate, the Davidic voice, as she strives to praise God even in her suffering.

The importance of the Hebrew Psalms for the New England Puritans derives from the Protestant Reformation. With Calvin and Luther's sanctioning of psalm-singing for corporate as well as private worship came the quick adoption of the psalms as the hymnody of many churches in western Christendom. Translators drew on popular secular tunes for the music of their new metrical psalms; the balled or common meter of their renditions contrasted favorably with the unmeasured music of the Roman Catholic plain-chant. The rendering of the Psalms into vernacular poetry was a favorite pastime of poets and pastors from the Reformation through the eighteenth century. It is significant that only ten years after arriving in the New World the Massachusetts Bay Puritans produced their own psalter—the Bay Psalm Book—that would supersede the Pilgrims' Ainsworth Psalter in ease of singing and the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter in faithfulness of translation.

For the Puritans, the singing of psalms satisfied at least two priorities: their enjoyment of music and their high estimation of the language of Scripture. In the Psalms the Puritans found a catalogue of praises in a language acceptable to God. Tradition held that David, God's faithful servant, provided a model of the language of praise that God had sanctioned. Although he was admittedly human in his sinfulness, David was also regarded as a type of Christ. His composition of psalms, in their reflection of the range of human spiritual experience, opened up the channel between God and man. Thus the Psalms were important not only for joyful, corporate singing but also for serious study and meditation. The numerous metrical translations of the Psalms in the seventeenth century attest to their central place.

That David the type prefigures Christ the antitype is central to understanding the seventeenth-century view of the Psalms. In his role of suffering servant, David was seen as exemplifying Christly behavior in the struggle to overcome sin and gain redemption. In one respect, then, the Psalms were regarded as illuminations of the connection between the psalmist's situation and the struggles of the contemporary Christian. The Psalms not only gave Christians of all ages encouragement and comfort in their suffering, but also provided experiential patterns to imitate in the Christian journey towards obedient living. David was the foremost model for all pious exercise, from repentance to supplication to joyful praise. In his total dependence on God, David provided a sanctioned way of communicating with God. As a type of Christ, he provided the words suitable for imitation in the Christian struggle. Because he was human, Christians could identify with him; because he was a type of Christ, they could look to him as a guide in their own service of God.

David was a seminal figure for imitation not only in his spiritual struggles but also in his poetics. As the chief work of poetry in the Bible, the Book of Psalms itself became a model for devotional writers and poets. Luther had stressed the usefulness of the language of the Psalms in the composition of original verse. Since the age of assured inspiration had ended with the canonization of the New Testament, any devotional poet aspiring to write in a sanctioned manner had to be satisfied with imitating holy Scripture. The Psalms, then, were the essential model for sacred songs and poetry. The authors of the Bay Psalm Book, in justifying their metrical translations of the Psalms for worship, declared in their preface that "certainly the singing of Davids psalmes was an acceptable worship of God, not only in his owne, but in succeeding times." Further, because God Himself had sanctioned poetry by using it in the Psalms, poetry was seen as an acceptable vehicle for devotion—especially if it imitated the Psalms. Thus poetic activity had biblical justification. It is not surprising that the genres of the prayer-poem, the religious lyrical poem, and the hymn were popular in the seventeenth century: all were patterned on the models that David had presented in the Psalms. David was viewed, then, not only as a saint but also as a sanctified artist. The psalter thus became an aesthetic guide "through its stances, its voices, and its use of the Word of artistry God accepted." It provided the best of the language of humanity in its most noble service: communication with God.

In a personal journal begun in 1656, Bradstreet's first entry is a spiritual autobiography addressed to her children; she indicates her turning to the Psalms for solace in the midst of personal affliction. In the letter "To My Dear Children," she says that, in her times of greatest affliction, "I [have] gone to searching and have said with David, 'Lord, search me and try me, see what ways of wickedness are in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.'" As the model of the faithful pilgrim, David provides the words for her as she struggles with emotional crises and physical suffering. He also provides her with a sanctified poetics. As she indicates in the letter, her intention in writing is not "to show my skill, but to declare the truth, not to set forth myself, but the glory of God." At the same time, she indicates that her immediate purpose is that her children might have the "spiritual advantage" of her experience. She follows the letter with entries about her succeeding struggles with illness and doubt, recording the entries in both poetry and prose. Reliance on the Psalms for the poetry of this notebook provides her with the means to serve the spiritual advantage of her children in the larger context of glorifying God. In providing a poetic language acceptable to God, the Psalms also provide a mode which will give her poems a lasting pedagogical importance. As the psalmist's verses teach the children of God of all times, so does her imitation of the Psalms allow her to attain a sanctified immortality for these poems intended for her children. As she writes in her letter, she has bequeathed these poems to her children so that she "may be daily in [their] remembrance" and thus teach them even after she has died, encouraging their faithfulness to and hope in God. "Make use of what I leave in love," she writes in the poem that opens her letter, "And, God shall bless you from above." She shows her indebtedness to the Psalms in David's role both as faithful servant and as sanctified poet.

Certainly Bradstreet had written earlier about her personal suffering, even as early as 1632, as in "Upon a Fit of Sickness, Anno 1632, Aetatis Suae, 19." This poem, unlike the poems on "public" topics, follows the common meter of the Bay Psalm Book, a meter that she would adopt again in the poetry of her notebook. But the similarity of this early poem to the Psalms—or to her later psalmlike poetry—stops there. Even the metaphor with which she opens and closes the poem, the "race" of the faithful follower of Christ, is not psalmic but Pauline (as in 2 Tim. 4:7). It is not until later in her life that she experiments with a full range of psalmic techniques in her personal poetry.

As [Adrienne] Rich points out [in her introduction to Jeannine Hensley, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, 1967], Bradstreet's active sensibility was decidedly changing after 1650, the year of the first edition of her The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up In America. The titles themselves of the thirteen poems added posthumously to the second edition (1678) indicate the change. These poems show a turn to more personal subjects: her responses to illness, the anticipation of the birth of a child, her loneliness for her husband in his absence, her responses to the deaths of grandchildren. No longer would she take on such subjects as the ancient monarchies, the four humors, or Queen Elizabeth. Instead, the poems become responses to the events of a woman's life, just as the poems in her notebook are. Five of the thirteen poems bear dates congruent with those of her notebook: "In Reference to Her Children, 23 June, 1659" and the poems on the deaths of grandchildren Elizabeth (1665), Anne (1669), and Simon (1669), and daughter-in-law Mercy (1669). It is noteworthy that three of these poems refer to deaths that occur in the autumn of 1669; one of the poems in the Andover Manuscript is also dated August 31, 1669. Yet none of the poems not in the notebook show any significant adoption of the psalm tradition. The poems of the notebook take on a special importance as she reserves the psalmic model for them. Through these poems we get a glimpse of a deeply personal side of Bradstreet, a side in which she shows us a deep commitment to her Puritan heritage as she struggles to assume the Davidic voice.

Since childhood Bradstreet had listened to the singing of the Psalms; she had heard the Psalms in the Sternhold and Hopkins version as a young child and then in the Bay Psalm Book in the fifteen years preceding her first journal entry. The authors of the Bay Psalm Book—university-trained ministers Thomas Weld, John Eliot, and Richard Mather—wanted to replace the Sternhold and Hopkins version with renditions more faithful to the original Hebrew, even if this meant a sacrifice of poetic effect. They declare in the psalter preface that their goal was to provide the psalms in their "native purity," not to give a paraphrase or in any way vary the sense of the sacred verse. For Bradstreet, the Bay Psalm Book translations provided a quite close rendering of the Hebrew Psalms at the same time that they provided verse models. These, and the Geneva Bible prose versions she read and meditated upon as a faithful Puritan, give her access to the biblical poetry and the psalm tradition.

The most insistent and persistent characteristics of the Bay Psalm Book selections—and Bradstreet's Andover Manuscript poems—are, of course, the metrical regularity and simple rhyme schemes. All but two of Bradstreet's poems of 1656–62 are in the two most common meters of the Bay Psalm Book: common meter and long meter. Bradstreet uses both the open (abcb) and closed (abab) rhyme schemes of the Bay Psalm Book. Although she does not imitate any particular psalm, the similarity in sound to the Bay Psalm Book selections is striking, as Psalm 23 demonstrates:

[Rivkah] Zim points out [in English Metrical Psalms, 1987] that, with respect to metrical psalms, metrical regularity can constrain a poet by the need either to fit his or her words to preexisting tunes, or to make the verses suitable for musical improvisation. Nevertheless, he recognizes, such metrical regularity would also have assisted a singer to read these holy songs and to sing them to brief melodies stanza by stanza. The metrical regularity and their ability to be sung would also make the verses easier to remember. Writing for an audience whom she very much wanted to edify, Bradstreet perhaps saw in the metrical psalms a form by which, in its ease of memorization, she and her lessons might be remembered.

Yet her larger purpose, as she indicates in her letter, is to glorify God. The diction and imagery found in the Psalms provide her with a sanctified poetic vocabulary. That she adopts the psalmic diction and imagery in the poems of her notebook is obvious, as in her use of the psalmic expressions of "paying vows" and "rendering praises" to God (appearing in eleven out of the fourteen Andover Manuscript poems); the biblical images of God as "light," "strength," "shelter," "shadow," and even a protective bird in His role of divine caretaker; the metaphor of God's "face" to suggest His favor; the metonomy of His rod and staff to reflect His fatherly, chastising care; and other psalmic figures. She uses such imagery to take the stance of the Davidic suffering servant. Like David, she suffers because of her own sin—and God's consequent chastisement—or because of the trials which are necessarily a part of her life, such as the loneliness she must endure in her husband's absence. In this stance as servant she voices her dependence on God by calling to Him in her afflictions or by praising Him as her help and strength. David provides a fitting model for her to emulate in her struggles with suffering and doubt. Even more strikingly, she imitates not only the psalmic diction and imagery but psalmic structural techniques as she imitates David's voice.

In her Andover Manuscript poems, Bradstreet uses interrogation, the shifting of audience, and amplification, which Fithian describes as, along with antithesis, the major rhetorical techniques used in the Psalms to express the poetic voice. As does the psalmist, Bradstreet sometimes uses the technique of interrogation to communicate her familiarity with God. This technique of direct questioning appears, for example, in Ps. 6: "My soule is also sore troubled: but Lord, how long wilt thou delay?" (v. 3). The psalmist often uses interrogation to call God to action. Since he enjoys a close relationship with God, he is in a position to urge God to take action, and he does so by interrogation. Likewise, Bradstreet uses interrogation in her poem "My Soul" when she writes, "Come Jesus quickly, Blessed Lord. / Thy face when shall I see?" (11. 25–26). More often, however, she uses the technique in the way that the psalmist uses it in Pss. 8, 27, and 89—as a sort of rhetorical device to communicate inadequacy and dependence on God. Here the direct questioning has the character of praise. Ps. 27:1 provides a good example: "The Lord is my light and my salvation, whome shall I feare? the Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I bee afraid?" Bradstreet uses the technique similarly in "In Thankful Remembrance for my Dear Husband's Safe Arrival":

What did I ask for but Thou gav'st?
What could I more desire?
(ll. 16–17)

As in Ps. 8:4, she does not intend her questions to be answered; she uses interrogation to communicate her own inadequacy before a gracious and loving God. The technique also appears, used in a similar way, in the opening lines of her "July 8, 1656" poem: "What God is like to Him I serve? / What Saviour like to mine?" (11. 1–2). The implicit answer, of course, is "none"—thus she goes on to praise her God. Like David, she communicates her worship of God, acknowledging the magnitude of His love and care. Such worship springs from her sense of gratitude to God: He has done so much for her in removing her affliction, yet He receives so little from her, as she asserts in an early prose passage from her journal. And again, like David, she realizes that the only offering she can make is praise. Interrogation provides her a vehicle to express her gratitude and praise in an intimate way.

Imitating David's shifting of audience within the context of a single psalm allows Bradstreet to give voice to her praise of God in a full way as well as to deal with her doubts in her times of suffering. In the Psalms, David often turns from addressing God to address his own soul or a general audience. It is common to see several shifts of audience in a single psalm; David will often address God, then turn to ask his soul a question, then turn back again to God in a report of the condition of his soul, as in Ps. 42:

In the first verse, the psalmist is obviously directing his words to God. Then he turns to his soul, rebuking it for its doubt and distress; subsequently he turns his attention back to God. At times, David shifts his attention to address a general audience, as in the ninth verse of Ps. 42: "I will say unto God, which is my rocke, Why hast thou forgotten mee?"

In Bradstreet's poetry, the shifting takes on special importance in that it provides her with the opportunities both to encourage her own children—her analogue to David's audience—and to praise God directly herself. As in "On My Son's Return," she urges her children on the path to obedience as she calls, in the first four lines, for "all praise to Him" (1. 1). Then she turns to address God herself, reviewing His faithfulness towards her in His care of her son. The shift implicitly allows her to praise God as His faithful servant as well as to remind her children—and herself—of the trustworthiness of God. In "For Deliverance from a Fever," she directs most of the poem to God Himself, recounting to Him her experience with a fever and, in doing so, offering her praise to Him. The shift to a general audience occurs near the end, after line 25:

Thou show'st to me Thy tender love,
My heart no more might quail.
O, praises to my mighty God,
Praise to my Lord, I say,
Who hath redeemed my soul from pit,
Praises to Him for aye.
(ll. 24–29)

Having experienced serious illness and recovery, Bradstreet desires to remind her readers that it is God who heals, as she states in her July 8, 1656, prose entry. Thus she turns in the last quatrain to call on a general audience to give praises to God. Reminding her children of the grounds for praise—the rescue of a suffering woman from her affliction—she urges them to join in her adoration, as if teaching them how to bless God. Moreover, the technique allows her to express the fullness of her gratitude: it is as if she feels so overwhelmed with gratitude that her own individual praise is insufficient as a response to God for His goodness to her.

Bradstreet's choosing to shift between a variety of audiences instead of writing only prayers addressed to God also allows her to challenger her readers to see life's trials from a broad perspective and thereby learn the "very lesson she must force upon herself." As Jeffrey A. Hammond has pointed out [in '"Make use of What I Leave in Love': Anne Bradstreet's Didactic Self," Religion and Literature 17 (1985)], the intentionally didactic nature of Bradstreet's verse is often a reflection of her efforts to identify and communicate what she saw as the real truth behind her periods of suffering and recovery—that is, that God is dealing in a fatherly way with His child. Certainly she indicates such a purpose in her letter "To My Dear Children."

That her devotional poetry is "virtually a seamless blend of the confessional and the didactic" is in keeping with her shifts of audience. When she turns to address a general audience (as in "From Another Sore Fit": "What shall I render to my God / For all His bounty showed to me?" [11. 14–15]), she no doubt has in mind her own children, desiring to challenge them to see past their own moments of affliction, as she does, to the One who provides sustenance, strength, and loving-kindness. At the same time, the technique affords her the opportunity to give full voice to her feelings as she moves easily between audiences, prodding her soul, addressing God, or calling Jesus to return—all of which she does in "My Soul," shifting four times in only twenty-eight lines (253). Thus her readers see her confession of her suffering, which she often perceives as chastisement from God, as in "Deliverance from a Fit of Fainting": she declares that her "life as spider's webb's cut off" (1. 6). Yet her readers also see how thanksgiving springs from such suffering: "My feeble spirit Thou didst revive / … Why should I live but to Thy praise?" (11. 10, 14). That the Christian expresses such thanksgiving is important to godly living, Bradstreet affirms in her July 8 prose entry. She herself "dares not pass by without remembrance" of the love God showed to her in her suffering. Such thanksgiving reflects David's model throughout the Psalms.

The psalmic technique of amplification—an addition to or expansion of a statement—also allows Bradstreet to voice her feelings about God in a way sanctioned by David. Of the three forms [Rosemary] Fithian describes [in "'Words of my Mouth, Meditations of My Heart,'" Early American Literature 20 (1985)]—hyperbole, accumulatio, and exclamatio—Bradstreet uses two in her Andover Manuscript poems, hyperbole and accumulatio. Hyperbole in the Psalms often communicates the psalmist's utter dependence on God by a graphic description of his physical condition. For example, in Ps. 31:10 the psalmist writes, "For my life is wasted with heaviness, and my yeeres with mourning: my strength faileth for my paine, and my bones are consumed." Similarly in Ps. 22 he describes his bones as being "out of joynt" and his heart as "like wax … molten in the middes of my bowels" (v. 14) as he seeks God's deliverance.

In her poems written about her periods of illness, Bradstreet also intensifies her own condition. In "From Another Sore Fit" she describes herself as having "wasted flesh" (1. 10) and as "melting" in her own sweat (1. 8), before God in His grace reaches out to help her. In "Deliverance from a Fit of Fainting" she describes her life as a "spider's webb's cut off" (1. 6) to communicate her physical weakness during her sickness, and she writes that she was "though as dead" before God "mad'st [her] alive" (1. 12). Her self-belittling conveys the Puritan belief that deliverance is to be sought in God and not in self: she is utterly dependent on God. Moreover, that such a heartbroken speaker could call upon God for help would certainly bring consolation for her readers, as Hammond points out. Hyperbole also communicates the capacity of God to deliver His children, as in Ps. 93 where God is "more mightie" than "the noyse of many waters" and "the waves of the sea" (v. 4). Bradstreet similarly exalts the Lord by making hyperbolic statements: "Thy mercies, Lord, have been so great / In number numberless, / Impossible for to recount / Or any way express" ("In Thankful Remembrance," 11. 20–23). Even in the midst of her trials, she knows that God will ultimately not forsake her and that in Him alone lies triumpth over affliction.

Accumulatio, the amassing of detail, is Bradstreet's most frequent poetic technique, specifically in the form of Hebrew synonymous parallelism. In this technique the lines of poetry are paired, with the second of the lines repeating the basic meaning of the first while adding detail, as in Ps. 145:18–19:

The Lord is neere unto all that call upon him:
yea, to all that call upon him in trueth.

He will fulfill the desire of them that feare him:
he also will heare their crie, and will save them.

In each instance, the first thought is not only repeated but supplemented. Like the other psalmic techniques, the parallelism is seen in both the Geneva Bible and the Bay Psalm Book selections, preserved in the metrical psalms by virtue of the accuracy of the translations. In the Bay Psalm Book, verses eighteen and nineteen of Psalm 145 are rendered thus:

As in the second verse of this case, the authors of the Bay Psalm Book often accommodate long lines of the psalms by arranging the parallelism between two pairs of lines. Bradstreet uses both forms of the parallelism. In the very first poetic entry of her notebook ("By Night When Others Soundly Slept") she employs the technique, arranging the parallelism between single lines:

By night when others soundly slept,
And had at once both ease and rest …
I sought Him whom my soul did love,
With tears I sought Him earnestly….
(ll. 3–4, 7–8)

She too expands the content of the first line by adding detail in the second. "From Another Sore Fit" provides additional examples (11. 6–7, 10–11), as well as "In My Solitary Hours," in which the pairings occur frequently (stanzas 1–3, 8, 10, 13). The parallelism can be found throughout Bradstreet's poetry; it appears in virtually all of the poems of her notebook. When she arranges the parallelism between two pairs of lines instead of between two single lines, she treats a two-line phrase as if it were actually a single line, as we have seen in the Bay Psalm Book:

Whence fears and sorrows me beset
Then didst Thou rid me out;

When heart did faint and spirits quail,
Thou comforts me about.
("For the Restoration of My Dear Husband," ll. 1–4)

A two-line phrase often echoes the preceding two lines in her poetry, usually in the same stanza. Thus a line is actually paralleling the second line after it, still preserving the structure of psalmic accumulatio.

Bradstreet fits such paired lines into the thematic patterns found in the Psalms—the most striking similarity between Bradstreet's Andover Manuscript poems and the Psalms. In the tradition of the Psalms, the articulations of the devout person's struggle toward obedience reflect categories with distinct themes, as Fithian has noted: lament, supplication, and thanksgiving. Although elements of two categories are often combined within a single psalm (such as thanksgiving and supplication), the three kinds are arranged within quite specific structural patterns in the Psalms. The great majority of Bradstreet's Andover poems clearly expresses thanksgiving and praise, as in the Psalms. This type of psalm typically begins with an exclamation of the intention to praise, often either in an epithet or in an imperative call to worship. Next, the psalmist gives the specific grounds for praise—for example, a catalogue of dangers that God has helped the psalmist to overcome, or a list of God's activities. Often an index of God's qualities constitutes the grounds for praise. Finally, a proclamation of praise appears.

Psalm 146 exemplifies a psalm of thanksgiving. The exclamation of the intention to praise appears in the first two verses. In this Psalm both a call to worship and declaration are given in the opening: "Praise ye the Lord. Praise thou the Lord, O my soule. I will praise the Lord during my life…. " Next, as his grounds for praise, the psalmist describes God in terms of what He has done; this catalogue provides the major portion of the content of the Psalm. The psalmist describes God as He "Which made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that therein is" and "Which executeth justice for the oppressed" (vv. 6–7). The psalmist also describes what God does in the present, such as giving sight to the blind (v. 8) and "releeving the fatherless" (v. 9). The statement of praise appears as the last verse of the Psalm: "The Lord shall reigne for ever…. Praise ye the Lord" (v. 10).

Among Bradstreet's poems, "From Another Sore Fit" and "Deliverance from a Fit of Fainting" clearly exemplify the thanksgiving theme. In each she declares her intention to praise in the first stanza by affirming God's worthiness for praise ("Worthy art Thou, O Lord, of praise," she writes in the first line of "Deliverance from a Fit of Fainting"). She continues in both poems with a list of the grounds for her praise by describing God's merciful acts toward her. She writes, "My plaints and groans were heard of Thee, / … My wasted flesh Thou didst restore," ("From Another Sore Fit," 11. 7, 10); similarly in lines 10–12 of "Fit of Fainting" she lists the reasons for her praise. Bradstreet concludes each by declaring her desire to praise: in "Fit of Fainting" the declaration appears in the last stanza ("Why should I live but to Thy praise?" [1. 14]), while in "Sore Fit" it occupies the last four stanzas ("Thy name and praise to celebrate, / O Lord, for aye is my request…. " [11. 26–27]). This declaration allows her to rehearse the events of her suffering and put them into cosmic perspective, thereby affirming to herself and to her readers that, although her suffering is real, it is not ultimate. Whether she emphasizes these events or the statements of praise which follow, it is clear that such praise emerges from a strong sense of pain and suffering. The thanksgiving pattern as modeled in the Psalms gives her ample means both to recapitulate her pain and to express her gratitude to God for delivering her. Most often her thanksgiving is gratitude for removing the affliction—the "sore fit" or the "fit of fainting." Yet, as she points out in many of her prose entries, it is also gratitude for God's fatherly care, for chastising her by means of affliction to make her a "vessel fit for His use." Asserting that God "hath no benefit" by her adversity, she states that He afflicts her for her spiritual "advantage," that she may be a "gainer" by it. Moreover, she can live no more "without correction than without food." Thus she is grateful for the "mercies in His rod" ("Sore Fit," 1. 16) and for His chiding her in her doubt ("Fit of Fainting," 1. 11).

Among her Andover Manuscript poems Bradstreet also includes several poems of supplication, a form that allows her to affirm God's trustworthiness as she petitions Him for help. A psalm of supplication is distinguished from a lament by its mood of certainty. Although the psalmist is asking for God's help, as in the lament, he is doing so in full expectation that God will heed his call. This type of psalm typically opens with an invocation followed by a list of reasons why the psalmist expects God to respond to his cry for help. This list could be a description of what God has revealed to the psalmist about Himself in the past—either God's qualities or His saving actions—or it could be a description of the psalmist himself, of his attempts to be obedient to God as he tries to persuade God or call Him to account to be the caring father He has promised to be. In this last instance the psalmist often presents himself as the figure of a righteous man, as in Ps. 17:3: "Thou hast proved and visited mine heart in the night: thou hast tryed me, and foundeth nothing.… " A request follows, in addition to an indication that the psalmist realizes the possibility of God's help. Sometimes the psalmist includes a promise to praise. In Psalm 71 the supplicating nature of the psalm is readily identifiable. First, the tone is that of certainty, of assurance that God will respond: "For thou art mine hope, O Lord God, even my trust from my youth," the psalmist writes (v. 5). The psalm adheres to the basic structure of a psalm of supplication. The invocation occupies verses one to four ("encline thine ear unto me," [v. 2]), followed by a description of the Lord's graciousness, as in verses seven and nineteen, in which the psalmist points out God's trustworthiness and the "great things" He has done. The psalmist's petition is that God would deliver him, as he repeats in verses two and four and rephrases throughout the psalm (for example, "Goe not farre from mee" [v. 12]). He tells God of his intention to praise ("Therefore will I praise thee for thy faithfulnesse, O God, upon instrument and viole" [v. 22]) and ends the psalm as if he had already been delivered ("they are confounded and brought unto shame, that seeke mine hurt" [v. 24]).

Since most of the Andover Manuscript poems are thankful responses to God's graciousness, the supplication poems are few. Yet the two that do reveal such a theme—the poems about the departures of Bradstreet's son and her husband—adhere closely to the psalmic pattern of supplication. Each poem begins with an invocation, a call for God's attention:

Thou mighty God of sea and land,
I here resign into Thy hand….
("Upon My Son Samuel," ll. 1–2)

O thou Most High who rulest all
And hear'st the prayers of thine,
O hearken, Lord, unto my suit
And my petition sign.
("Upon My Dear and Loving Husband," ll. 1–4)

Each continues with a description of the poet's obedience. In the poem on her son, Bradstreet concentrates on her obedience in the nurture of her son: she mentions the prayers, vows, and tears involved in raising him (1. 5) and her faithfulness to him as a mother (1. 6). In "Upon My Dear and Loving Husband" she describes not only her own obedience in stanza 5—similar to the way that the "righteous man" of the Psalms does—but also her husband's (stanza 3), as if in an effort to persuade God to take care of him: "At Thy command, O Lord, he went…. Then let Thy promise joy his heart" (11. 12, 14). She intensifies her persuasion when she calls her husband God's "servant" (1. 10)—as a reminder to God about His responsibility to him—and her own "dear friend" (1. 11)—suggesting that God should take care of him because of His responsibility to Anne herself.

In both poems, as in the psalms of supplication, the speaker's request for God's help is confident. In the poem on her husband, she declares that she is commending Simon into God's "arms": she has made the initial move and trusts that God will receive her husband (11. 8–9). She calls on God to "keep and preserve" her husband (1. 10) as well as herself in his absence (11. 16, 19), declaring that God is her "strength and stay" and that His "goodness never fails" (1. 17, 1. 31). In "Upon My Son Samuel" her request also seems confident. Again she asks God to "preserve" and "protect" her son (11. 13, 14); she asserts her confidence in God when she declares that she has "no friend … like Thee to trust" (1. 11). Moreover, she is confident of God's favorable stance towards her son: "For sure Thy grace on him is shown" (1. 10).

Both poems conclude by concentrating on praise, with an indication that the poet realizes that God will help in some way. In "Upon My Dear and Loving Husband" Bradstreet emphasizes her intent to praise: she tells God that her and Simon's response to His safekeeping will be that they together will sing His praises (11. 46–51). In "Upon My Son Samuel" she asserts that she will celebrate God's praise if Samuel returns safety, seeming to assume that he will (11. 15–18). Almost as an afterthought she adds that she hopes that she will see him "forever happified" with God if she should die before his return. Whatever happens, it will be God's will; He will do what is best (1. 20). In both poems she has an attitude of peace and confidence in God, characteristic of the psalms of supplication. She has seen God work before in her life, answering her prayers for deliverance and healing her illness and doubt. She has no reason to believe that God will not exercise His fatherly care in some way for her loved ones.

Only one "lament" poem seems to occur among Bradstreet's devotional poems; the absence of her husband is the only occasion on which she reflects in these poems a state close to depression. In this poem we see the influence of the psalmic lament as she pleads with God to comfort her in her loneliness and to return her husband to her. A psalmic lament typically involves five basic parts, as in Psalm 3. The invocation or cry for help opens the psalm ("Lord, how are mine adversaries increased? how many rise against me?" [v. 1]); it is followed by the complaint ("Many say to my soule, There is no helpe for him in God" [v. 2]). Then the psalmist voices his trust in God, reviewing God's care for him in the past ("I did call unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard mee … " [v. 4]). He follows this by petitioning God, laying his request before Him ("O Lord, arise: helpe me, my God" [v. 7]). These three elements following the invocation can occur in any order in a lament; sometimes they are repeated (as in Psalm 3, in which the psalmist repeats his trust in God). The lament typically concludes with a vow to praise God or with the statement of praise itself. In Psalm 3 the praise occurs in the last verse: "Salvation belongeth unto the Lord, and thy blessing is upon thy people" (v. 8). "In My Solitary Hours" is Bradstreet's single patterned psalmic lament in the Andover poems.

The invocation and complaint are combined in the first stanza. Calling on God to hear her, she tells Him to observe her "tears," "troubles," "longings," and "fears." In stanza two she asserts her trust in God: "Thou hitherto hast been my God; / … Through Thee I've kept my ground" (11. 7–10). She continues to express her trust in stanzas three and four, reflecting on her past close relationship with God. She even declares that God is more "beloved" to her than is her husband. Thus the foundation is laid for her petition, which occurs in stanzas five, eight, and nine: she asks God to "uphold" her, to grant her His favor, and finally to bring back her husband. She reiterates her trust in God in stanzas six and eight and concludes the poem with a vow to praise—individually (11. 39–40, 49–50, 53–54) and with Simon (11. 43–46). Again she demonstrates that praise does emerge from her suffering, but this time she is in the midst of suffering and can only promise to praise. Yet though she suffers, she is still able to trust. Certainly she is a "gainer" by her adversity: like the psalmist, she has seen that, although God may hide His face, He does not desert His children. She knows that it is God to whom she must go for care, and so she lays her petitions before Him. The psalmic lament provides a fitting structure for her to voice her distress as well as her intent to praise.

By imitating David in the language, voice, stance, and thematic patterns in the poems of her notebook, Bradstreet takes on the voice of David, demonstrating her powerful identification with David: "then have I … said with David," she writes in her letter. In her quest for faith as well as for a poetic, David provides a model for her as both an approved servant and a sanctioned poet. As she struggles with her relationship to God, questioning His care for her in her periods of illness or His presence in her family's absence, she turns to David and writes psalmlike poetry. And we cannot help but hear a godly mother's desire for her children to hold fast to the faith, even after she herself has died, when she asks God

In her opening letter she remarks, "I have often been perplexed that I have not found that constant joy in my pilgrimage and refreshing which I supposed most of the servants of God have." It is in David that she finds a servant of God who knows affliction, a suffering believer with whom she can identify. Yet she has also "tasted of that hidden manna" and has had "abundance of sweetness and refershment after affliction." This is the lesson she would have her children learn. Praise and thanksgiving can indeed emerge from pain and suffering, if one is confident in Him who returns "comfortable answers" to prayer. David's words provide sanctified poetry; his experience provides a point of identification for the suffering yet trusting Christian. And his poetic forms—both those of the Bible and the metrical translations of the Bay Psalm Book—provide an effective pedagogical model. Inspired and sustained by the psalms, Bradstreet is better able to voice her praise of God in a period of affliction and thereby urge her children on to greater faith.