Anne Bradstreet

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Why Our First Poet Was a Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice

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In the following excerpt, Caldwell discusses Bradstreet's struggle with traditional male images symbolizing poetic creation, and concludes that Bradstreet became the founder of American poetry precisely because of her marginal position.
SOURCE: "Why Our First Poet Was a Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice," in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, 1988, pp. 1–35.

It takes a worried man—or woman—to sing a worried song, and it is not surprising that Bradstreet's earliest poetry is more worried, in a more obviously "feminine" way, than anything she wrote later. Self-consciously erudite, duly apologetic, and above all, written "to please [her] wintry father," these "public" poems are marked by frequent, nervous recurrences to two conventions that Bradstreet certainly would have encountered in her wide reading. One is the well-known modesty topos, a long-established posture of authorial self-effacement and disparagement. Critics have differed about the degree of genuine self-doubt in Bradstreet's apparently formulaic apologies, but since all but one of them appear in poems she wrote before the age of thirty-five (and significantly, before her father's death), it seems reasonable to suppose that the novice poet found some real and necessary comfort in a convention that provided an acceptable outlet for her fears. Far more interesting, however, are her early imaginative encounters with a second convention, namely, the often-used image of the pen (an image that virtually disappears from Bradstreet's work after 1650), for this is a masculine symbol whose employment by a woman poet can never quite be taken for granted.

Among Bradstreet's favorite reading, we know, was the work of Sir Philip Sidney, perhaps her distant kinsman. Sidney's use of the pen in the first sonnet of Astrophel and Stella (1598) is probably the best-known occurrence of that image in English literature: a pen that, truant or idle though it appears, eventually delivers the poet from his allegedly pregnant state in a sort of hermaphroditic triumph. Today we are acutely aware, especially from the work of Gilbert and Gubar, that for women writers, the pen can represent a fearsome problem—this phallic instrument that the male writer wields in literally "begetting" his "thoughts on paper," this symbol of the male author's sexual authority that is also "the essence of literary power." Little wonder, then, that when the twenty-six-year-old Bradstreet took up her pen, early in her writing life, to record a tribute to her hero, Sidney, she could not get this time-worn convention of her literary culture to work for her….

Apollo laught to patch up what's begun,
He bad me drive, and he would hold the Sun;
Better my hap, then was his darlings fate,
For dear regard he had of Sydney's state,
Who in his Deity, had so deep share,
That those that name his fame, he needs must spare,
He promis'd much, but th' muses had no will,
To give to their detractor any quill.
With high disdain, they said they gave no more,
Since Sydney had exhausted all their store,
That this contempt it did the more perplex,
In being done by one of their own sex;
They took from me, the scribling pen I had,
I to be eas'd of such a task was glad.
For to revenge his wrong, themselves ingage,
And drave me from Parnassus in a rage,
Not because, sweet Sydney's fame was not dear,
But I had blemish'd theirs, to make't appear;
I pensive for my fault, sat down, and then,
Errata, through their leave threw me my pen.
For to conclude my poem two lines they daigne,
Which writ, she bad return't to them again.
So Sydney's fame, I leave to England's Rolls,
His bones do lie interr'd in stately Pauls.

[In "Anne Bradstreet's Public Poetry and The Tradition of Humility," Early American Literature 17 (1982)], Eileen Margerum makes the interesting argument that this passage is a "diversion" and "not a statement of poetic self-doubt," that Bradstreet's aim here is to deflect attention from her "unorthodox views" in praising Sidney's amorous poetry at all, since he was then "out of favor with the Puritans." But, regardless of her conscious motives, Bradstreet's treatment of the pen figure has nothing in common with the confident, even breezy literary sexuality of the male poets. Instead, there is shame before her own sex for having a pen at all; it must be confiscated by those Fury-like muses, only to be returned for brief service—hurled at her like a weapon by "Errata." Clearly, it is an insulting mistake for Mistress Bradstreet to wield a pen, and the problem is not handled, as it might have been, with irony and wit. The episode takes shape through a barrage of classical images strewn nervously and even bewilderedly about. One detects real, not mock, distress in this passage, confusion as to what the poet's stance should really be, and a sense that the whole weight of inherited literary convention is pressing the poet into an uneasy, abrupt silence.

This is not an isolated case, merely attributable to the fact that the Sidney elegy was probably only the second poem Bradstreet ever wrote. In "To her most Honoured Father," Bradstreet dedicates her earliest efforts to Thomas Dudley, even though her "lowly pen" is unequal to the "Eagles quill." Dudley presumably used in writing his own (now lost) poem on the four parts of the world. "In honour of Du Bartas, 1641" finds Bradstreet wishing for "an Angels voice, or Barta's pen," although her tongue is hopelessly "mute." At the end of the Grecian section of "The Foure Monarchies," "My tyred braine, leaves to a better pen, / This taske befits not women, like to men." Even the elegy to a woman, Queen Elizabeth, questions the efficacy of the poet's pen, though in a milder way: "No Phoenix, Pen, nor Spencers Poetry" can sufficiently praise "Eliza." He who would do so "Must dip his Pen i'th' Heleconian Well; Which I may not … " A few years after the Sidney elegy, however, Bradstreet's "Prologue" to the so-called Quaternions—her four long poems on the elements, humours, ages, and seasons—finally uses the pen image with complexity and skill.

1. To sing of Wars, of Captaines, and of Kings,
Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun,
For my mean Pen, are too superiour things,
And how they all, or each, their dates have run:
Let Poets and Historians set these forth,
My obscure Verse, shal not so dim their worth.

2. But when my wondring eyes, and envious heart,
Great Bartas sugar'd lines doe but read o're;
Foole, I doe grudge, the Muses did not part
'Twixt him and me, that over-fluent store;
A Bartas can, doe what a bartas wil,
But simple I, according to my skill.

3. From School-boyes tongue, no Rhethorick we expect,
Nor yet a sweet Consort, from broken strings,
Nor perfect beauty, where's a maine defect,


My foolish, broken, blemish'd Muse so sings;
And this to mend, alas, no Art is able,
'Cause Nature made it so irreparable.

4. Nor can I, like that fluent sweet tongu'd Greek
Who lisp'd at first, speake afterwards more plaine
By Art, he gladly found what he did seeke,
A full requitall of his striving paine:
Art can doe much, but this maxime's most sure,
A weake or wounded braine admits no cure.

5. I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who sayes my hand a needle better fits,
A Poets Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;
For such despight they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it wo'nt advance,
They'l say it's stolne, or else, it was by chance.

6. But sure the antick Greeks were far more milde,
Else of our Sex, why feigned they those nine,
And poesy made, Calliope's owne childe,
So 'mongst the rest, they plac'd the Arts divine:
But this weake knot they will full soone untye,
The Greeks did nought, but play the foole and lye.

7. Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are,
Men have precedency, and still excell,
It is but vaine, unjustly to wage war,
Men can doe best, and Women know it well;
Preheminence in each, and all is yours,
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

8. And oh, ye high flown quils, that soare the skies,
And ever with your prey, still catch your praise,
If e're you daigne these lowly lines, your eyes
Give wholsome Parsley wreath, I aske no Bayes:
This meane and unrefined stuffe of mine
Will make your glistering gold but more to shine.

This poem has been much discussed, and its fifth stanza is probably the most quoted of all of Bradstreet's lines. The poem's witty send-up of male "superiority" hinges cleverly on the juxtaposition of male pen and female needle—witty, but awesomely serious in its revelation of a woman writer's tangled feelings about her vocation. Here, the pen figure is mingled with two other emotionally laden image-clusters: needle, tongue, musical instrument—all of which have sexual overtones, and two of which can be dangerous; and images of threat and hurt: wars, wounds, brokenness, the preying of hawks. Moreover, the famous fifth stanza is notable not only for the needle/pen opposition, but also for the key word "obnoxious." Since its primary 17th-century meaning was "exposed to (actual or possible) harm; subject to injury or evil," we must read the line, "I am vulnerable to criticism," not "repellent to my critics," as we would mean now. It is the effect on herself of those cutting tongues, and not her effect on them, that worries the speaker. For this poet, the tongue—in some poems directly associated with the masculine pen—is a fearsome object; in others, as here, the speaker also has a good deal of pain and trouble with her own tongue. The reader's eye is also drawn to stanza three, poignantly and familiarly rendering the woman poet-singer as defective or deformed, a musical instrument that has been played too roughly, its strings broken, no longer virginal (and the pun is intended, for this might be a virginal, that small tabletop harpsichord popular in the 16th and 17th Centuries), foolish, broken, and blemished. The poem, with its freight of cutting, wounding, and maimed objects, seems to say, "Don't hurt me, men." Yet all the while, the speaker shoots out barbs or needles of her own, by fearlessly launching her poem in the masculine, old-world epic mode of the Aeneid, by tossing off puns, by playing on the art-versus-nature convention, by skillful rhetorical shifts—in all these ways, she seems to laugh at the male literati. In the guise of subservience, couched in the conventions of poetic self-effacement, she needles her supposed critics. In fact, the needle in stanza five may be less important as a symbol of women's domesticity than as a symbol of women's weaponry. If in the masculine world of wars, captains, and kings, the pen is mightier than the sword, the woman poet can hope to make the needle, and the act of needling, mightier than the pen.

But it is not a successful standoff. There is still the anxiety and the pain in this poem about the making of poems. Susan Gubar tells us [in "'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," in The New Feminist Giticism, ed. Elaine Showalter, 1985] that for a woman the making of art can feel like the destruction of the woman's own body.

Because of the forms of self-expression available to women, artistic creation often feels like a violation, a belated reaction to male penetration rather than a possessing and controlling…. Women's paint and ink are produced through a painful wounding, a literal influence of male authority. If artistic creativity is likened to biological creativity, the terror of inspiration for women is experienced quite literally as the terror of being entered, deflowered, possessed, taken, had, broken, ravished—all words which illustrate the pain of the passive self whose boundaries are being violated…. [Women artists] often describe the emergence of their talent as an infusion from a male master rather than inspiration from or sexual commerce with a female muse.

Such may well be the case with the early Bradstreet, even though we must respect the long distance and differentness between the centuries. True, in "The Prologue," Bradstreet's broken, out-of-tune muse is female, is herself; in her very early elegy to the epic poet Guillaume Du Bartas, she "compares" her muse to "a Chide" (but interestingly, a boy child) whose speech falters and who is also "weake brain'd I." But Bradstreet's muse in a truer sense was the man who was "the strongest influence in her life"—her father, Thomas Dudley. To him, she consecrated all of her early work, which she clearly felt he had inspired; from him flowed any "worth" she might contain; to him, all duty owed. It may be, as Wendy Martin argues, [in An American Triptych, 1984] that the contrasts between Bradstreet's elegy for her mother (a remarkably pallid poem) and the elegy for her father "dramatize the differences in roles that Puritan women and men were expected to play in their society." They also dramatize the differences in Bradstreet's feelings towards each of her parents. "Father, Guide, Instructor too," he was the one who gave his second child and eldest daughter her extraordinary education, and he was the one, apparently, to encourage her writing (or whose encouragement mattered). He was also at least one of her poetic "precursors" or "mythic progenitors," for he had written poetry, almost all of it now lost. For this reason, he may also have been what Joanne Feit Diehl calls "the composite father … the main adversary" [in "Come Slowly—Eden," Signs 3 (1978)].

Diehl, in her study of women poets and the muse, points out that male poets are naturally able to "separate their poetic fathers—mythic progenitors—from the [traditionally female] muse" and by engaging in an oedipal struggle to court the muse away from the poetic father or precursor, "invoke the aura of inspiration" they desire. But such a synthesis is denied the woman poet, who "cannot 'beget' art upon the (female) body of the muse" and who therefore must get her "literal influence," in Gubar's phrase, from a "male master"; so she conflates precursor and muse into a "doubly potent" masculine figure, "fears his priapic power and wards him off with intense anxiety as she simultaneously seeks to woo him." These insights into the woman poet's dilemma seem especially ominous for Bradstreet: to have had a muse who was both her "poetic father" and actual father must have been burdensome indeed. There is a telling glimpse of this problem in a pair of passages. In the final stanza of "The Prologue," the speaker both "wards off" and "woos" the manly "high flown quils, that soare the skies" catching "prey"; we find the same image in "To her most Honoured Father," written about the same time (1642) and paying ambivalent homage to Thomas Dudley's own poem on the four parts of the world.

Their paralells to finde I scarcely know,
To climbe their Climes, I have nor strength, nor skill,
To mount so high, requires an Eagles quill:
Yet view thereof, did cause my thoughts to soare,
My lowly pen, might wait upon those four.

Thus, the poet teases and resents, worships and fears the patriarchal "Eagles quill"—the only means available to her for writing poetry. Given the confusion of the paternal presence in her creative imagination and given the "conventional romantic relationship of poet and muse," we can understand why Bradstreet fled, Daphne-like, from the Apollonian laurel that her poems might have earned: The violent sexual origins of the "Bayes" may have seemed much too close for comfort.

But we should not forget that even as he was her muse and progenitor, Governor Thomas Dudley exerted something other than mythic force. He was also, to his daughter's imagination and in actual fact, a figure in history: "One of thy Founders, him New-England know, / Who staid thy feeble sides when thou wast low," and a formidable founder at that, who according to his own account, "Dy'd no Libertine" and whose daughter defended him as

True Patriot of this little Commonweal,
Who is't can tax thee ought, but for thy zeal?
Truths friend thou wert, to errors still a foe,
Which caus'd Apostates to maligne so.
Thy love to true Religion e're shall shine,
My Father's God, be God of me and mine.

But it was not Dudley's allegedly stern and "arrogant" character alone that made him central to his daughter's poetic quest. She, of course, claimed in her elegy to him that he was "Well known and lov'd, where ere he liv'd" (prudently adding, "by most"); but something more interesting is revealed in the succeeding line, bland as it may at first appear: "Both in his native, and in foreign coast." Dudley's native coast was, of course, on the British side of the Atlantic, whereas New England, in Bradstreet's vocabulary, was still "foreign" after more than twenty years. Whether it seemed foreign to her own sensibility or whether the poet was assuming Dudley's own outlook, one thing seems clear: This was Dudley's "historical" significance for her; he was, in all his power and presence, a figure of the Old World; he "was" the Old World. Hence, it was only after he died in 1653, a few years after the publication of The Tenth Muse, that Bradstreet's poetry began to steer its well-known course away from patriarchal European literary models and toward the personal and empirical, never to return…. Fifty-six years ago, Samuel Eliot Morison attributed the shift in Bradstreet's poetic life to the trauma of seeing The Tenth Muse in print, which "completely cured her of the Du Bartas disease, and of writing imitative poetry." A recent interpretation by Wendy Martin is that the liberating shift occurred on the death of the father. Martin is right, but we may add that with Dudley's passing came the "death" of old England to Bradstreet's poetic imagination. When Bradstreet lamented in her elegy that "His Generation serv'd his labours cease." did she not feel the double impact of these words? Yes, Dudley the governor and magistrate had served and labored for his contemporaries, and his entire generation of Winthrops and Cottons, now dead, had served and labored for the country; but Dudley's "Generation" of a poet-daughter, his "labours" as her mythic progenitor—these, too, had served and passed. That these complementary readings are so tightly joined in one or two words indicates the inseparability in Bradstreet's psyche of Dudley the muse from Dudley the type of his "native" England. Now Bradstreet had to go her own way in the "pathless paths" of the New World experience. Now her book "had no father."

"The Author to her Book" marks this point of no return. Though precise dating of her writings is sometimes impossible, there is no reason to doubt that Bradstreet wrote this poem shortly after the surprise appearance of The Tenth Muse in 1650 and therefore near the time of her father's death. Addressed to the work that had been "snatcht" by her brother-in-law and "expos'd to publick view" by being published in England without Bradstreet's permission, the poem at first appears to give conventional treatment to a familiar metaphor: the book as the author's brainchild.

Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise then true
Who thee abroad, expos'd to publick view,
Made thee in raggs, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joynts to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling then is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun Cloth, i'th' house I find.
In this array 'mongst vulgars mayst thou roam,
In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come;
And take thy way where yet though art not known,
If for thy father askt, say thou hadst none:
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door.

Although it is not strictly an envoi, "The Author to her Book" may be tellingly compared with numerous selfdisparaging "sendings on the way" of "newborn" books by Bradstreet's admired predecessors. [In Shakespeare's Images of Pregnancy, 1980], Elizabeth Sacks has shown that at a time when "the English language itself was undergoing rebirth," scores of Renaissance works, "born from the poet's laborious throes," were "viewed as … vulnerable, helpless infant[s] struggling for existence in an unfriendly world." Spenser, Sidney, Chapman, Turberville, Lyly, Dekker, Shakespeare, and others dressed the idea with "florid obstetrical metaphors," imagining their creations with "bleeding" and "gaping wounds" inflicted in "delivery" by careless printers, or literary offspring maimed, crippled, lame, deformed, and monstrous, vulnerable to harsh treatment by the larger world. Sacks points out that "rediscovery of the generation metaphor"—which can be traced back at least as far as Plato—"seemed appropriate" in a period of prosperity, expansion, and "great literary productivity," but her findings suggest that in the hands of authors afflicted with "male womb-envy," the metaphor often took on a dark and even bitter aspect. Coinciding with the "novelty of popular printing" and the burgeoning of published literary texts, it gave shape to the poets' fears about winning sympathetic support from patrons and public, and it could even be twisted into a "savage" weapon of "displeasure and contempt," as in the Harvey—Nash debate of the 1590s. It may even have reflected Tudor and Elizabethan obsessiveness about barrenness and the production of heirs.

Bradstreet, then, had at her disposal a rich and wellworked, if somewhat equivocal, metaphor. She must have known Spenser's dedication to Sir Philip Sidney of The Shepheardes Calender (1579), wherein the poet, in the modest guise of "Immerito," sends his "little booke" to the patron for protection: It goes, "As child whose parent is vnkent"; if "Enuie barke at thee," it is to hide under the patron's wing; if asked who made it, it will reply that a "shepheards swaine" sang it while feeding his flock; if asked its name, "Say thou wert base begot with blame / For Thy thereof thou takest shame"; in the end, "when thou art past ieopardee, / Come tell me, what was sayd of mee / And I will send more after thee." She must also have known Sidney's own dedication to The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1590), which likened "this idle work of mine" to an unwanted child.

As the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster, I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child which I am loth to father. But you desired me to do it. … I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities…. [My head] having many, many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered would have grown a monster…. But his chief safety shall be the not walking abroad; and his chief protection the bearing the livery of your name.

The exploitation of this metaphor went to even greater lengths when the poet felt no need to portray himself as a serious, courteous gentleman. Such was Bradstreet's Southern contemporary, George Alsop, four years an indentured servant in Maryland, whose own "The Author to his Book" introduced a satirical pamphlet (1666) describing that colony. Alsop's ribald, violent couplets begin with a lifelike account of the poet's seduction, rape, and abondonment by Apollo. The resulting boy-child is a "Brat as black as Ink," and the poet, fearing he will be accused of fornication with an African slave, throws his "Bastard" out into "a monstrous World," imaginning all sorts of degradations for him and his final death by hanging, although "In Resurrection he will surely live." Half the poem is taken up with acid portrayals of English critics as sour, stuffy, and posturing murderers, ignorant "Asses and captious Fools" incapable of understanding "The Heathen dresses of another Land" and who are not "real men." The poet, presumably, is a real man, and he indicates it in part by toying bawdily with the childbirth metaphor as a slap against the fastidious critics of himself and of the New World.

Yet the reader gets very different impressions from the men's protestations, on the one hand, and Bradstreet's, on the other. All these poets achieve ironic effects based on the notion of parental love, all employ a grotesque imagery that is unacceptable on a logical plane, and all betray a genuine affection for the "base-born" literary child. But Spenser, Sidney, and other courtly male poets are concerned primarily with paying an elaborate if convoluted compliment to actual patrons and often to their literary precursors, as Chaucer had done in his envoi to Troilus and Criseyde. Their transparent pose of humility is grounded in a real situation, i.e., their precarious, discomforting dependence on the patronage of powerful royals and nobles. Hence, the men who write these poems, including Alsop, reassert their autonomy by teasing and mauling the parent-child figure until it yields up an aggrandized, even defiant picture of the poet himself, whether he is a tough guy, a charming, singing swain, or a manly, Zeuslike brain enticingly swollen with fancies.

Bradstreet's treatment of the metaphor is something apart from all these. We must remember that she probably felt compelled to write her poem in response to the prefatory one by her brother-in-law John Woodbridge, whose Tenth Muse dedication, "To my deare Sister, the Author of these Poems," called the book "so faire an infant," defended his own efforts "To force a womans birth" and "Expose her Labours," and regretted that without Bradstreet's "owne sweet hand; 'Tis not so richly deckt, so trimly tir'd." In reply, Bradstreet's lowly imagery of a fatherless child roughly handled may look conventional and may seem to be-speak some half-playful mixture of self-deprecation and secret pride; but the homely, realistic details—the washing and rewashing of the "child's" face, the store of homespun cloth "i' th' house"—and the relative gentleness with which the speaker tries to mend the (once again) blemished, broken child are not in the reckless spirit of the male poets. It is as if the poet is not really comfortable with this particular tradition, and, although she purports to use it in the mannered, clever, and masculine way, some real distress seeps out in what seems a muted reprimand to her brother-in-law, to male literati in general, and perhaps particularly to those in the Old World "abroad." The reluctant use of imagery that would be unnatural to a loving mother and caretaker of many children is more a sign of withdrawal from the bastions of literary patriarchy (implied in the poem's very first line) than it is either a genuine confession of artistic inadequacy or even a plea for critical acceptance. When this poet remarks that her poems have no father, she does not do so in an ironic pretense of rejecting the "child," like Spenser or Sidney. It is the truth. Her poems have no courtly patron and no familial pater. The patron/pater is dead, and with him, as we have seen, something of the Old World itself. Hence, the poem is built on a foundation that must be discarded. If there are traces of some breach between old England and New England in the emotional thrust of the poem's contents, such a breach is also implied in the skewed employment of a convention, deeply embedded in European literary culture, that will not serve in the new place….

Still, we might expect Bradstreet to use the figure more than she does, at least in the early period of her writing, when she was closer to European conventions and when, as a bride, she was also very much preoccupied with her own (biological) fertility. The convention, however, is scarcely there, and both of the two Bradstreet poems that do clearly use the maternity/creativity metaphor—one is "The Author to her Book," as we have already seen—come late in her writing life and are unusually fearful and melancholy. We need only recall the historical alliance of childbirth and death—death of the mother and of the baby—to realize why this should be so. But the curse of Eve, "the great daunger" and "the great paine and peryl of child birthe," was not only an axiom of life in an age when twelve to fifteen percent of English women died in childbirth and many more from ensuing "complications" and "debilitations"; it was also inescapably linked with male domination: "Vnto the woman he said, I wil greately increase thy sorrows, & thy conceptions. In sorowe shalt thou bring forthe children, and thy desire shal be subject to thine housband, and he shal rule ouer thee" (Genesis 3:16). Well might these associations have dampened the creative urges of any woman who dared on her own to write poems. But perhaps just as significant were contemporary assumptions about the exact role of the woman in the process of reproduction. Marina Warner points out [in Alone of All Her Sex, 1983] that before 19th-century microscopes discovered the ovum, a mother was regarded as "merely a nutritive force in the genesis of a human life," the passive storehouse of substance and food; whereas the "vital procreative" part that gave "form and movement" to the child was believed to be only by the active "operation" of the father. Moreover, Warner vividly recalls the traditional Christian association of mother Eve with "nature, a form of low matter," and with "all that is vile, lowly, corruptible" and physically repellent: "Woman was womb and womb was evil." It was all very well for men to play with these notions in their ironic melodramas of giving birth to poems, but quite another for women poets, who lived inside women's bodies, and most of whom had, of course, experienced actual, physical childbirth, to want to associate these negativities and condemnations with their literary labors. And if, as in Bradstreet's case, the muse was envisioned as her very own father, the "paine and peryl" of artistic childbirth would be grievous indeed, if not unthinkable….

If a poet's voice is "something he inherits, but which environment modifies and on which experience tells," then Bradstreet's destiny as a poet had to be tied intimately to the new place, with all its problems and perplexities. Yet Bradstreet did warble out the old and did begin anew by turning a problem, this very problem of speech and of language, into an opportunity to write a different sort of poetry than she had been trained to write.

This development is perhaps most clearly seen in those poems, written a few years after she composed "Contemplations," in which Bradstreet lamented the deaths, within a period of four years, of three small grandchildren, all the offspring of her first-born son, Samuel. The three poems have been subjected to some Puritan-like wrangling among scholars over the alleged heresy and unorthodoxy of grandmother Bradstreet's struggle between grief and belief. Yet surely as human beings we can assume that the loss of a child or grandchild is deeply and searingly felt even within a religious life, and that it is worthwhile to look at the poems as poems, as constructs of language that reveal something about the expression of feeling in poetry and even in American poetry. The question is not only one of dogma and Puritan orthodoxy, but, given the human anguish at the deaths of these children, a question of how the experience gets translated into poetic language and form.

When we explore this question, we find that the three elegies form a related group and should be read as such, for there are noticeable progressions in feeling and form from Elizabeth's to Anne's to Simon's memorial. Even the titles record this change: The two granddaughters are "deceased," but the grandson, third to go, has "dyed"; the first two died "being a year and half old" and "being three years and seven Moneths old," the third died "being but a moneth, and one day old", (emphasis added). The first elegy, to Elizabeth, is set within a framework of natural phenomena, plants, fruits, and flowers; the second, to Anne, is set in a more ephemeral realm of bubble, glass, and turning shadow; the third stands nakedly before God. The first is in two neat seven-line stanzas with a carefully woven rhyme scheme of couplets and triplets, the second is in nine consecutive couplets, and the last is in just six couplets, as if to echo the brevity of the tiny infant's life. The first two start with conscious statement directed outward: "Farewel dear babe," "With troubled heart & trembling hand I write"; the third opens with a musing not so much heard as overheard: "No sooner come, but gone, and fal'n asleep." The first two speak in the first person singular: "Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate," "How oft with disappointment have I met," "I knew she was but as a withering flour"; the last elegy entirely eschews the "I" in favor of a general "we." The first takes on the question of the natural order of things with a certain stately, declarative didacticism; the second quivers with a series of rhetorical shifts that act out the "troubled heart" of the speaker as she moves through a swift succession of moods; but the third gives us what can only be called the sound of silence.

No sooner come, but gone, and fal'n asleep,
Acquaintance short, yet parting caus'd us weep,
Three flours, two scarcely blown, the last i'th' bud,
Cropt by th' Almighties hand; yet is he good,
With dreadful awe before him let's be mute,
Such was his 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,
He will return, and make up all our losses,
And smile again, after our bitter crosses.
Go pretty babe, go rest with Sisters twain
Among the blest in endless joyes remain.

Brevity and compression are the expressive strategy here, and the flickering, halting rhythm, the absence of an "I," and the silent spaces in the poem all suggest a speaker withdrawn or withdrawing, not unlike Emily Dickinson's speaker in "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." This is a tight-lipped poem, hinging on silence. A full third of the poem enjoins quiet and constraint. The tone throughout is one of chary resistance to speech, of breath held back. The hand of God "Crops" in silence, as in a desert or a vacuum and not amidst the rustically abundant nature of the Elizabeth poem. The Savior, of course, does not speak, but only smiles enigmatically and eerily. The one direct speech in the poem utterly undercuts the notion of communication: "Go pretty babe, go rest with Sisters" is a timeworn domestic formula and seemingly all the speaker can manage, like a weary mother sending the noisy children out to play so she can be quiet and alone. In all these ways, the poem enfolds itself in a taut, laconic moodliness. Yet line seven, "With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust," draws us in; it is the exact center of the poem and the only line rooted in the Bible. The source is the Lamentations of Jeremiah (3:26–29):

It is good bothe to trust, and to waite for the saluation of the Lord.
It is good for a man that he beare the yoke in his youth.
He sitteth alone, and kepeth silence, because he hath borne it vpon him.
He putteth his mouth in the dust, if there maie be hope.

The Geneva exegesis for these last two lines reads, "He murmureth not against God, but is pacient. He humbleth him selfe as thei that falle downe with their face to the grounde, & so with pacience waiteth for succour." So again, speech is enjoined, but with an important anticipation of change. We are reminded of Job, whose story also stands behind the grandchild elegies ("Man that is born of woman, is of short continuance, and ful of trouble. He shooteth forthe as a flowre, and is cut downe: he vanisheth also as a shadow, & continueth not" [14:1–2]), and who does eventually encounter a God who speaks to him. Much has been said about these poems' stony resistance to the divine dispensation; but, at least, by grounding her elegies in certain portions of scripture, Bradstreet can remind herself of the promise of succour that eventually will come from God in speech, in dialogue with man, even if it is only in the next world: "Thou drewest nere in the daye that I called vpon thee: thou saidest, Feare not" (Lamentations 3:57, emphasis added); or perhaps more to the point, she can remove herself in some sense from the little world of men and recall the great lesson that "Job's answer was found, not in the friends' talk about a God who puts everything to right in the world's affairs, nor even in what God says and does, but in God himself." [Hugh Anderson, "The Book of Job," in The Interpreter's One-Volume Commentary on the Bible, 1971].

In the meantime, in this realm, the poem stands, honest and uncompromising, held together by the tensile strength of its speechless speech…. What she can do is speak in a voice of stark honesty, unwilling to fall into archness, reticent to the point of silence, yet all the more eloquent for what she withholds, the buried feeling in the line. Albert Gelpi has characterized "the American strain as it splits away from the British" in terms of Edward Taylor's qualities: "honesty which lacks tact and finish, self-involvement which can snarl itself in knots and crotchets, fresh energy which can move into clumsiness, a complex personal idiom ready to sacrifice conventional clarity." I would suggest that Bradstreet's quieter honesty and her forced, oblique inwardness are also characteristic, emerging in a plainer surface by far than Taylor's and one that looks simple, but which does not sound so to the attentive ear. Bradstreet's muted voice, her sound of silence, is an eloquent construct of the unsaid but not the unarticulated. It is a voice suited to the experience of a New World not yet fully accessible to the consciousness of its inhabitants.

Some of the subtlety and intensity of Bradstreet's achievement can be foreseen in an early poem, "Before the Birth of one of her Children," written some time before 1647 and therefore possibly the first of her warblings "anew." This is Bradstreet's other "childbirth" poem, but it is a birth poem in a far more authentic way than is "The Author to her Book" or similar works by contemporary male poets. We have seen that for the woman writer, birth is too weighty a matter to be used as a mere device: When Bradstreet does give it serious attention as a metaphor, it is completely integral to the meaning of the poem.

All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No tyes so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with deaths parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh inevitable;
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon't may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot's unty'd that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that's due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have,
Let be interr'd in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel'st no grief, as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms:
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes my dear remains.
And if thou love thy self, or loved'st me
These O protect from step Dames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;
And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.

This poem is about itself, quite literally. Its goal is both physical union and immortality through the poem as an object, as a palpable thing. The poem begins with what appear to be the usual aphorisms about the mutability of all things, but these conventional statements have a sharp point, for as Bradstreet unfolds her poem, its own existence and its own mutability will be brought into question. From the outset, the poem turns the reader's attention increasingly toward itself and toward the immediate situation, i.e., the situation that impels the poet to write "these [particular] farewell lines," until it ends in its own concrete objectification: a paper to be kissed, imbued with salt tears that can be tasted by the mouth. The taste of salt has many associations and surely suggests here the poet's bitter grief at the possibility of losing her husband (she loses him if she dies): We hear echoes of the story of Lot's wife and of the Passover symbolism. But probably, just as surely, this 17th-Century housewife would think of salt as a preservative against deterioration. The speaker juxtaposes images of nothingness, emptiness, absence, numbness, and oblivion with images of decay: "Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms" is oddly necrophiliac; the children as "remains" grotesquely bring to mind the poet's own rotting corpse. Yet the paradox is that something pure will actually be preserved from mere nothingness and from decay: the poem, written on its salt-soaked paper. This general notion may not seem very startling—it has been encountered before, notably in Shakespeare's sonnets—but the immediacy and physicalness of the poem's language are unusual. These are first apparent in the double meaning of line five: "The sentence past is most irrevocable" calls attention to the preceding line as a physical thing; it is there and it is irrevocable, as is the heavy blow of the death sentence, to which it is a witness. Similarly, "these farewell lines" are these lines and no others. Moreover, the lines are woven with exhortations, initially in the form of gentle subjunctives but soon transformed into relentless imperatives: Love thy dead, look to my babes, protect the children, honor my hearse, kiss this paper. There is, especially, a constant implied demand to look at the poem and to remember its injunctions as one remembers its author. Indeed, "Look to my little babes my dear remains" has the same kind of double force as line five, for those babes, those remains, can be construed as the poems as well as the children that have been created. In a sense, poem and author, poems and children, are all one, and they can be kept alive only through the perceptions of Simon Bradstreet. Although it is beyond the poet's power to ensure her husband's reading of this poem, with its ensuing effects, her concern about reaching his eyes is one indication of that command she is trying to exercise over his person: his mind (memory), his affections (love), his senses (seeing, kissing, tasting), all through the immediacy and activism of the language of the poem as it is being read and presumably reread.

Hence, by the end of the poem, it is clear that the poem itself has taken an active part in the process it relates: the process of preserving the feeling that fueled it, not "consumed with that which it was nourished by" so much as preserving that which nourished it, in the living act of being read. And this physical participation in the process of its own creation, or at least in the process of its emergence into someone else's consciousness, is something like what babies do to be born into the world. There is even a laborious "panting" quality in the sequence of breathless pleas beginning with "and" in the last ten lines: "And when thou feel'st," "And when thy loss," "And if thou love," "And if chance," "And kiss this paper." One might say the poem "is" a baby, and the baby is the poet's self or the part of herself that loves her family, idealized into art. [In The Nightingale's Burden, 1982], Cheryl Walker in fact points to "the association between self-representation in children ('my dear remains') and self-perpetuation in art" as the key to the poem. Yet the children are less important in the poem than the literal birth of the poem itself. Unlike the male poet who uses childbirth as a fancy or a conceit, Bradstreet implants the metaphor so deeply within the poem that we feel something, some identity, some meaning, is really struggling to be born here, struggling to be engendered. From the feminist point of view, that something may well be a "wounded" self, or worse, an eternally absent self, represented only by the paper, which will be read by the man, thus returning the woman to her customary entombment as man's "text and artifact." Yet the interwoven issues of self-birth, self-preservation, and self-expression to which this poem attests are not necessarily confined to women or even to individuals. We have here a whole society trying to give birth to itself, to preserve itself, to utter itself; yet the members situated in a relationship with old England that consists in being what Leslie Fiedler has called "The Other's Other," a people whose self-definition must be determined "not directly, but reflexively," against its own mythologized version of the Old World. So here, the poet's "translated" self is to be reconstructed by the imagined Other, the husband, as he literally reads her in the form of the poem that she herself has made. It is not a simple, domestic, "woman's" poem, and although it is certainly not a resolution of problems (not that poems should be), it takes us a long way from needles and pens. The old, clever conventions are gone; in their place are the makings of a more powerful and ingrown symbolism, rooted in concrete and inescapable experience. "Before the Birth" may not be a second "Nativity Ode," but it is a step toward honest dealing with American concerns, a step that could not have been taken in the same way by a mannered minor English poet like Katherine Philips. Yet it is a poem that only a woman could have written. This is not to suggest that New England's men did not experience the problem of identity or of finding an authentic voice; just the contrary. But no man of the first generation recorded these struggles in a significant way in poetry: It fell to a woman to do it, forced by her gender into a confrontation with urgent problems of poetic expression.

Indeed, an argument can be made that all the first-generation colonists were in the position of women—a variation on the feminist critics' theme that all women have been "colonized." Consider that the American Puritans were accused of cowardly, womanish flight from the troubles in England; that they had to grapple with problems of authority in Massachusetts while paying homage to a patriarchal home government that either patronized, chastised, or ignored them; that they had to face unprecedented experiences for which traditional language and forms were inadequate; that in New England there were subtle strictures on free expression by anybody. Psychologically and symbolically, the colonists were, in these respects, "women." For such a community, a woman poet was a natural representative, her nerve endings alert to the peculiar struggle for identity and for authentic expression that feminist critics have exposed as the urgent concerns of women writers, so many of whom have found themselves writing in a "New World." It is not, then, so surprising that Anne Bradstreet was bringing forth a newborn, New World poetry while men on both sides of the ocean were still engaged in the witty pleasures of literary couvade….

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'To Finish What's Begun': Anne Bradstreet's Last Words

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'Then Have I … Said with David': Anne Bradstreet's Andover Manuscript Poems and the Influence of the Psalm Tradition

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