Applying a Calvinistic misreading of a biblical lesson, Bradstreet explains why stability must elude us in this life:

All the comforts of this life may be compared to the gourd of Jonah, that notwithstanding we take great delight for a season in them and find their shadow very comfortable, yet there is some worm or other, of discontent, of fear, or grief that lies at the root, which in great part withers the pleasure which else we should take in them, and well it is that we perceive a decay in their greenness, for were earthly comforts permanent, who would look for heavenly? ("Meditations Divine and Moral," #69)

In the Book of Jonah, the episode of the gourd (4:6–11) teaches its audience (if not the recalcitrant prophet) to value creation; Bradstreet uses it to teach her audience—her children—to devalue this green but decaying earth, to look toward eternity. Yet she undermines her pious instruction through her concluding rhetorical question, which makes apparent her emotional allegiance to seasonal comforts. Being drawn in opposite directions destabilizes and energizes Bradstreet's creative work, especially when its subject allows her to experience the opposing pulls most keenly.

The season of autumn, a type of Revelation to the book of nature, provides her with just such a subject, since it inspires her to luxuriate in comforts of apocalyptic intensity, as precariously glorious as Jonah's gourd; not surprisingly, Bradstreet's reading of autumn results in her most successfully sustained poem, "Contemplations," written about twenty years after her first celebration of the season in the Quaternion poems. As critics have noted, Bradstreet now fleshes out her scholarly interest in nature's patterns and types with a convincing voice, rich in personal knowledge and desire. The creative fall is not only the subject of "Contemplations," but also the experience it bears witness to and affords.

As in "The Four Seasons of the Year," autumn here is the season of creation and the fall; implanted in its paradisal perfection is the seed of its demise:

Some time now past in the autumnal tide,
When Phoebus wanted but one hour to bed,
The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,
Where gilded o'er by his rich golden head.
Their leaves and fruits seemed painted, but was true,
Of green, of red, of yellow, mixed hue;
Rapt were my sense at this delectable view.

The first three words of "Contemplations" inform us that the paradise it presents at the outset has already been lost through the passing of time. The choice of "tide" further sets the scene in flux, suggesting its inadequacy as a permanent contest, and by the end of the second line, indeed, the reader knows that the world created here has but an hour's duration. Thus from the start, Bradstreet acknowledges the transience of earthly beauties, and her meditative ramble during the New England Indian summer moves on the edge of night and winter.

Yet also evident is the poet's attraction to the colorful, delectable world artfully served up by Phoebus Apollo, the sun. (Like other Colonial writers, Bradstreet found in classical mythology sanction for sensuous involvement in her New England surroundings.) Apparent author of the text she delights in, the sun seems Bradstreet's muse, encouraging her own fall creativity. As the poem proceeds, the sun draws her praise, almost her worship. She repeatedly raises her eyes from his text the better to see God, creation's true author and rightful recipient of her affection; repeatedly her eyes return to the sun-lit world, unable to wean themselves from the passing scene. Only after a prolonged excursion into history and subsequent ruminations by the banks of a "stealing stream" (l. 149) on the effects of time does she resign herself to the orthodox position that the text that matters is not nature's Revelation (or the record of man's questionable accomplishments), but the one mentioned in Revelation 2:17: "… he whose name is grav'd in the white stone / Shall last and shine …" (ll. 232–33). The poet's ultimate desire is not to create, but to be recreated, not to write, but to be written on the apocalyptic stone so her name will outshine the sun. The stone replaces both world and poem as text, thus capping her creative fall.

The poem's historic excursion mentioned above is prompted by the poet's inability to join a choir of nature's "abject" creatures praising their creator (stanzas eight and nine); … she is not in close enough communion with the rest of nature to participate in its mass, sing in its language; thus she must speak instead of that which makes communion impossible: man's fall into historical consciousness and sin becomes the burden of her song, a purely human source of creativity. Bradstreet first focuses on the primal family (stanzas 10–15), then reflects on the human condition (stanzas 16–20) in the tone of radical biblical wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job. Like Solomon (the traditional author of Ecclesiastes), she is made melancholic by the vanity of our existence; like Job, she is bitter that this existence has not even the cyclical longevity of the green earth (see Job 14:7–10), though immortality is our recompense. Biblical wisdom, with its interest in natural patterns and human affairs, provides a language, a voice through which, here and elsewhere in her work, Bradstreet can assess and articulate the fall of her experience.

Bradstreet perhaps most identifies with the original human source of wisdom, "our grandame" Eve, whom she imagines in stanza 12 contemplating the course of history in a "retired place," much like the poet herself:

Here sits our grandame in retired place,
And in her lap her bloody Cain new-born;
The weeping imp oft looks her in the face,
Bewails his unknown hap and fate forlorn;
His mother sighs to think of Paradise,
And how she lost her bliss to be more wise,
Believing him that was, and is, father of lies.

Bradstreet's Eve shows no guilt for her sin, only grief for her loss. Holding bloody Cain in her lap, she thinks of Paradise; she is indeed the archetype of the poet, with longing that comes from being sensuously and consciously alive, and with that blood-stained wisdom that comes from being an experienced mother.

It is as such that Bradstreet speaks in much of her mature work, encouraging and admonishing her offspring, bewailing their absence or loss, chastizing herself for her strong attachment to them (as well as to other extensions of her body and her body itself), finding her ordinary and extraordinary concerns as a woman enmeshed in fleshly relationships meet subjects for her poetry. Her religion carries her toward silent resignation and the stony silence of eternity, but her emotional ties to others and the world involve her in words, through which she can work out or at least articulate her fears and sorrows, and verbally commune with the very human sources of her keenest joys. Thus her fall into her married, motherly, and grandmotherly roles, while consuming most of her time, stimulates her creativity; when she can write, she can write with the wisdom and authority of one who has not so much listened to that old serpent, the father of lies, but to herself as she falls, and so can speak the truth about what she has suffered and loved.

Bradstreet's love poetry makes such bold use of literary conventions that they carry conviction. When she closes her "Letter to Her Husband Absent upon Public Employment" with "Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, / I here, thou there, yet both but one…," the language itself achieves the emotional union she longs for. When, in "To My Dear and Loving Husband," she concludes "Then while we live, in love let's so persevere / That when we live no more, we may live ever…," her unorthodox plot to storm heaven through intense fleshly love intensifies her verse. That she felt embodied in her verse is indicated in her poignant plea to her husband in "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" to "kiss this paper for thy dear love's sake" should she die in childbirth. And her moving elegies for all those who, like her "Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet," were her "heart's too much content," suggest she was far more adept in making present her personal losses than in realizing her spiritual hope. In her mature work, Bradstreet writes as an Eve bearing the fruits of her mortality.