Anne Bradstreet

“ THOUGH the manuscript of the first edition of Anne Bradstreet's poems was nearly if not entirely complete before the removal to Andover, some years were still to pass before it left her hands entirely, though her brother-in-law, knowing her self-distrustful nature, may have refused to give it up when possession had once been obtained. But no event in her life save her marriage, could have had quite the same significance to the shy and shrinking woman, who doubted herself and her work alike, considering any real satisfaction in it a temptation of the adversary. ”

“ The first two years of marriage were passed in England, and held the last genuine social life and intellectual development that Anne Bradstreet was to enjoy. The love of learning was not lost in the transition from one country to another, but it took on more and more a theological bias, and embodied itself chiefly in sermons and interminable doctrinal discussions. Even before the marriage, Dudley had decided to join the New England colony, but Simon Bradstreet hesitated and lingered, till forced to a decision by the increasing shadow of persecution. ”

“ The New England woman has never walked when she could ride, and so long as the church stood within easy distance, demanded nothing more. One walk of Anne Bradstreets' is recorded in a poem, and it is perhaps because it was her first, that it made so profound an impression, calling out, as we shall presently see, some of the most natural and melodious verse which her serious and didactic Muse ever allowed her, and being still a faithful picture of the landscape it describes. ”

“ No story of personal experience is more confounding to the modern reader, and none holds a truer picture of the time. Governor Dudley and Simon Bradstreet were both concerned in the whole course of the matter, which must have been discussed at home from day to day, and thus there is every reason for giving it full place in these pages as one of the formative forces in Anne Bradstreet's life; an inspiration and then a warning. There are hints that Anne resented the limitations that hedged her in, and had small love of the mutual criticism, which made the corner stone of Puritan life. ”

“ Men and women alike, forswore the desired stiffness, retaining it only in their opinions. By the time that Anne Bradstreet had settled in Andover, bodily indulgence so far as adornment or the gratification of appetite went, had become a matter for courts to decide upon. Whether Simon Bradstreet gave up the curling locks which, while not flowing to his shoulders as in Colonel Hutchinson's case, still fell in thick rings about his neck, we have no means of knowing. ”

“ Samuel Bradstreet, who became a physician, living for many years in Boston, which he finally left for the West Indies, was about twenty at the time of his graduation from Harvard, the success of which was very near Anne Bradstreet's heart and the pride of his grandfather, Governor Dudley, who barely lived to see the fruition of his wishes for this first child of his favorite daughter. ”

“ Anne Bradstreet.—There was, however, belonging to this primal literary period, one poet who, in some worthy sense, found in poetry a vocation. The first professional poet of New England was a woman. In the year 1650 there was published, in London, a book of poems written by a gifted young woman of the New England wilderness,19 Anne Bradstreet by name. She was born in England, in 1612. She was the laborious wife of a New England farmer, the mother of eight children, and herself from childhood of a delicate constitution. ”

“ Ruskin demands as a necessity in lessening some of the present complications of the marriage question may not have been the fortune of Simon and Anne Bradstreet, it is certain that few couples have ever had better opportunity for real knowledge of one another's peculiarities and habits of thought. Circumstances placed them under the same roof for years before marriage, and it would have been impossible to preserve any illusions, while every weakness as well as every virtue had fullest opportunity for disclosure. ”

“ Then, for a generation or so, he was too busy contending with natural forces, and asserting his claims to life and place on the new continent, to have much leisure for verse-making, though here and there, in the stress of grinding days, a weak and uncertain voice sounded at times. Anne Bradstreet's, as we know, was the first, and half assured, half dismayed at her own presumption, she waited long, till convinced as other authors have since been, by the "urgency of friends," that her words must have wider spread than manuscript could give them. ”

“ Barren of personal detail as they too often are, the writer of the present imperfect sketch has found Anne Bradstreet, in spite of all such deficiencies, a very real and vital person, and ends her task with the belief which it is hoped that the reader may share, that among the honorable women not a few whose lives are to-day our dearest possession, not one claims tenderer memory than she who died in New England two hundred years ago. ”

“ He had travelled widely and knew men and manners, and into the exhortations and expoundings of his daily life, the unfoldings of the complicated religious experience demanded of every Puritan, must have crept many a reminiscence of old days, dear to the heart of Anne Bradstreet, who, no matter what theory she deemed it best to follow, was at heart, to the end of her life a monarchist. ”

“ There can no peril chance to me so terrible, nor any kind of death so cruel, that shall not be much easier for me to abide, than to live so far separate from you."
Weakened by the long voyage and its perpetual hardships, and dismayed, if may be at the sadness and privations of what they had hoped might hold immediate comfort, she could not rally, and Anne Bradstreet's first experience of New England was over the grave, in which they laid one of the closest links to childhood and that England both had loved alike. ”

“ The child born on the stormy passage over, and who in good time became Anne Bradstreet's son-in-law, marrying her daughter Dorothy in 1654, appeared with the father and mother at the first public service after his arrival, and before it was positively decided that he should remain in Boston. ”

“ She was a Puritan of the Puritans; her father was later elected to be governor of the colony, preceding his son-in-law in that distinguished position, so that Anne Bradstreet must have been from the beginning of her life permeated with the very spirit of Puritanism. One would not think that such training and environment would be favorable to the fostering of the poetic faculty; severity of creed and the aesthetic soul do not often go hand in hand. Yet she was the first professional poet of New England,--indeed, probably of America ”

“ Sturdy English stock as were all these New England dames, and blessed with a power of endurance which it required more than one generation to lessen, they were as given to medicine-taking as their descendants of to-day, and fully as certain that their own particular prescription was more efficacious than all the rest put together. Anne Bradstreet had always been delicate, and as time went on grew more and more so. ”

“ Anne Bradstreet preceded Phillis Wheatley by a little over twenty years. She published her volume of poems, "The Tenth Muse," in 1750. Let us strike a comparison between the two. Anne Bradstreet was a wealthy, cultivated Puritan girl, the daughter of Thomas Dudley, Governor of Bay Colony. Phillis, as we know, was a Negro slave girl born in Africa. ”

“ But, as we have already seen, he was the Puritan poet, and affected every rhymester of the time, to a degree which it required generations to shake off. In New England, however, even he, in time came to rank as light-minded, and the last shadow of poetry fled before the metrical horrors of the Bay Psalm Book, which must have lent a terror to rhyme, that one could wish might be transferred to the present day. The elegy on Du Bartas is all the proof needed to establish Anne Bradstreet as one of his most loyal followers, and in spite of all protest to the contrary such she was and will remain. ”

“ But Anne Bradstreet, the first woman whose work has come down to us from that troublous Colonial time, and who, if not the mother, is at least the grandmother of American literature, in that her direct descendants number some of our most distinguished men of letters, calls for some memorial more honorable than a page in an Encyclopedia, or even an octavo edition of her works for the benefit of stray antiquaries here and there. ”

“ CHAPTER VIII. SOME PHASES OF EARLY COLONIAL LIFE. Much of the depression evident in Anne Bradstreet's earlier verses came from the circumstances of her family life. No woman could have been less fitted to bear absence from those nearest to her, and though her adhesive nature had made her take as deep root in Ipswich, as if further change could not come, she welcomed anything that diminished the long separations, and made her husband's life center more at home. ”

“ And live they must whilst God is just
That he may plague them so."
Of the various literary children who may be said to have been nurtured on Anne Bradstreet's verses, three became leaders of New England thought, and all wrote elegies on her death, one of them of marked beauty and power. It remained for a son of the sulphurous Wigglesworth, to leave the purest fragment of poetry the epoch produced, the one flower of a life, which at once buried itself in the cares of a country pastorate and gave no further sign of gift or wish to speak in verse. ”

“ Brissot, the leader of the Girondists in the French Revolution, and Louis Philippe, who were familiar with its scenery, remembered it with pleasure. Anne Bradstreet, the wife of Governor Bradstreet, one of the earliest writers of verse in New England, sang of it at her home on its banks at Andover; and the lovely mistress of Deer Island, who sees on one hand the rising moon lean above the low sea [Pg 6] horizon of the east, and on the other the sunset reddening the track of the winding river, has made it the theme and scene of her prose and verse. ”

“ To them the highest earthly distinction came to be found in the highest learning. The earnest student deserved and obtained all the honors that man could give him, and his epitaph even recorded the same solemn and deep-seated admiration. "The ashes of an hard student, a good scholar, and a great Christian."
Anne Bradstreet shared this feeling to the full, and might easily have, been the mother of whom Mather writes as saying to her little boy: "Child, if God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that thy mother ever asked for thee." ”

“ Even fifty years ago, a woman's work, whether prose or verse, which came before the public, was hailed with an enthusiastic appreciation, it is difficult to-day to comprehend, Mrs. S. C. Hall emphasizing this in a paragraph on Hannah More, who held much the relation to old England that Anne Bradstreet did to the New. ”

“ That her poems were read and admired is attested by such poetic tributes as that of Nathaniel Ward, who affirms that she was “a right Du Bartas girle,” and represents Apollo as unable to decide whether Du Bartas or the New England Muse was the more excellent poet. But Anne Bradstreet was not a poet; she was a winsome personality in an unlovely age. That she should have written verse at all was phenomenal, but that it should have been poor verse was inevitable. ”

“ Her first sixteen years of life were, for Anne Dudley, filled with the intensest mental and spiritual activity—hampered and always in leading strings, but even so, an incredible advance on anything that had been the portion of women for generations. ”

“ Simon Bradstreet (a portrait of whom is in the senate chamber of the State House, Massachusetts) married again after Anne's death, and became governor of Massachusetts in 1679, not dying till 1697, aged 94. Amongst Anne's descendants are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Dana, and Dr. Channing, besides many other of the best-known Americans.
[Works of Anne Bradstreet, in Prose and Verse (ed. Ellis) , U.S.A. 1867; Anne Bradstreet's Poems, 2nd ed. Boston, 1678; Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, bk. ii. pp. 17, 19.] ”

“ The popularity of “The Day of Doom” shows that in the very years when the Royalists were returning to power in England the Puritans were greatly in the majority in New England. The reaction marked by Morton, Ward, and Roger Williams was only beginning. Moreover, if it had been the only “poetry” of the period, we should have to admit that the Puritans were almost hopelessly unpoetical.
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) proves the contrary, and in doing so she proves how the love of beauty can manage to bloom under the bleakest skies. Her talent was assuredly a “flower in a crannied wall.” ”

“ In spite of the tremendous value set upon souls, indifference to human life still ruled, and there was even a certain relish, if that life were an enemy's, in turning it over heartily and speedily to its proper owner, Satan. Anne Bradstreet is no exception to the rule, and her verses hold various fierce and unexpected outbursts against enemies of her faith or country. ”

“ There was not only the village life with its petty interests, but the larger official one of her husband, in which she shared so far as full knowledge of its details allowed, Simon Bradstreet, like Governor Winthrop, believing strongly in that "inward sight" which made women often clearer judges than men of perplexed and knotty points. Two bits of family life are given in a document still in existence and copied by the New England Historical and Genalogical Register for 1859. ”