1669 Was ever stable joy found below?
Or perfect bliss, without mixture of woe? …
Farewell dear child, thou ne’er shalt come to me,
But yet a while, and I shall go to thee.
The poem is not about the child or even her grandmother’s love for her. Instead it draws the stern Puritan lesson about the fickleness of this world’s pleasures. By this, her 57th year, Bradstreet might be excused for feeling the strain, having settled a frontier farm in the New World, borne eight children, suffered recurrent bouts of illness and had her house burn down, devouring her library. Three years later she did, indeed, join her granddaughter in heaven.
Born into an impeccably Puritan family in England and married at sixteen to a graduate of Cambridge’s most Puritan college, Anne and her family joined the Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay (Boston) in 1630. Though both her father and husband would become governors of the colony in time, Anne still had the arduous practical work of settling and running a frontier farm near Andover.
She also wrote poetry – lots of it. In bulk, her major output was a series of ‘quaternians’ – like ‘The Four Seasons of the Yeare’, and ‘Of the foure Humours’, inspired by the Huguenot poet Du Bartas. In 1650 her brother-in-law carried these manuscripts back to London, where they were published as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, the first volume of American poetry to be published.
But it is her shorter, more personal lyrics that people read now – possibly because they can more easily be studied in practical-criticism classes. And they were not all gloomy. Many were intimate expressions of love – like ‘To my Dear and loving Husband’ – of thanksgiving (‘For Deliverance from a Fever’) and even praise for God’s work in nature – as in this leaf-peeper’s joy at a New England autumn:
Their leaves & fruits seem’d painted, but was true
Of green, of red, of yellow, mixéd hue,
Rapt were my senses at this delectable view.