10
Anne Bradstreet
Colonial Kindred Spirit
One hundred passengers pressed against the rails of the Arbella to catch their first sight of the New World. As they breathed in the sweet scent that breezed from the shore, they glimpsed a pigeon soaring over the ship’s deck, the first sign in sixty-two days that life existed beyond the roiling waves. Three days later, on June 12, 1630, the sea-weary travelers disembarked to survey their new home: Salem plantation, three thousand miles from their native England. Anne Bradstreet, seventeen years old and newly married, was one of many who stepped foot on the foreign shore. As she stood in the mud amid her family’s crates and trunks, her heart sank at the desolate sight.
It’s easy to understand her dismay. Anne’s life in Northampton, England, had been one of comfort and leisure. Her father, Thomas Dudley, had been employed as a steward to the Earl of Lincoln; her mother, Dorothy, was a woman of noble birth. As a young girl, Anne had lived in a large, comfortable home, complete with numerous servants to handle most of the domestic chores. She had enjoyed afternoon tea, whiled away the hours browsing her father’s personal library full of hundreds of books, and occupied herself with a bustling social life.
Compare that cultured existence to what Anne glimpsed as she stepped from the Arbella onto the shore of the New World. The primitive settlement consisted of about forty crude dwellings, only a third of which resembled actual houses. They were constructed of roughly hewn oak frames and pine boards. They had thatched roofs, oil-paper windows, and wattle-and-daub chimneys made from woven strips of wood bound with a sticky mixture of dirt, sand, dung, and straw. And these were the upscale homes. The rest were cave-like dugouts burrowed into hillsides or “English wigwams,” tent-like structures made with pliant branches and covered with boughs.
Life for the colonial settlers was fraught with discomfort, sickness, and death. Summers seared hot, while winters were frigid and damp. Few of the colonists were as fortunate as Anne and her family, who did not lose any immediate family members. Hundreds of settlers died of illness, scurvy, and starvation during the first year, and hundreds more retreated to England, disheartened by the crippling illnesses, grinding homesickness, and unrelenting hunger and cold.
Because Salem village was overcrowded and provisions were in short supply, some of the newly arrived colonists, including Anne, her husband, Simon, and her parents and siblings, relocated to Charlestown, near the mouth of the Charles River. However, Charlestown was quickly deemed unsuitable, and Anne, her family, and a group of other colonists eventually moved to Newtown, a few miles up the Charles River. There, in her second year in Newtown, Anne fell gravely ill with a “lingering sickness like consumption,” which, she later wrote in her private memoirs, she believed to be “a correction I saw the Lord sent to humble and try me and do me Good: and it was not altogether ineffectual.”1 When she recovered, Anne wrote what’s now considered one of her earliest poems, entitled “Upon a Fit of Sickness”:
Twice ten years old not fully told
since nature gave me breath,
My race is run, my thread spun,
lo, here is fatal death.
All men must die, and so must I;
this cannot be revoked.
For Adam’s sake this word God spake
when he so high provoked.
Yet live I shall, this life’s but small,
in place of highest bliss,
Where I shall have all I can crave,
no life is like to this.
For what’s this but care and strife
since first we came from womb?
Our strength doth waste, our time doth haste,
and then we go to th’ tomb.
O bubble blast, how long can’st last?
that always art a breaking,
No sooner blown, but dead and gone,
ev’n as a word that’s speaking.
O whilst I live this grace me give,
I doing good may be,
Then death’s arrest I shall count best,
because it’s Thy decree;
Bestow much cost there’s nothing lost,
to make salvation sure,
O great’s the gain, though got with pain,
comes by profession pure.
The race is run, the field is won,
the victory’s mine I see;
Forever known, thou envious foe,
the foil belongs to thee.2
These early attempts at verse are not considered her best work. Described as “technically amateurish” and “remarkably impersonal even by Puritan standards,”3 the poetry was less an expression of Anne’s day-to-day experiences in the settlement than, as poet Adrienne Rich points out, “a last compulsive effort to stay in contact with the history, traditions, and values of her former world.” Yet these early poems are a beginning, “a psychological stepping-stone to the later poems which have kept her alive for us.”4
As biographer Elizabeth Wade White notes, “Only a conscious and ardent desire to become a poet, combined with a strong sense of spiritual dedication, could give the necessary courage for such an act to a Puritan woman of 1636.”5 It was no small feat for a Puritan woman like Anne—a wife and mother of eight children, living in the wilderness of the New World—to find the time and creative energy to compose poetry. Likewise, the fact that her brother-in-law and later her readers were supportive of her work is a testament to its importance. The Puritans were a serious and self-disciplined people who viewed every action in light of its value in God’s eyes. Clearly they deemed Anne’s work as both creatively and spiritually valuable.
Anne’s first volume of poetry, The Tenth Muse, was published without her knowledge by her brother-in-law, who took the manuscript with him and had it printed when he returned to England in 1650. She had intended the poems only for her family’s eyes, and she was not only shocked by their appearance in print but also horrified by the fact that many of them were unedited drafts. At the same time, though, the positive reception of her work gave Anne the confidence to continue writing and to find her true voice. The titles of her later poems, all of which were published after her death, reveal a distinct change not only in form but also in subject matter. No longer wedded to a formulaic style or to imitating the contemporary or classical poets, Anne ventured boldly into her own experiences to write more personally about the events of her own life: the departure of her eldest son, Samuel, to England; the loss of her home to a devastating fire; the fear of childbirth; the death of a grandchild.
These private poems are also more confessional than her public work, often revealing what she considered her flaws and spiritual shortcomings. For instance, from her private journals we know that Anne struggled to overcome the lure of worldly temptations, and she accepted her recurring illnesses, fevers, and fainting spells as God’s way of reforming her and redirecting her spiritual course. In a 1657 journal entry Anne writes about her physical suffering, noting, “I trust it is out of His abundant love to my straying soul which in prosperity is too much in love with the world.”6
We also glimpse this tension between worldly temptation and godliness in one of her most famous poems, “Upon the Burning of Our House,” in which she writes, “I blest His name that gave and took, That laid my good now in the dust,” followed by the admission that she casts her “sorrowing eyes” on the ruin to gaze upon the trunk, the chest, and the store she counted best, “my pleasant things in ashes lie.” For several lines Anne pines over all the treasures lost and the memories that will no longer be made before finally chiding herself for her shallow materialism, concluding:
And did thy wealth on earth abide?
Didst fix they hope on mold’ring dust. . . .
The world no longer let me love,
My hope and treasure lies above.7
Clearly Anne used both poetry and journaling to exercise her creativity and wrestle with her spirituality.
Public Versus Private Anne
Her stated intention for writing was “to declare the truth, not to set forth myself, but the glory of God.” Yet her writing, especially the poems and personal letters published after her death—material that she never intended for the public eye—also reveals a deeper struggle. Only three of the eighteen poems she released to “publick view” are specific statements of her religious faith, and as White notes, all three are by-the-book examples of Puritan belief. But it was in her private memoirs, which she wrote to be shared posthumously with her children—so they would know “what was your living mother’s mind”8—that Anne divulged her deepest spiritual musings, including her doubts and questions.
“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,” she confessed to her children. She admitted that she made a concerted effort to maintain her faith, yet at the same time she wrestled with accepting the existence of God and the truth of the Scriptures. “Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures, many times by atheism how I could know whether there was a God,” she confessed. “I have argued thus with myself. That there is a God, I see. If ever this God hath revealed himself, it must be in His word, and this must be it or none.”9
Likewise Anne struggled with her religious denomination, wondering aloud whether the “Popish religion” (Catholicism) might in fact be the “right” one. The Catholics have the same God, the same Jesus, and the same Scriptures, she observed, but they interpret it all a bit differently. Then again, she decided, their “vain fooleries,” “lying miracles,” and “cruel persecutions of the saints”10 were enough to turn her back toward Protestantism.
By the conclusion of the confessional letter to her children, Anne reported that she had largely overcome her spiritual conflicts. “I have not known what to think,” she wrote, “but then I have remembered the works of Christ that so it must be . . . and I can now say, ‘Return, O my Soul, to thy rest, upon this rock Christ Jesus will I build my faith.’”11 Despite the letter’s positive conclusion, though, Anne’s admissions would have been considered blasphemous by many of her fellow Puritans, including her father, who was, as White notes, a “staunch condemner of anything that suggested a ‘toleration.’”12
The fact that Anne laid out her struggles so honestly in this heartfelt letter to her children is a testament to her search for truth, as well as her conviction that her faith—as well as her children’s, should they struggle in the same way—would prevail over doubt. It’s clear that Anne endeavored to offer her children solace and hope on their own faith journey and was willing to risk being deemed a heretic, should it come to that, in order to speak truthfully about the fact that faith did not always come easily to her.
Anne Bradstreet lived four hundred years before us, and she faced trials and hardships we will never live or understand. Yet she is also a real, relatable woman who walked through many of the same spiritual questions we grapple with four centuries later. As she poured her heart into the pages of her journal in poetry and prose, we see ourselves—our own questions, our own doubts, our own hopes—reflected in her authentic words. And just as she offered her sage and honest advice to her children, so that they “may gain some spiritual advantage by [her] experience,”13 we too can find comfort and hope, as well as a kindred spirit, in Anne Bradstreet.