Sunday service by Robin McNallie
3.28.2010

 

Readings:
1) “thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize @ air/ your body’s made and moves. I summon, see,/ from the centuries it./I think you won’t stay. How do we/ linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,/ implausibly visible, to whom, a year,/ years, over interims; or not;/ to a long stranger; or not; shimmer @ disappear.”
John Berryman, “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”

2) “Sometimes the sun is only shadowed by a cloud that we cannot see his luster although we may walk by his light, but when he is set, we are in darkness till he arise again. So God doth sometime veil His face but for a moment that we cannot behold the light of His countenance as at some other time.”
Anne Bradstreet, “Meditation 50”

When I agreed to do this morning’s service, I was in the middle of reading Sarah Vowell’s well-received 2008 book on the 17th c. Massachusetts Bay Puritans, “The Wordy Shipmates.” I recommend it highly. Vowell, an audaciously cheeky commentator on that society, is also true to the historical record and shrewd in her judgments on it. She is essentially a stand-up comedian doing a sort of antic impression of Perry Miller, Harvard University’s pre-eminent authority on the New England Puritans and the later Transcendentalists. Although Vowell doesn’t seriously contradict H. L. Mencken’s oft recycled definition of Puritanism as “the sneaking suspicion that someone somewhere is having a good time,” she does suggest that there are, at least, a few redeeming qualities to Puritan society which should perhaps come as good news to UUs since our Unitarian branch is the evolved offspring of Puritan congregationalism; we won’t be harmed either from owning up to that dour and dyspeptic past or knowing it more fully. Since Vowell devotes considerable space to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, we can infer that a positive attribute she finds in the Massachusetts colony is the quality of the dissenters it produced—before banishing them to Rhode Island.

I would like, however, to direct my own remarks to another woman of that patriarchal world not covered by Vowell, the other Anne—Bradstreet. To students seeking to pass their masters exams in American Literature Anne Bradstreet is the answer to the question: “ What poet was the first in the English speaking New World colonies to have a volume of poetry published in London in the year 1650?” The title of that book, probably supplied by a market savvy publisher of the time, is “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.” Anne, incidentally, was peeved initially, because her brother-in-law had delivered the draft of it to London without her knowledge. The universal moral here: Keep your best china and all loose manuscripts hidden when having your in-laws over. [Read more…]