MISTRESS ANN BRADSTREET: GODLY AGNOSTIC

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.

Three noteworthy facts to remember about that book’s publication: 1) its author was indeed a woman, 2) its author was indeed a Puritan—to the Puritan mind writing poetry was deeply suspect, a product of idleness and sensuous inclinations, unless the verse served as an aid to creedal indoctrination , as, for example, the famous “New England Primer” with such exemplary couplets as “In Adam’s fall/ we sinned all,” and 3) “The Tenth Muse” is rarely read today, its contents deemed to be very derivative of the work of a French poet , DuBartas, popular at the time. Bradstreet’s distinctive voice is largely absent, save in the Prologue where she upbraids male poetasters for not acknowledging that women too can create worthy verse.

The works by Bradstreet that do make contemporary anthologies are her so-called “domestic” poems. In these she evinces repeatedly a fierce love for husband Simon and her eight children, seven of whom survived, remarkably, the primitive conditions of that time and place to reach adulthood. She, in the main, writes an unadorned verse in simple patterns of standard rhyme and meter. The voice heard in the poems is what invests them with the power to reach the modern reader. It is both direct and guileless, doubtlessly because Bradstreet is addressing only herself or an intimate circle of family and close friends. She is confessional but rarely falls into the well of self-pity. Some readers have detected a resemblance between Bradstreet and her 19th c. New England successor, Emily Dickinson, who also went largely unpublished in her life.

I will bring that voice into this sanctuary whose simple elegance I think Anne would have approved of. Of the poems I have read by her, this one addressed to Simon, is the one that most powerfully stirs me. Truly there are many great, even outstanding poems by others that, even with their greater refinement, move me far less. It is titled by editors “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”; its power to move us is reinforced by our knowledge of the all too real and considerable dangers of child bearing in that colonial era. “ All things within this fading world hath end,/ Adversity doth still our joys attend;/ No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,/ But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet./ The sentence past is most irrevocable,/ A common thing, yet oh, inevitable./ “How soon, my dear, death may my steps attend,/ How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend,/ We both are ignorant, yet love bids me/ These farewell lines to recommend to thee,/ That when that knot’s untied that made us one,/ I may seem thine, who in effect am none./ And if I see not half my days that’s due,/ What nature would, God grant to yours and you;/ The many faults that well you know I have/ Let be interred in my oblivious grave;/ If any worth or virtue were in me, let that live freshly in thy memory/ And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,/ Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms,/ And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains/Look to my little babes, my dear remains./ And if thou love thyself, or lovedst me, These O protect from step-dame’s injury./ And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,/ With some sad sighs honour my absent hearse;/ And kiss this paper for thy love’s dear sake,/ Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.”

American poet John Berryman, a reader who came obsessively under Bradstreet’s spell, spent five years in the aftermath of WW11 studying her life and work, leading up to the publication in 1953 of his “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” a 57 stanza tribute but really more like a feverish valentine. Knotty and elliptical, the poem presents a speaker who at junctures seems hard to identify—is it Berryman, Bradstreet or an amalgam of the two, the latter a clear possibility given the author’s fervent embrace of his subject. I cannot decide whether I find “Homage” to be truly touching or genuinely disturbing. The ambivalence may be attributed to my awareness of Berryman’s later suicide.

Berryman, clearly, seems to have identified with the turbulent spirit he detected in Mistress Anne. He evidently saw her like himself as being at war with the surrounding culture. I believe he was barking up the wrong Anne. Unlike Anne Hutchinson, the public rebel, Bradstreet’s conflict was essentially inner and private. We need to remember that this Anne was a poet and what W. B. Yeats said of a poem: it is the argument the poet is having with himself (or herself). I would like to suggest that the advent of Anne’s recurrent struggle between her earthly attachments and her duty to the God whom by the dictates of her faith she needs to love, honor, and obey can be pinpointed at that moment she arrived in Massachusetts in 1630. She tells her children in a letter she leaves them as she approaches death, this in about her sixtieth year, that upon first viewing the new scene, “My heart rose.” Those three monosyllables convey to me incredible poignancy. Imagine if you can. Here is a young girl, daughter of Thomas Dudley, steward to the Earl of Lincoln, who had at one time eight tutors and a large library at her disposal, who, at sixteen, recently married to Cambridge educated Simon Bradstreet, accompanied him and her beloved father on the
Arbella , the ship which was to take this vanguard of Puritans to the Bay Colony, the first cresting wave of the great Puritan migration of the 1630’s.

What can we, both reasonably and intuitively, infer about the young Anne’s state of mind at that moment when her “heart,” she tells us, “rose”? Trepidation certainly at the wilderness around her, possibly even terror and, not least, a stabbing pang of regret at all that has been left behind. She must have felt quite literally forsaken of God, God forsaken. Her bulwark against despair had to be her bond with family–father, husband, and the eight children she gave birth to over time, “my little babes, my dear remains.” Essentially, this is her perpetual conflict, a struggle between her love of this world, her attachments therein, and her duty to God, whom, by the dictates of her Puritan faith she needs to love, honor, and obey above all else. In this same final letter she confesses to the struggle, still, seemingly, ongoing, as she approaches death: “Many times hath Satan troubled me,” she writes, “concerning the verity of the Scriptures, many times by atheism how I could know whether there was a God; I never saw any miracles to confirm me, and those which I read of, how did I know but they were feigned. That there is a God my reason would soon tell me by the wondrous works that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end. The consideration of these things would with amazement certainly resolve me that there is an Eternal Being. But how should I know He is such a God as I worship in Trinity, and such a savior as I rely upon?…. 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.” I detect in that last sentence desperation more than doubt even. What she seems to imply, is that her professed faith is a gamble that she is making that she might possibly lose, indeed, might already have lost.

In recent years, some readers have wanted to see Anne Bradstreet as a stealth secularist, one writer dubbing her “the worldly Puritan.” Such a view seems to me to be an example of the wish becoming the conclusion. Her writing, taken en toto, simply doesn’t support it. This morning’s reading from Anne’s Meditation 50 in which she depicts her God coming and going like the sun is in effect registering her own persistent cycling between faith and doubt, also referenced in her parting letter. Against the poems expressing earth-anchored love of husband and children is, for instance, her poem “The Flesh and the Spirit” which employs the debate format, a poetic tradition that dates to the Middle Ages and, continues to appear, some times in disguise, up to the 20th century. The debate typically pits the claims of this life and this world against those of the next. The soul, as might be expected, normally gets the last word, although in the 20th century the tables tend to be turned as in Wallace Stevens’ magnificent meditation “Sunday Morning.” In Mr. Stevens you truly have a real honest-to-godless secularist. But Bradstreet accords the last word, and, in essence, the victory garland to the soul. Although many readers , even fairly devout ones, can claim that the arguments of the flesh seem more compelling in her poem, just as in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” Satan seems more convincing than God, Bradstreet explains why this is so. She says in her 13th meditation “The reason why Christians are so loath to exchange this world for a better is because they have more sense than faith: they see what they enjoy; they do but hope for that which is to come.” That is her way of saying this world is a real turn-on, a wholesale aphrodisiac, and who knows this better, as we have seen already, than Anne herself. In “The Flesh and the Spirit,” however, as in another poem where she consoles herself concerning the loss of her house to fire, she asserts that the eternal lease on life offered by Heaven trumps the immediate gratifications of earth.

Puritan, poet, woman, wife, mother, Anne Bradstreet was caught in a duality she couldn’t in the end bring to congruence. She remained divided between her heart’s present attachments—“Earth is the right place for love./ I don’t know where it’s likely to go better,” to quote Robert Frost—and her expectation of heaven—“My hope and treasure lies above” as she says in her loss- of- home poem.

When Henry David Thoreau lay on his death bed, a relative asked him, as one story has it, if he had prepared himself for the next world. His reply? “One world at a time.” For Mistress Bradstreet, I believe, Heaven couldn’t be dismissed, but it could wait.