Anne Bradstreet: Poems from Early America Quiz

Answer: The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung Up in America

Anne Bradstreet, nee Dudley, (1612-1672) was born to a well-off Puritan family in Northampton, England, traveled with her husband on board the Arbella with John Winthrop to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Following Winthrop's long tenure as governor, Bradstreet became governor himself.

Her book--"The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung Up in America"--was supposedly published without her knowledge. However, a letter to the publisher of this book suggests that she is giving permission for its publication. Some believe that she maintained ignorance of her book's being published on purpose so as to protect herself from censure from her Puritan community. While much of her godly and spiritual poetry would have been acceptable to a Puritan audience, her society believed that writing was a man's profession. Furthermore, the knowledge required to write the structurally sophisticated poetry she wrote, as well as to discuss the topics she discussed, was not typical of a woman; women were not supposed to pursue knowledge and academics to the extent that men did. Perhaps, too, she did not wish to hinder her husband's political prospects.

Her second publication of "The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung Up in America" was truly published without her knowledge or without her permission. Her brother-in-law, the Reverend John Woodridge, took her manuscript to England without her knowing it and republished it in a more sophisticated binding and cover. After learning of this, she was at first upset and embarrassed, but soon warmed to what had happened, as the book was well reviewed and began making money.

"The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung Up in America" is the only collection of Bradstreet's poetry published during her lifetime; however, she wrote other poems that are considered parts of other collections.

Answer: her book of poems published without her knowledge

The name of the poem referred to in the question is "The Author to Her Book", and "the friends, less wise than true" refers mainly to her brother-in-law, who pilfered her book of poems "The Tenth Muse lately Spung Up in America" to republish it in England in a more glorious manner and bring her more recognition than she was experiencing.

The poem represents the typical (if not perhaps stereotypical) attitude of a Puritan toward accomplishment or achievement. Bradstreet refers to her book as "ill-formed" and to her brain as "feeble" because in her culture human beings were flawed and sinful--evil, corrupt creatures. She should not attempt to bring attention or glory to herself, for a human was not worthy of such things, and, besides, focusing on oneself would distract from focusing on God. All human thought and action should glorify God.

At one point, Bradstreet writes, "I cast thee by as one unfit for light, / Thy visage was so irksome in my sight". If a reader compares these lines and others to words from poems by Edward Taylor, another early American Puritan poet, he or she can see that Bradstreet's humility is not unique to her. For example, in Taylor's "Prologue" to his "Preparatory Mediations", he compares himself to a "crumb of dust" and asks God to "pardon" his miserable attempts at poetry. In fact, he believes that he couldn't even use a pen correctly without God's help: "It would but blot and blur, yea jag and jar / Unless thou mak'st the Pen, and the Scrivener".

Bradstreet also in this poem demonstrates her playfulness through the use of a pun: "I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet, / Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet". She appears to be referring to an antiquated practice of stretching a child's limbs to make the limbs equal in length if the child were born with one limb shorter than the other. However, continuing her metaphorical comparison of her book to a child, she is also referring to the feet of her metrical lines of poetry. A foot, to a poet, would be a certain number of syllables arranged so that one syllable receives stress or emphasis. Sometimes, poets, who might revise their lines, might notice that they didn't have the correct number of syllables per line and would have to "stretch" the line or add the appropriate number of syllables.

Answer: Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666

"Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666" captures Puritan beliefs and ideals perfectly. They were to follow the Biblical commandment to be thankful in all things, and the lines from the quotation in the question demonstrate her doing that as she "blest His name". Puritans also attempted to live lives of complete humility and dependence on God. One can see her humility and dependence in lines such as these: concerning her house, she writes, "It was His own; it was not mine. / Far be it that I should repine", and then she resolves, "The world no longer let me love. / My hope and treasure lie above". Furthermore, Puritans tended to see a purpose in all things, and Bradstreet seems to believe that God has taken her home to remind her that spiritual matters are more important than earthly ones and to reprimand her for having placed so much value on material possessions. She writes these lines:

"Then straight I 'gin my heart to chide:
And did thy wealth on earth abide?
Didst fix thy hope on mouldring dust?
The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?
Raise up thy thoughts above the sky
That dunghill mists away may fly."

Her comparison of the smoke rising above the ashes of her home to the steam rising above a fresh pile of dung certainly capture her understanding of earthly things as having utterly no value, as well as being odious and repulsive.

Answer: Jesus, the Son of God

Much of Bradstreet's poem "Contemplations" represents a variety of emblematic poetry. A writer describes a scene or an object, subtly compares that scene or object to something else, and then draws a conclusion (usually a moral one) from that comparison. Here, Bradstreet describes the beauty of the sun and its light. She is looking upon leafy trees, already arrayed in the colors of fall, and describes them as having yet more color because of the sun's light having settled upon them. Then, her eyes are drawn higher to the sky itself and she begins to describe the sun itself--not only its appearance but also its power. After several stanzas, the reader begins to conclude that Bradstreet, while talking about the sun, is also talking about the Son (as in the Son of God). As she thinks upon the beauty of the world and the beauty of Christ, her vision is drawn higher still into the heavens themselves, and she concludes, "How full of glory then must they Creator be, / Who gave this bright light luster unto thee?"

This is only a small part of the poem. She then looks at Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and remarks upon how they lost paradise. However, she looks too at how humans in her own time continue to lose paradise every day. She thinks about how the earth seems to renew itself continuously with the seasons while humans die and are gone forever. She then comments on how this is an illusion because the Bible has taught her that the earth will one day pass away while humans, or at least their souls, never die. She decides in the end to place her faith in that which is eternal rather than that which is temporal. If one reads enough of Bradstreet's poetry, one realizes that she struggled with being trapped between the attractions of this world (the creation's beauty, her family, her husband, etc.) and her duty to God. In many ways, she often seems to hope for an eternal life on earth--as if earth is where Heaven ultimately will be.

Answer: The Vanity of All Worldly Things

The theme of Bradstreet's poem "The Vanity of All Worldly Things" is the same as that of "Ecclesiastes", which is believed by most to have been written by David's son Solomon. The author of the Old Testament book of wisdom writes: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (1:2, KJV) and later, "I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit" (1:14, KJV).

Just as Solomon concludes that the only consolation human beings can find is through service to God, Bradstreet concludes her poem declaring that following the way of Christ "satiates the soul, this stays the mind".

Answer: her being buried outside of a hallowed graveyard and without a tombstone

"Before the Birth of One of Her Children" does not contain the faithfulness or optimism of the previous poems mentioned in this quiz. In fact, the poem offers only despair and anxiety. It begins with a very gloomy couplet: "All things within this fading world hath end, / Adversity doth still [meaning "always"] our joys attend". The poem's mood never lightens from this point onward and mentions God only once when she hopes that God will bestow blessings on her loved ones after she's gone. At one point, she makes clear that not even the bond of love is strong enough to protect us from death as she contemplates the futility of living as if our loved ones belong to us: "That when that knot's untied that made us one, / I may seem thine, who in effect am none". What many readers have noted about the poem is that not once does she think of the child she is carrying; she seems totally focused on herself except for the couple of lines in which she mentions her worry about how a step-mother might treat her living children. While one might take this lack of concern about the child she's carrying as an indication of Bradstreet's selfishness or egocentrism, it more than likely is an indication of a tendency to avoid thinking about a child and becoming attached to it before it is safely born into the world.

The poem demonstrates the very real fear that women experienced during pregnancy and childbirth at the time in Europe. However, consider that Bradstreet is across the Atlantic in a settlement in the wilderness of North America. Often, becoming pregnant was a death sentence, and many women did not approach the experience of pregnancy with the degree of joy that couples experience nowadays. Bradstreet's courageous spirit is perhaps represented in her risking pregnancy eight different times in early America and doing so despite her weak constitution, the result of childhood illness.

Answer: metaphor

Anne Bradstreet metaphorically refers to her granddaughter as a flower, perhaps not only to suggest the frailty of human life but its fleeting and transitory nature as well. The short poem is only two stanzas long, and in the first one, she attempts to console herself through her belief that the child is not truly dead but alive and well in Heaven: "Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate, / Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate, / Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state". While it's tempting to read the first of these three lines as a question rather than an admonishing or bolstering statement, the second stanza more clearly illustrates Bradstreet's inability to understand the child's death, which, as a Puritan, she sees as an act of God, for all things are under God's immediate and absolute control. To Bradstreet, her grandchild's death goes against nature itself. She writes:

"By nature trees do rot when they are grown,
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate."

Frequently in other poems, Bradstreet looks to nature for an understanding of the way of the world, and she does so here. All of nature suggests to her that death occurs only after an organism has matured or has come to its fruition. To her, the death of her grandchild is irrational, inexplicable, and unjust, and all she can do is end her lament with something akin to, "Who can understand the ways of God?"

Answer: to cut a plant short by cutting off its top

At the time Anne Bradstreet wrote this poem, she had already witnessed the deaths of two other grandchildren born to her son Samuel and his wife Mercy. One can imagine the grief and frustration that Bradstreet must have been experiencing by this point. Eventually, Mercy Bradstreet would die herself after giving birth to yet another child, and then this child died as well. In fact, only one child of Samuel and Mercy's lived to see adulthood. To say that pregnancy, childbirth, and surviving infancy and childhood were difficult is to risk understatement.

In this poem, Bradstreet continues the metaphorical reference to her grandchildren as flowers:

"No sooner came, but gone, and fall'n asleep,
Acquaintance short, yet parting caused us weep;
Three flowers, two scarcely blown, the last i' th' bud,
Cropt by th'Almighty's hand; yet is He good."

In the third line, Bradstreet refers to Elizabeth, Anne, and then Simon. The first two had hardly bloomed, as she says, when they died, but Simon was so young that he was still only a bud. Again, she sees their deaths as a result of God's decisions and actions. He is the one who took them, and the word "cropt" suggests she interprets his taking them as harsh, if not cruel. It is as if he has beheaded them, executed them, "cut off their tops". Then she seems to quickly and guiltily follow her blaming metaphorical statement with the words "yet is He good" in an attempt to return her mind to piety. Or, is her statement meant to be a sarcastic one?

She wants to gripe and to complain but knows this is not her duty, so later she writes, "With dreadful awe before Him let's be mute / Such was His will, but why, let's not dispute". Obviously, there is no reason to remind herself that her role is to be quiet and accepting unless she is tempted to not be these things. Then, a few lines later, she writes, "Let's say He's merciful as well as just". It's important to focus on why she uses the word "say". Consider that she does not write, "He IS merciful" or "Let's BELIEVE" or "Let's HAVE FAITH". The use of the word "say" suggests she may be doubting God's omnibenevolence at this point, or that in her anger she just doesn't feel as if she can say more confident-sounding words and phrases, so she is going to pay lip service until she can believe again. She's going to "fake it until she can make it" as some are apt to say. She knows her duty is to be grateful and praising of God in all things, so she does what she can; she will say the words even if she can't really feel them at this point.

Answer: Simon Bradstreet

At some point around the year 1628, Anne Dudley married Simon Bradstreet, who assisted her father Thomas Dudley, a steward of the Earl of Lincoln's estate. She would have been around the age of sixteen at this time. Though not completely at peace with the idea, she traveled to America with her husband and her parents in 1630 under the leadership of John Winthrop, who served as the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first governor. Simon Bradstreet was very much involved in the politics of the colony, but did not become its governor until 1679, so Anne Bradstreet was not alive to experience this part of her husband's life; she died in 1672 at the age of 60 after having struggled with tuberculosis. Both Anne's father and her husband were instrumental in the establishment of Harvard University, and two of her sons were graduates of the institution. The Bradstreet Gate in Harvard Yard is dedicated to Anne Bradstreet and her significance as America's first published poet.

"To My Dear and Loving Husband" is a short poem. The remainder of it, following the first four lines in the question, is as follows:

"I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense,
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever."

The final lines, while quite romantic, are certainly not very Puritan-like. She seems to place faith in the idea that the earthly love between her and Simon will save them from death, not in the idea of God's gift of salvation.

Answer: their children

The lines quoted in the question above represent a passion that would be typical of all human beings but not typical of a Puritan to express in writing for the public to read. Of course, as she has referred to her husband as the "Sun" and the sun's heat and light give life to all organisms on the planet, a reader may easily interpret her words as having symbolic meaning. On the other hand, the word "heat" also refers to physical passion and sexual desire, and his burning desire for her would certainly have led to the birth of "those fruits" that she "bore".