Mistress Bradstreet (31 page)

Taught what was good, and what was ill,

What would save life, and what would kill.

Thus gone, amongst you I may live,

And dead, yet speak, and counsel give . . .
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There was a lesson here. It was not enough to live a “worthy” life; it had to be remarked upon by others for its example to resonate in the future. This was not about fame or perennial recognition. Instead, it was the duty of the Puritan mother to pass on a spiritual legacy to the next generation. Of course, writing an epitaph was one way Anne could mourn her mother; but she also felt her children needed “to see” their grandmother so they could emulate her piety. And Anne could use poetry to pass on her own beliefs to her children in case she died prematurely and they started to stray. What better way could she serve New England? Anne would pursue this idea of feminine legacy and the passing of tradition between mothers and daughters in her next series of poems.

Before Dorothy died, when Anne was working on “A Dialogue,” Dudley had sent her a copy of a poem he had been writing to inspire her to try her hand at yet more ambitious verse. His poem is no longer in existence, but from Anne’s description of it, it featured four women who were allegorical figures of “the four parts of the world.”
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Whenever her father laid down the gauntlet, Anne rose to the challenge, and this time was no exception. In the years preceding Dorothy’s death, she had embraced this fresh project even though she was not yet finished with “A Dialogue.” After her mother died, she drove herself to compose an even more compendious and far-reaching poem. In fact, before her very eyes, the poem got longer and longer and then split into four parts, and then another four parts, until she had what she called
The Quaternions,
four poems with four sections each. When she was done, she would have written sixteen poems and more than eighteen hundred lines, an enormous accomplishment for any poet. Perhaps this flurry of work helped take Anne’s mind off the loss of her mother. But it is also possible that Dorothy’s absence gave Anne the freedom she needed to take more literary risks. After all, it was Dudley, not Dorothy, who had always encouraged her creative drive.

Anne must have had some sense of pride in these poems, because later she would confess that her characters might “seem . . . to claim precedency” over her father’s, but of course she hastened to add that this was only a trick of the eye, since it was impossible for her “humble hand” to have “rudely penned” anything superior to her father’s verse.
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The sheer size of
The Quaternions
is particularly impressive given that Simon continued to travel much of the time and Anne still had all her duties as a mother and a deputy husband. Yet somehow she seized the opportunity and the time to pen poems that would display her encyclopedic learning and would also address the complexities of the relationships between mothers, daughters, and sisters as well as the difficulties of feminine aspiration.

Pent up, lonely, and brimful of ideas, in the initial poems of
The Quaternions
she set herself the vertiginous goal of telling the story of creation. Those who felt that women should not addle their wits with too much information and too much political involvement could not be too badly offended, as this was one of the most popular subjects from Scripture.

Of course, Anne had stolen this idea from Du Bartas, the long-winded sixteenth-century poet she admired so fervently and had elegized earlier that year. But her poem bore little resemblance to his. To begin with, she released herself from the necessity of relying exclusively on scriptural knowledge for telling her story and included the latest scientific discoveries. Even more important, while Du Bartas had bogged down in attempting to describe the first seven days of the universe, Anne came up with her own narrative structure. By refusing to tell the story chronologically and by resisting the point of view of an omniscient (and implicitly male) narrator, she created a story with suspense, tension, and character development. As in “A Dialogue,” her people spoke directly to each other, as though they were in a play.

Once again, Anne drew on her experience as one of four sisters and as the mother of three girls. In “The Four Elements,” the first poem of
The Quaternions,
she used female characters to stand for the cardinal elements of the universe—air, water, earth, and fire. This was not in itself an unusual decision; many other writers had used allegorical female figures in their poetry. But their characters were usually stiff emblems of some abstract quality: patience, virtue, mercy, and so on. Anne, on the other hand, breathed life into her women, making them into “sisters” who jockeyed for position.

Each element shouted that she was the most important to the universe. This was the kind of competitive anger, knowledge, and passion that good Puritan females weren’t supposed to possess. In Anne’s poem this feminine rage threatened to destroy the world:

All would be chief, and all scorned to be under,

Whence issued winds and rains, lightning and thunder;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The sea did threat the heavens, the heavens the earth,

All looked like a chaos or new birth:

Fire broiled Earth, and scorched Earth it choked.

Both by their darings, Water so provoked

That roaring in it came . . .
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Although Anne allowed for the possibility of the creation of a new order from the clash between these sisters, she focused most of her energy on describing a bone-rattling apocalypse that was meant to chill her readers into repenting their battles, reestablishing the harmony that they were supposed to enjoy and thereby forestalling the wrath of God and the blight of His judgment.

Ultimately, Anne’s elements attempt to resolve their quarrel through rational debate, suggesting that if even women, generally considered the weak-minded sex, could rely on reason to quiet their problems, then so could the Puritan leaders in both England and New England. Otherwise England would be destroyed.

To flesh out each character’s argument, Anne had to study fiercely. She would have to master the physics, chemistry, and practical applications of each element to make the debate compelling and informative. She was fortunate to live in Ipswich, with its many good private libraries. Dedicated as she was to running her household smoothly, she still threw herself into her research, knowing that she would have to squeeze her hours of scholarship into her already full days.

Ironically, the restrictions Anne faced as a female writer seemed to work in her favor. Because she drew upon the material she knew best, the experience of women, and of women in families, her work had an earthy quality lacking in the sermons and poems of her male counterparts. In addition, the potential criticism that she faced as a female writer pressed her into creating more finely wrought and imaginative work than was required of her male contemporaries. Men were not subject to the limitations she had to circumvent and could simply write diatribes, pamphlets, and sermons, whereas the inventiveness that poetry demanded suited Anne and served her well.

Still, Anne could never escape the problems she faced as a woman writer. In the introductory poem (which she addressed to her father), she worried that no one would believe she had written these poems herself. She was especially concerned that people would think she had copied her words from Du Bartas:

[I] . . . feared you’ld judge Du Bartas was my friend,

I honour him, but dare not wear his wealth;

My goods are true (though poor), I love no stealth,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I shall not need mine innocence to clear,

These ragged lines will do’t when they appear.
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The fact that she worried about such accusations was an indication of the uniqueness of her achievement. This was an ambitious project for any poet, let alone a woman. Anne knew that it would be impossible for many of her contemporaries to explain the power and intelligence of her work except by charging her with plagiarism. Here was a new use of feminine self-deprecation. Her “poor” lines would attest to the authenticity of her work.

Yet Anne’s “sisters” exploded the idea that women were always the dulcet, obedient individuals they were supposed to be. It was as though her characters embodied her own hidden ambitions, to which she could never confess. In the world of poetry, her “elements” could be as pushy, smart, and aggressive as they wanted; each sister shoved the others to the side in order to demonstrate her own importance. Nowhere did Anne paint a picture of the pious, demure Puritan lady Dorothy had raised her to be. Her women shouted, raged, and insulted each other as bawdily as any man.

But “The Four Elements” was not simply a free-for-all, since Anne also made sure to apply her copious research. Earth gave a brief overview of the geography of Greece; Fire spoke of the great towns she had razed to the ground, from Troy to Zion; Water outlined her services to the ancient Egyptians; and Air explained that she occupied “every vaccuum,” a radical scientific concept for the era (though ultimately it would be proven untrue). Each of these learned ladies tried to outdo the other in the scope of her knowledge. No one had ever heard of such a thing—a tribe of debating bluestockings—although it is tempting to wonder if this is how Anne, Patience, Mercy, and Sarah argued among themselves.

By the time she was done composing this poem, these women were Anne’s intimates. She had steeped herself in their “qualities” and imagined who they would be if they were really alive. She had read late into the night, holding lines of verse in her mind during the day and writing the new sections of the poem down only after the children slept. Samuel, Dorothy, Sarah, Simon, and Hannah must have quickly become accustomed to their mother’s distracted looks, her habit of tuning out their demands while she worked, and her way of listening, it seemed, to voices no one else could hear.

So while she stood at the huge fireplace, tending each of the little fires—the embers that allowed a corn pudding to simmer slowly in its kettle, the low flame in the back that baked the bread for the week, and the roar near the front that roasted the chicken they would eat that day for dinner, Anne might have heard the orange tongues declare,

Ye cooks, your kitchen implements I frame

Your spits, pots, jacks, what else I need not name

Your daily food I wholesome make, I warm

Your shrinking limbs, which winter’s cold doth harm.
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On the hot summer days when it seemed miraculous that the river had not completely dried up, the trickle that splashed over the pebbles on the riverbed seemed to gurgle, “If I withhold, what art thou? Dead dry lump, / Thou bear’st no grass nor plant not tree, nor stump.” While Earth declared defiantly, “I come not short of you, / In wealth and use I do surpass you all.” Even the gentle Air itself seemed to sigh, “I am the breath of every living soul. / Mortals, what one of you that loves not me / Abundantly more than my sisters three?”
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How could Anne ignore the quarrel that was going on all around her, even if it was, so to speak, a civil war of her own invention? After all, the scholars said that whenever the powers of darkness disrupted the harmony of the elements, the result was invariably natural disasters of all kinds, as well as a mirroring chaos in the microcosm of the human world.

She could not stop, then, with Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. According to Aristotle, whom Anne read in translation, the human being was a miniature version of the universe itself. Man, too, was a mixture of four elements, known as “humors”—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm.

Although all four humors were present in each individual, one humor was believed to dominate according to a person’s overall health and personality type. Blood, which was in charge of distributing the humors throughout the body, was supposed to bestow a generous temperament on those who were “sanguine” in nature. Choler, which governed the heart and gave the body the necessary “heat” to function, was responsible for a martial spirit. Melancholy, which was in charge of the bones, liver, stomach, and spleen, tended to make one sad but also wise. And Phlegm, which was responsible for the governance of the brain, gave one an intellectual bent, since it was in charge of reason, imagination, and memory.

According to contemporary science, if the four elements battled with each other, the four humors would reflect this dissension and human beings would have to contend with illness, disaster, and plague. To Anne there was clear evidence of the universe’s lack of harmony, from the civil war in England to the death of the best and the holiest, such as the Lady Arbella all those years ago. Even the Hutchinson debacle was an example of how the finest individual could be toppled by the brutal forces of the devil.
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Again, Anne translated this academic idea—that dissension among the elements would produce chaos in each human being—into what she knew best. Air, Fire, Water, and Earth would become pregnant and produce daughters, the four humors, who would vie for primacy in a companion piece to “The Four Elements.” Each humor shared many of the qualities of her “mother element.” Happily, this new poem, appropriately titled “Of the Four Humors,” also required more research, an activity Anne seemed to thrive on. Now she would have to read all she could find on human anatomy, medicine, and the actual workings of the humors—which organs they were associated with and what powers they governed in the body.

Once she mastered the science she needed, she poured her knowledge into shaping the quarreling cousins in their own battle for preeminence. When Phlegm asserts her primacy as the seat of the senses, her description of the miracle of human eyesight reveals that Anne had read the foremost expert on anatomy, Dr. Helkiah Crooke, and was as up-to-date on the science of sight as was possible:
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