Mistress Bradstreet (33 page)

But the waters did not run so smoothly with their sister Sarah. It had been almost ten years since Sarah had left home to live in Boston with her husband. With the difficult weather, depending on the season, it was overwhelming to consider traveling, especially as Anne, Mercy, and Patience were either pregnant or nursing babies during most of these years. Sarah, on the other hand, had produced only one child, a daughter named after her sister Anne, and could perhaps have braved the journey, but it seems something stopped her. Perhaps it was the dangers of travel and the distance between settlements, but it seems there was something more to her hesitation than a geographical divide.

Although Andover was so remote that it was hard to receive news from Boston, most important information did eventually find its way there. Almost immediately after little Mercy’s birth, Anne and Mercy learned that their sister was acting strangely. Although the exact details of her behavior were unclear, she appeared to be questioning the authority of the ministers just as Hutchinson and her followers used to do. This is surely what Anne and her family had always feared, that the impressionable young girl had gotten poisoned by her exposure to the older woman. Sin was contagious, after all.

In spite of Sarah’s odd behavior, or perhaps because of it, her husband took her back to England when he traveled there for business. But England in 1646 was not the place to bring an unstable young woman with a passionate temperament. On every street corner, men and women prophesied that the end of the world was coming: Charles was Satan in disguise; Jesus walked the earth. At twenty-six Sarah became swept up in the excitement. John Winthrop Jr. received a report that alarmed all of Sarah’s family with its brief description of her as “a great preacher.”
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It appeared that Sarah had taken to speaking publicly of her beliefs, another ominous echo of Hutchinson’s behavior.

Clearly Sarah had put aside the Puritan lessons of modesty and humility and was now following the commands of her own heart. Anne and her sisters could not help but brood over their sister’s actions. It began to seem that she was bound to face the same fate as New England’s false prophetess. Then even more disturbing information arrived. Sarah had suddenly turned up back in Boston without her husband and was promptly officially “admonished” for “prophesying” in “mixt assemblies.”
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What was Sarah doing in public, exposing herself to the curious eyes of both men and women, disgracing herself and her family?

As the months passed, it became evident that Sarah’s disgusted husband had no intention of coming back to Massachusetts. He was fed up and wrote angry letters to his father-in-law, accusing Sarah of adultery, heresy, and lust. To his old ministers in Boston, John Cotton and John Wilson, he declared that he had

hazarded my health and life, to satisfy the unsatiable desire & lust of a wife that in requittal impoysoned my body with such a running of a reines that would, if not (through mercie) cured, have turned unto the french Pox. It is cleare . . . that no poyson can be received from the bodie of a woman, but what shee first has received from the infected body of some other.

That he had never strayed from his marital bed went without saying, Keanye asserted, vowing that he had never bestowed “the due benevolence of a wife” to any woman besides Sarah.
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Condemned by her own husband, Sarah was in a desperate situation. Soon she could face penalties of exile, imprisonment, even death. Dudley wrote to Keanye, imploring his son-in-law to grant Sarah a divorce and desist from pushing her into a court trial for indecent behavior. Keanye pounced on the opportunity, eagerly scribbling his official repudiation: “[Sarah] has not lefte mee any roome or way of reconciliation: And theirefoare as you [Dudley] desier, I do plainely declare my resolution, never again to live with her as a Husband.”
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Getting divorced was no easy matter in Puritan New England. But Dudley was currently serving the colony as deputy governor yet again, and he applied pressure to the General Court until his colleagues relented in 1647, granting his daughter this unusual reprieve. Such an act immediately raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Dudley family’s reputation began to suffer. One settler wrote to the governor that much “offense [had been] taken, at the late Divorce granted by the Court.” He continued: “How weighty a business it is, as I neede not tell you, so I would humbly desire that some course may be taken so to cleer the Courts proceeding, as that rumors might be stopped.”
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But Winthrop stuck by his old friend, and Sarah’s divorce remained on the books—not that this helped her pull herself together. At twenty-seven she had made the decision to go her own way. Reports came to Anne that Sarah had begun having illicit love affairs, waltzing around Boston on the arms of men her family did not even know. She swore at the authorities and resumed preaching on street corners. Soon she was excommunicated from the church for “odious, lewd, and scandalous unclean behavior.”
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Dudley’s daughter, Anne’s sister, excommunicated! Dudley swung into action, arranging for Sarah to be married to a man of lower social station. He paid the man a generous allowance for the simple task of controlling his headstrong daughter. But despite her father’s efforts, Sarah would die in poverty at the age of thirty-nine, unhappy and alone.

The effects of Sarah’s behavior on her siblings are impossible to measure, although Anne’s image of the sisterly circle of unity points to the extent of the disaster for the Dudley women. To lose one sister to such hellish pursuits could only devastate the other three. At the same time, it tainted their own reputations. Perhaps all the Dudley sisters were suspect. Although Patience and Mercy seemed acceptable, Anne’s intentions could be seen as odd. Was poetry writing really so different from prophesying?

Dudley undoubtedly suffered over these blows to his family’s pride, but Anne lived far enough away from Boston to be protected from most of the gossip. Despite her constant introspection and recurring self-doubt, Anne’s confidence in herself and her poetry had grown. She knew she was doing God’s work; she had earned Ward’s blessing and had recently gained the respect and friendship of her brother-in-law, the newly minted minister of the Andover church.

Anne had not stopped writing before or after her move. Poetry was solace during the icy winters and the long nights. Back in Ipswich, she had completed two more poems, “Of the Four Ages of Man” and “The Four Seasons,” as companion pieces to “The Four Elements” and “Of the Four Humors.” This completed the “four times four” of
The Quaternions.

But Anne was only thirty-four years old. She had not finished writing, and besides, she had ended her last poem on a bitter note. Sharply disappointed in “The Four Seasons”—the final of the four poems of
The Quaternions
—she concluded that work by castigating herself for her own limitations, plaintively begging her readers’ forgiveness:

My subject’s bare, my brain is bad,

Or better lines you should have had:

The first poem fell in so naturally,

I knew not how to pass it by;

The last, though bad I could not mend,

Accept therefore of what is penned,

And all the faults that you shall spy

Shall at your feet for pardon cry.
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Although no one else seemed to share her negative assessment of the work, this was an unsatisfactory stopping place, and Anne resolved to try again and tackle a fresh project. This time she allowed herself to dream of pushing past the topics of her last work—the natural sciences and the cycles of the material world—to enter a new arena of knowledge: the history of the ancient world. What better way to connect with the two older men in her life whom she loved and yet who were now far away—Ward and Dudley. She had already displayed an impressive grasp of recent English history and politics as well as a vast store of scriptural information in
The Quaternions
and the elegies, but to tell the story of “the four monarchies” of the pre-Christian era would require mastering a fresh course of reading and would allow her to grapple with the principle of monarchy in general, a topic that was on every English person’s mind in 1646.

Characteristically, Anne must have relished the prospect of so much research; there was no more fruitful way for her to escape her fear, isolation, and loneliness than through this kind of immersion in study. Although it is unclear where she found the books she needed, whether she sent servants to Ipswich to borrow volumes or whether she and Simon had purchased new editions from England, it is evident from her verse that she raced through as many works about ancient civilizations as she could find. She also steeped herself in one of her childhood favorites, Sir Walter Raleigh’s
History of the World,
drawing inspiration from his opening salute to the reader:

For who hath not observed, what labour . . . bloodshed, and cruelty, the Kings and Princes of the World have undergone . . . to make themselves and their Issues Masters of the World? And yet hath Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Syria, Macedon, Carthage, Rome, and the rest, no fruit, no flower, grass, nor leaf, springing upon the face of the earth, of those seeds: No, their very roots and ruines do hardly remain.
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Even as Sarah shrieked heresies on the streets of Boston, Anne’s imagination was caught by worlds long gone. It was impossible not to glean lessons for herself and her family from the nation builders of the past. Her brand-new home, her chests and tables, her children, the flickering light of the candles they could now afford—she knew all this could vanish overnight if God willed it. Just as the Assyrians had turned to dust, so might the New Englanders, unless they kept the memory of Christ fresh in their hearts.

During her second winter in Andover, pregnant for the seventh time, Anne launched herself into this enormous story, seizing upon the bloodiest moments in the fifteen centuries before Christ had saved the world. Truly, this was history from a Puritan perspective. Though she was venturing out of female territory, she was not straying from the orthodoxy of her faith. And she was convinced that if she could tell the story the way it should be told, she could prove that New England was poised at the apex of human history.

Another poet might have been tempted to choose the easiest poetic method in order to sprint straight through to the end. But Anne had never had any traffic with anything facile, and she determined to use one of the most difficult poetic forms of all—the heroic couplet—stretching herself to write iambic, or five-beat lines that rhymed, one after another. This challenge was especially daunting given the gigantic dimensions of the unwritten poem that lay before her like a dark, unplanted field. Ultimately, she would have to remain metrically accurate while wresting more than twenty-five hundred rhymes out of a language that, unlike Italian and French, resisted easy assonance of any kind. In fact, only a few years later, Milton would declare that it was the chain of “rime” that had held English poets back from creating truly lofty poetry out of the English language.
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But Anne would likely have vehemently disagreed with such a statement. Rhyme was a discipline that helped elevate the writing of poetry to a religious meditation. And it was also how she helped herself remember her lines until she could find the time to write them down. Such weighty subject matter merited a muscular approach, although she wilted now and then as her task came to seem insurmountable. Sometimes she would pause in the middle of her story to call attention to her weakness as a writer; for example, warning the reader that she would “rudely mar” any description of the glories of Babylon if she attempted to pen them with any accuracy.

This task befits not women like to men

For what is past, I blush, excuse to make

But humbly stand, some grave reproof to take;

Pardon to crave for errours, is but vain,

The Subject was too high, beyond my strain. . . .
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Of course, there was a strategy at work here as well. Anne’s apology may well have been sincere, but it would also help deflect the charges of plagiarism and trespass that she so dreaded.

If Ward were near he might have assuaged her occasional doubts about her abilities. In a kind of tribute to their friendship and his patient support of her work, she carefully copied the Latin phrase
Ne sutor ultra crepidam
(that the shoemaker should stick to making shoes) from the title page of her dear friend’s
The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam
into her apology.
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In doing so, Anne hinted that despite the criticism she might face as a female writer, she, like her old friend, would never abandon her true “cobbler’s trade” of mending “feet”—a double entendre that Ward would appreciate, since “a foot” was the unit of measurement for metrical poetry.

In this determined spirit, she penned graphic accounts of the ruthless women of antiquity that more than counterbalanced her own protestations of weakness, particularly her descriptions of the careers of famous evil-doers. About Semiramis, the Assyrian soldier-empress, she wrote that she was “a brave virago” and was remarkable for her “valor.” She relished the tale of the warring Greek queens, Euridice and Olympias, noting that Euridice’s soldiers refused to “shoot” their “darts” at their old queen, Olympias, and concluding their tale with a boisterous description of Olympias’s vengefulness after she defeated the younger queen. Anne made sure that her readers appreciated the multitude of Olympias’s sins. The viperous old woman dug up the bones of her enemy’s brother “and threw his bones about to show her spite.” After she murdered her husband, she “slew,” “stopped the breath,” or “fried” the children of his other wives.
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Despite the horror Anne evinced at such wrongdoing, the number of lines she lavished on these cruel women suggested that there was something about them—their arrogant sense of freedom to create whatever havoc they desired—that fascinated her. Perhaps it was this last idea that had the most pull, the idea of liberty from the restraints of proper female decorum under which she and her sisters labored. Or maybe it was simply that female courage in all its manifestations was on Anne’s mind during those first difficult winters in Andover.