Mistress Bradstreet (36 page)

The Tenth Muse
was 220 pages long and printed in a tiny typeface. There were thirteen poems in all, including her elegies to Du Bartas, Elizabeth I, and Sidney,
The Quaternions,
“The Prologue,” “The Four Monarchies,” and “David’s Lamentation for Saul and Jonathan.” It was impossible for her readers to miss her piety and skill. Clearly Anne Bradstreet was a learned, faithful woman whose work demonstrated the redemptive effects of emigrating to America. No Old World woman had ever achieved such a feat; perhaps New England had enhanced her abilities in some mysterious way, as though God looked with favor on both her project and the colony.

When he overheard remarks like these, Dudley could breathe a deep sigh of exultation. Anne’s book went a long way toward helping her family recover from Sarah’s disgrace. She had restored the reputation of the Dudley name and had become an unwitting celebrity. John had made sure to tell the reader in his prefatory letter that Anne was above all a woman who was “honoured, and esteemed where she lives for her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, and discreet managing of her family occasions.” Her poems had not impaired her commitment to her family as a good mother and wife. Her neighbors saw that she had not shirked her duties and instead had “curtailed . . . her sleep, and other refreshments” in order to devote her time to her writing. Indeed, John declared, she had spent only “some few hours” on her work.
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This was clearly not true, but what else could Woodbridge say? The appearance of any woman in print was suspicious enough—as John wrote, “The worst effect of [a man’s] reading will be unbelief, which will make him question whether it be a woman’s work, and ask, is it possible?”—and so a volume of this weight and magnitude needed copious explanation. No other woman in the history of the English language had managed such an accomplishment. It would be more than a century before another female would publish work with this kind of ambition and on this large a scale. Understandably, then, Woodbridge tried to reassure readers that Anne was not trespassing in male territory.
The Tenth Muse
was a “Womans Book” and needed to be read with sympathy by male readers, not with “envie of the inferiour Sex.”
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And yet no one balked at her achievement. Her book galloped through printings. In 1658 it was listed as one of “the most vendible books in England” in the bookseller William London’s catalog, next to “Herbert’s The Temple, Mr Milton’s Poems . . . and Mr Shaksper’s Poems.” Fifteen years later, “a very learned English woman who had tutored the daughters of Charles I” exclaimed, “How excellent a Poet Mrs. Bradstreet is (now in America) her works do testify.”
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One young man wrote a fan letter:

Your only hand those Poesies did compose,

Your head the source, whence all those springs did flow,

Your voice, whence changes sweetest notes arose,

Your feet that kept the dance alone, I trow:

Then, vail your bonnets, Poetasters all,

Strike, lower amain, and at these humbly fall,

And deem your selves advance’d to be her Pedestal.
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It seems likely that Anne wrote back to this particular devotee, whose name was John Rogers, because she had heard of him from her sister Patience. He was courting Patience’s daughter Elizabeth, and when at last he married her, John was thrilled that Anne became his aunt by marriage.

Although it was slightly overwhelming to receive such impassioned testimonials from young men, Anne also relished the attention. She cultivated her relationship with young Rogers, who was a man “of so sweet a temper” that he had few enemies and would, in fact, one day become president of Harvard College. This would turn out well for Anne, as it would probably be Rogers who would oversee the printing of her
Selected Works
years after she had died.
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Anne had achieved even more than her bold father had dreamed of when he had devoted himself to her early education. Dudley could only rejoice. New England and Anne were his two largest sources of pride, and now they had merged in a breathtaking climax. His intelligent eldest daughter had become the spokesperson for the American Puritan way.

Sadly for Anne, she was able to bask in her father’s pride for only a few years. Dudley died in 1653, when Anne was forty-one. Characteristically, she turned her attention to writing an elegy for him, fulfilling what she termed was her “duty” even as she sought comfort in verse. Though it must have been a struggle to express her admiration and love when laboring under such grief, she turned out eighty-five lines, lavishing far more attention on this tribute than she had on her brief twenty-line poem for her mother.

My mournful mind, sore pressed, in trembling verse

Presents my lamentations at his hearse,

Who was my father, guide, instructor too,

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

For who more cause to boast his worth than I?

Who heard or saw, observed or knew him better?

Or who alive than I a greater debtor?
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In this poem Anne expresses the special bond she and her father had. No one was closer to him than she, she claimed, and therefore she must endure the largest share of grief at his death. Even his new wife does not have the right to interject herself between the two. “He was my father” she declares, making no mention of her siblings. She was “his own.”
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Then, in true Dudley fashion, she shifts the poem’s theme to America and her father’s other daughter, New England. Just as Dudley delighted in Anne as the poetic spokesperson for New England, so Anne is proud of his role in the creation of the colony. He must be acknowledged for all he did so that the voices of “malice” and “envy” will not drown out his achievements:

One of thy Founders, him New England know,

Who stayed thy feeble sides when thou wast low,

Who spent his state, his strength and years with care

That after-comers in them might have share.

True patriot of this little commonweal,

Who is’t can tax thee ought, but for thy zeal?
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The elegy’s last word, “lament,” summed up Anne’s feelings during this difficult time. Word had come from over the ocean that her beloved friend Ward had died the previous fall, and his loss coupled with Dudley’s was surely hard to bear. Then John Cotton, too, expired at his home in Boston after a short illness. She seemed to have lost all of her male teachers and guides in one blow; significantly,
lament
was the last word she would write for almost ten years. With the exception of a few devotional verses, she would not pen another serious poem until the early 1660s.

No one knows why this is, or even if it is strictly true. Some of her papers could have gotten lost, especially since in the years to come she would face a tragedy that would destroy many of her belongings. But it does seem likely that she was too alone in Andover to compose poetry. Without Woodbridge and Ward, and now without her father’s support, perhaps she could no longer struggle against all the barriers that lay between a woman and a serious writing life. Or perhaps she was simply too preoccupied with running her household, as Simon continued to be busy with colonial matters of governance.

Although she could take some comfort from her eighth and last baby, who was born in 1652, she revealed the extent of her yearnings when she named the infant John, after the “brother” she missed and loved so well. Her children brought a certain kind of joy, and originally they had given her the confidence that God had blessed her and her attempts at poetry, but as time wore on, they could hardly be said to make writing easier. When little John “with wayward cries . . . did disturb her rest,” she felt herself “waste” as the child “did thrive.” Seven times before, she had done this, and she was “spent”; her strength was ebbing. How could it be otherwise? For almost twenty years, Anne had been bearing children; she was exhausted. By the time she was forty-four, “the wretched days” yawned in front of her, each one laden with responsibilities and hard physical labor that taxed her beyond her abilities. In one journal entry in 1656, she wrote, “My spirits were worn out and many times my faith weak.”
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Her tasks were made all the more difficult by the fact that mysterious illnesses began to strike with alarming frequency. Sometimes Anne wondered if it were time to follow her father on the last pious journey, the one she hoped would take her to heaven and the embrace of the eternal “Bridegroom,” Jesus, the one “man” who would never leave her and on whom she could count without any hesitation.
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Her passion for God grew, as though she were in the midst of an all-consuming love affair and had to endure time apart from her beloved as she once had mourned her time away from Simon. Employing a rather jumbled collision of divine identities, she wrote:

Lord, why should I doubt any more when Thou hast given me such assured pledges of Thy love? First, Thou art my Creator, I Thy creature, Thou my master, I Thy servant. But hence arises not my comfort, Thou art my Father, I Thy child; “Ye shall be My sons and daughters,” saith the Lord Almighty. Christ is my brother, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father, unto my God and your God; but lest this should not be enough, thy maker is thy husband. Nay more, I am a member of His body, He my head.
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She reflected, “[God] is not man that He should lie.” Instead, like a perfect suitor, “His word He plighted hath on high.” And it was this idea that comforted her most as she yearned to “cleave close to him alway[s].”
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Perhaps her loneliness and pain during these years was beneficial, since, according to her faith, it was an opportunity to deepen her relationship with God.

Still, sometimes her suffering grew so intense that life felt almost impossible to endure. For the first time since she was an adolescent, she was tortured with thoughts of her own death. “In my distress,” she cried, “I sought the Lord / When naught on earth could comfort give, / And when my soul these things abhorred.” But God gave her comfort in her despair. “Then Lord,” she wrote, “Thou said’st unto me, ‘Live.’”
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During this bleak period, it must have felt to her that her sons and daughters were all she had left. Although her eldest, twenty-year-old Samuel, had just graduated from Harvard and her second son, thirteen-year-old Simon, was at school in Ipswich, all the others were still home with her. Her two older daughters, Dorothy and Sarah, aged eighteen and fifteen, were helpful, but they were restlessly awaiting bridegrooms (Dorothy would soon marry Seaborn Cotton, John Cotton’s eldest son). The two younger girls, Hannah and Mercy, were also useful helpmates, but in 1653, when baby John was a year old, they were still only eleven and seven, while Dudley was a busy and mischievous five-year-old.

And so, even as she combated the rolling tide of fevers that struck her down, she continued the spiritual education of her strong-willed children, who “began to sin as soon as act.” She tried to guard herself against their “pleasing face[s]” because, behind their smiles, there often lurked “a serpent’s sting.” Sadly, sometimes they seemed to delight in breaking the fifth commandment to honor their parents; they were “oft stubborn, peevish, sullen,” and were inclined to “pout and cry” for no apparent reason. All this while encountering the childhood illnesses and daily “breaches, knocks and falls” that were part of life on the frontier.
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To Anne it must have seemed that the household would fall apart without her efforts. Her sons and daughters desperately needed her, and yet her strength seemed to be failing her. If she were to die, she wanted to ensure that her children grew to become devout Puritans and would continue to build New England in accordance with her father’s vision. Rather than trusting her children entirely to the care of servants or giving in to the temptation to succumb to her illnesses, she fought to stay alive and keep them out of the clutches of some “step-dame.” And it was in this protective vein that she decided to write a spiritual autobiography for the benefit of her children. She explained why in the prefatory lines:

This book by any yet unread,

I leave for you when I am dead,

That being gone, here you may find

What was your living mother’s mind.

Make use of what I leave in love,

And God shall bless you from above.
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This five-page document is remarkable as a celebration of her faith as well as an admission of her doubts. Anne urged her children to know that questioning was an essential component of Puritan belief; she wrote, “I have not studied in this you read to show my skill, but to declare the truth, not to set forth myself, but the glory of God.” She had always assumed that “there is a God,” but she wondered, “How should I know He is such a God as I worship in Trinity, and such a Saviour as I rely upon?” By voicing her own uncertainties, she gave her children permission to make their own journeys of faith. Not that they should stray from Puritanism but that they should not allow their delusions and questions to take them away from God. Everyone, Anne implied, could face such “block[s],” and she outlined hers in surprising detail, from her flirtation with “the Popish religion” to a profound despair, where she asked, “Is there faith upon the earth?” She had to put aside the virtuous reputation she had worked so diligently to create in order to confess such things, but nothing was more important than helping her children persevere in their “pilgrimage.”
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Characteristically, she ended what she called her “short matters” with an apology: “This was written in much sickness and weakness, and is very weakly and imperfectly done, but if you can pick any benefit out of it, it is the mark which I aimed at.”
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In fact this would be the principle that would govern Anne for the rest of her writing life. Even in the formal poetry she would embark on once again, she would endeavor to reveal “the glory of God” rather than the splendor of her “skill.” The most important thing now, she believed, was to write for the benefit of her readers. Like her father, she would dedicate herself to the “after-comers”: those inhabitants of New England who would read her words after she died. Perhaps she could provide them with the inspiration to devote themselves to the true God as well as to Massachusetts Bay, God’s chosen land.