Mistress Bradstreet (38 page)

She lit upon an eight-line device, piling seven lines of iambic pentameter on top of one longer line, an alexandrine, and tying the whole thing together with a more intricate rhyme scheme than in any of her other poems (
ababccc
). But she did not want her verse to sound fancy or overwrought, nor the other extreme, like a tedious sermon. Instead, she hoped to recount the twists and turns of a real spiritual pilgrimage, and so she cast pitfalls along the way, temptations that could lure the pious reader from the final righteous destination, just as she herself had been “many times . . . troubled” by Satan.
¹⁶

Using herself as an example, Anne sought to examine the unique place of human beings in the world. Only mankind, she says, can feel God’s presence and experience both sorrow and joy, yet often we seem inferior to the rest of nature. The glorious sun, trees, birds, even crickets “in their little art” all pay tribute to God’s greatness. Yet the poet is “mute” and unable to do the same. The seasons are cyclical, and each winter is replaced with a new spring, but man ages and dies. The fish and birds know “not what is past, nor what to come dost fear,” but go about their business, “feel[ing] no sad thoughts or cruciating cares” and “know[ing] not their felicity.” Man, on the other hand, is “at best a creature frail and vain . . . subject to sorrows, losses, sickness, pain.” He is vulnerable to “troubles from foes, from friends, from dearest, near’st relation”—this last was perhaps a veiled reference to the poet’s own trials with Sarah.
¹⁷

To Anne the truth of mankind’s “natural” existence is that it is fleeting. She writes, “But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he’s laid,” lamenting that human beings “see[m] by nature and by custom cursed.” In part this is because we are forever separated from the rest of nature by the fall of Adam. Cain’s murder of Abel, Anne reflects, is only further evidence of our flawed nature, “branded with guilt and crushed with treble woes.” With both compassion and a sense of sadness, she pities the plight of the human being:

And yet this sinful creature, frail and vain,

This lump of wretchedness, of sin and sorrow,

This weatherbeaten vessel wracked with pain,

Joys not in hope of an eternal morrow;

Nor all his losses, crosses, and vexation,

In weight, in frequency and long duration

Can make him deeply groan for that divine translation.
¹⁸

Despite this, rather than extolling “the heavens, the trees, the earth” over man, Anne reminds us that nature will eventually “darken, perish, fade and die,” while only “man was made for endless immortality.” In other words, birds play an essential role in the universe, but it is a particularly human gift to yearn for God. In fact, she suggests, it is our capacity for both reflection and anticipation that will (with God’s grace) allow humankind to triumph over death. We are blessed with the ability to glimpse redemption; the problem is that we rarely exercise this capacity. Instead, “he that saileth in the world of pleasure” doesn’t realize until “sad affliction comes and makes him see” that only heaven can offer “security.”
¹⁹

Finally, Anne reflects that “time . . . draws oblivion’s curtains” even over kings and monuments. “Their names . . . are forgot. . . . Nor wit nor gold . . . scape times rust.” The futility of seeking fame—her own personal weakness—is clear. Only with God is there any kind of permanence for the pilgrim.
²⁰

Despite the beauty and completeness of “Contemplations,” which is now regarded as “a work of arresting integrity” and her most significant poem, Anne was not through promoting these ideas.
²¹
As soon as she finished this poem, she sat right down and penned another, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” a work that was more directly sermonizing than “Contemplations.” Of course, religion and politics continued to be intertwined in Anne’s world, and so “The Flesh and the Spirit” was as much about Massachusetts Bay as it was about the Puritan faith.

To humanize the theology she meant to preach, Anne returned to her old style of twenty years earlier, creating a dialogue between yet another pair of quarreling women, Flesh and Spirit. Anne conceived of the sisters as fighting over each other’s claims to precedence, just as the women did in
The Quaternions.
But in this poem, instead of the unity forged at the end of the earlier poems, there is a clear winner. Spirit conquers Flesh with a decisive flourish. Experienced poet that she was, Anne allowed Flesh to put up a good fight.

To begin with, Flesh taunts Spirit, just as Anne and her friends had been mocked by non-Puritans all those years ago in England. Indeed, even in Massachusetts, although the Puritans controlled the government and the majority of the residents were believers, still there were undoubtedly those who found their rules and their many deprivations ludicrous.

Sister, quoth Flesh, what liv’st thou on,

Nothing but meditation?

Doth contemplation feed thee so

Regardlessly to let earth go?

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

Dost dream of things beyond the moon,

And dost thou hope to dwell there soon?
²²

It was a rare Puritan who could adopt the voice of the enemy and even poke fun at the pious behavior of the devout. But Anne was proud of her differences from nonbelievers and loved the “dream[y]” nature of Puritanism, the capacity of the pious to envision the invisible and yearn for a world no one knew for certain even existed. To demonstrate the power of Spirit, she had Flesh dangle temptations in front of her sister so that Spirit could display her muscular faith.

Interestingly, Spirit counters each of Flesh’s temptations with sensual imagery. In fact, Spirit ends the poem by declaring that her spiritual kingdom is far superior to that of Flesh because one day she would have all the luxuries of her earthbound sister and more.

My garments are not silk nor gold,

Nor such like trash which earth doth hold,

But royal robes I shall have on,

More glorious than the glist’ring sun;

My crown not diamonds, pearls, and gold,

But such as angels’ heads enfold.
²³

Faith was based on the intangible prospect of a glorious future, and Anne sought to make this heaven a place her reader could imagine. She sensed that the tension between spirit and flesh—the difficulty of delaying gratification—would be the central problem of the next generation, given the waning numbers in the congregation. With prosperity came too much attachment to the world and too much laxness with regard to religion. The plenty that now graced families in America could prevent them from ever reaching the kingdom to come. Anne reflected that

the gifts that God bestows on the sons of men are not only abused but most commonly employed for a clean contrary end than that which they were given for, as health, wealth, and honour, which might be so many steps to draw men to God in consideration of His bounty toward them, but have driven them the further from Him that they are ready to say: we are lords, we will come no more at Thee. If outward blessings be not as wings to help us mount upwards, they will certainly prove clogs and weights that will pull us lower downward.
²⁴

But even as she was warning against the temptations of the world, Anne had to stare down her own earthly attachments. In the early 1660s it began to seem that the world was too kind to her. Almost immediately after Simon returned to Massachusetts from England, her oldest son, Samuel, who had completed his training as a doctor, married a beautiful if frail-seeming girl. His young bride, also named Mercy, seemed to “love [her husband] more than her own life,” and this gave Anne great delight, for her firstborn had a special place in her heart. She had never forgotten how she had yearned for his arrival; to her he would always be “the son of prayers, of vows, of tears.”
²⁵
With joy she watched Samuel build a thriving medical practice in Boston.

Her next son, Simon, was well on his way to becoming a minister, dedicating himself to his studies with devotion. Dudley, her third son, had elected not to go to Harvard and was instead being trained by his father in the skills of a real estate owner and farmer, and her youngest, John, was being tutored by the Andover schoolmaster. Although the younger boys could be wild at times, they were, in general, well-behaved, respectful lads, and Anne was relieved that her children showed every sign of being the pious young Puritans she had trained them to be.

In 1663 wonderful news came from England. John and Mercy Woodbridge were returning home. The Restoration had made England an inhospitable place for Puritan preachers, and John felt that it was time to come back to be near their loved ones and to help preserve the “true religion” in the one place it could still thrive.

It had been sixteen years since Anne had seen her sister and brother-in-law, and the 1650s had been a tumultuous decade for all of them. When John had left, Anne had still been a young woman whom he was worried he might “too much love.”
²⁶
Now she was fifty-one years old and a grandmother, as her daughters had proved more fortunate than she had been and had produced children almost immediately upon their marriages.

For both John and Anne, age and appearance were supposed to be immaterial. John had always celebrated his sister-in-law’s wisdom and the “solidness” of her work. What had always mattered to them most was conversation and poetry. Thus, when he arrived back in America, John was undoubtedly eager to see his sister-in-law’s new poems, although, unfortunately, there are no records of what he thought of Anne’s plainer style. Still, it seems likely that as a Puritan minister, he would have been thrilled with the religious themes “Contemplations” and “Flesh and Spirit” treated. For Anne the next two years flew by in a blaze of happiness that she had never thought she would have again. Her writing soared; she felt productive and fruitful. Her children were well and happy. And when Samuel sent word that Mercy was pregnant, it seemed to Anne that her life was too perfect to be true.

Samuel, however, was concerned about his young bride. She had never seemed strong to him, and so he wanted her to stay in Andover to be under his mother’s experienced care during her pregnancy. The veteran of eight labors, Anne was also a skilled and knowledgeable nurse; she had attended countless births, and so throughout her daughter-in-law’s “breeding pains,” she nurtured her as tenderly as she could.

Mercy gave birth to a baby girl, Elizabeth, in February of 1664, and Anne was exhilarated. Perhaps because of concerns about her health, the new mother stayed in Andover with her mother-in-law, and Samuel visited frequently. For Anne, the baby’s cries and murmurs must have made the house feel alive again. Before long Elizabeth was smiling, sitting up, and taking her first steps, although Anne undoubtedly warned her daughter-in-law that this was the stage when she had to be particularly vigilant, since toddlers were notoriously liable to harm themselves. In fact, Anne found that she had a lot of advice to give.

While Elizabeth crawled throughout the house, forcing the family to put the fireguard hastily into place and to store the sharp knife blades on high shelves, Anne decided to devote herself to writing a series of “meditations” that she dedicated to her son Simon, who had asked her to “leave something for [him] in writing that [he] might look upon, when [he] should see me no more.”
²⁷
Anne had leaped at this idea because it fit well with her sense of wanting to leave behind a legacy for her children and the generations to come.

“Diverse children have their different natures,” she wrote, sounding as though she were speaking directly to Mercy. “Some are like flesh which nothing but salt will keep from putrefaction, some again like tender fruits that are best preserved with sugar. Those parents are wise that can fit their nurture according to their nature.” Or, she advised, “A prudent mother will not clothe her little childe with a long and cumbersome garment, she easily foresees what events it is like to produce, at the best but falls and bruises, or perhaps somewhat worse.” And, “Some children are hardly weaned; although the teat be rubbed with wormwood or mustard, they will either wipe it off, or else suck down sweet and bitter together.”
²⁸

Anne never failed to draw God into her homespun counsel. In her eyes God became like the “prudent mother” who “proportion[s] his dispensations according to the stature and strength of the person he bestows them on,” and Christians were like the infants who clung to the mother’s breasts even when God carefully “embitter[ed] all of the sweets of this life, that . . . they might feed upon more substantial food, yet they are so childishly sottish that they are still hugging and sucking these empty breasts [of the world].”
²⁹

During the first year of Elizabeth’s life, Anne wrote seventy-seven of these aphorisms, and she included many more topics besides motherhood. Some were directly political: “Dim eyes are the concomitants of old age, and shortsightedness in those that are eyes of a republic foretells a declining state.” Others were moral observations: “Wickedness comes to its height by degrees. He that dares say of a less sin ‘Is it not a little one?’ will ere long say of a greater, ‘Tush, God regards it not.’”
³⁰

Though she was living through one of the happiest stages in her life, Anne reflected that sadness might befall her at any moment.

All have their bounds set . . . and till the expiration of that time, no dangers no sickness no paines nor troubles, shall put a period to our dayes, the certainty that that time will come, together with the uncertainty, how, where, and when, should make us so to number our dayes as to apply our hearts to wisedome.
³¹

Sadly, her words proved prophetic. There was something terribly wrong with Mercy’s child. Whether it was fever or smallpox or some congenital ailment is unclear, but in the middle of a hot August night, when she was only a year and a half old, Elizabeth died.