Mistress Bradstreet (39 page)

Anne was brokenhearted. She had never lost a child, and in her sorrow, she turned to her old method of managing pain, writing an elegy to baby Elizabeth that combined theology with the intimate, loving language of a grandmother. The result was a poignant poem of great beauty. She used the stanza she had invented in “Contemplations” to lament her little granddaughter:

Farewell dear babe, my heart’s too much content,

Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,

Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,

Then ta’en away unto eternity.

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.
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Anne had been practicing this sort of personal renunciation in her verse for years. No longer did she blame herself when bad things happened. Over time she had learned that she had no ability to influence the course of events in her life, and so she turned her heart toward God, resolving to stay true to her faith not only for her own sake but also as an example for the grief-stricken Mercy and Samuel.

But Mercy, who was pregnant again, was too shaken by this event to have a clear sense of what to do. She seems to have refused to move back to Boston and clung to her mother-in-law in her sorrow. Anne counseled her as best she could, reminding her, “If we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” And “Yet . . . must we trust in the Lord and stay upon our God” even “when He seems to be . . . quite gone out of sight.”
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Whether or not she was able to take comfort from these sentiments, Mercy continued to stay in Andover, and that November, to everyone’s delight, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl whom she called Anne, in clear testimony to her love for her mother-in-law.

It would have been impossible for Anne not to love her namesake, and she cherished the times that little Anne did “come to me,” writing that the little sprite was like a “bubble” or a “flower.”
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But that summer, when the new baby was only nine months old and nearly a year after Elizabeth’s death, another tragedy struck the Bradstreet household. A servant dropped a lit candle. Almost immediately the entire house was engulfed in heat and smoke. Anne woke to a “thund’ring noise” and someone with “a dreadful voice” shouting, “Fire!” and again, “Fire!” Three generations of Bradstreets filled the night with “piteous shrieks,” and Anne “did cry” to “my God . . . / To strengthen me in my distress / And not to leave me succorless.”
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Anne and Simon managed to get everyone out safely, and once outside, stricken and heartsick, Anne “beheld a space / the flame consume my dwelling place.” The air was thick and gray, and at last she “could no longer look.”
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The line of neighbors who had rushed to help at last gave up on saving the house, working only to contain the disaster and protect their own dwellings. And so the home that she had lived in for nearly twenty years crashed in bits and pieces to the ground.

As usual, she comforted herself by scribbling down a poem, this time on a sheet of “loose paper” that was all she had left, since her writing books had all been destroyed. She had lost her family’s clothes and possessions, a library of eight hundred books, and many of her personal papers, including some of her poems. She mourned

the places . . .

Where oft I sat and long did lie:

here stood that trunk,

and there that chest,

There lay that store I counted best.

My pleasant things in ashes lie,

And them behold no more shall I.

But characteristically, Anne did not allow herself to despair. She reminded herself that God “gave and took . . . yea, so it was, and so ’twas just. / It was His own, it was not mine.”
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After all, she had already had ample practice “contemplating” the fleeting nature of earthly things.

With Simon’s resources, however, it didn’t take long to have a new house built. Anne turned back to her poetry, continuing to revise and edit for a second edition of her work. Now she was ruthless in her cuts, dismantling some of her early poems in accordance with her deepened faith in New England and Puritanism. Despite the fire, the inconvenience and hardship of having to start over again in a new house, Anne found the next few years to be far more rewarding than she could have imagined. She had her hands full yet again. Her new home rang with the voice of her granddaughter; her own younger children were thriving. Simon’s businesses were doing well. All in all, she had little to complain about.

Still, Anne remained on her guard against disaster, and this was fortunate, because in 1669 her life took a sudden downward turn. By then little Anne was three years old, and her grandmother spent a good deal of time watching over her while her frail mother, Mercy, who was pregnant again, rested. But late that spring, Anne’s heart contracted in misery and fear. Helplessly, she watched as little Anne “withered,” having contracted a fever. She tried all the healing remedies she had learned over the years, but the little child’s fate seemed “sealed,” and she died, leaving her grandmother to lament her passing “with troubled heart and trembling hand.”
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Though it seemed impossible to console herself and the baby’s parents, she penned yet another elegy, “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old.”

The result was a poem that sounded like a confession of anger at God, as though Anne were whispering her rage at the injustice of human affairs:

How oft with disappointment have I met,

When I on fading things my hopes have set.

Experience might ’fore this have made me wise,

To value things according to their price.

Was ever stable joy yet found below?

Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe?

I knew she was but as a withering flower,

That’s here today, perhaps gone in an hour;

Like as a bubble, or the brittle glass,

Or like a shadow turning as it was.
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Anne made it clear that it was no easy matter for her to surrender this child to the Lord, but she chided herself for forgetting the lessons of her earlier tragedies as well as for trusting God to keep the child alive. She should have known better, she reflected, than to regard the child as “mine own, when thus impermanent.” God takes all things away and she blamed him for her misery: “The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight.” Finally, rather than being resigned to losing the child, she dreamed of soon rejoining her: “thou ne’er shall come to me, / But yet a while, and I shall go to thee.”
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Little Anne might at last be in a joyful condition, but her grandmother was not. In the privacy of her writing book, she decided that she had had enough. She was ready, once again, to leave this cruel world behind, and so she wrote her own farewell in a poem without a title. In the first lines of this poem, which she penned in such haste that she actually left out all punctuation, she relished the thought of all the suffering she would leave behind in death, comparing herself to an exhausted traveler, at last able to halt his journey:

As weary pilgrim now at rest,

Hugs with delight his silent nest,

His wasted limbs now lie full soft

That mirey steps have trodden oft,

Bless himself to think upon

His dangers past, and travails done.

The burning sun no more shall heat,

Nor stormy rains on him shall beat.

The briars and thorns no more shall scratch,

Nor hungry wolves at him shall catch.

He erring paths no more shall tread,

Nor wild fruits eat instead of bread.
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Anne was tired of weeping and depleted by the “cares and sorrows” of the last three years. Her body ached. She felt weakened by the hard work of a lifetime, and she no longer felt able to cope with the hardships of her existence. It seemed to her that she was “moldering away.” “Oh,” she exclaimed, “how I long to be at rest / And soar on high among the blest.” She ended this poem by begging God to take her into His arms and allow her to “behold” the “lasting joys” of His love, crying, “Lord make me ready for that day, / Then come, dear Bridegroom, come away.”
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Perhaps writing the elegy for the little girl who bore her name had allowed Anne to envision her own leave-taking. Now, once again, death seemed a comforting idea. Although Anne must have thought this was her final piece, two more tragic events were to occur, both of which necessitated the writing of elegiac poems.

That October, when Mercy gave birth to another baby, her first son, it was difficult for Anne, or anyone, for that matter, to be too hopeful for this new life. After all, how long would this baby last? And indeed, by November Anne sorrowed because little Simon was “no sooner came, but gone, and fall’n asleep, / Acquaintance short, yet parting caused us weep.”
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She allowed herself to consider the painful blows of Mercy’s three dead babies in the next sad elegy she forced herself to write, inserting six very angry lines right in the middle of the poem:

Three flowers, two scarcely blown, the last i’the bud,

Cropt by th’Almighty’s hand; yet is He good.

With dreadful awe before Him let’s be mute,

Such was His will, but why, let’s not dispute,

With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust,

Let’s say He’s merciful as well as just.
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Anne could not help revealing her ambivalence about God after these many losses. Although she appears to proclaim His benevolence, her inversion “yet is He good” sounds far less declarative than interrogative. In the face of God’s indomitable will, she depicts herself as speechless. There is no defense for His behavior, she seems to splutter, no way to explain His cruelty. Although she quickly tries to dampen her rage, clearly she does have a matter to “dispute” with Him. Of course, Anne knew that she must not rebel against the Lord. But the phrasing “Let’s say He’s merciful as well as just” sounds like a qualified statement that she couldn’t really credit.

Anne’s poetic efforts did not help her son make peace with these terrible deaths, and whether it was in anger or despair, the following year he decided that he and Mercy needed a new chance at life and shocked his parents by announcing that he was going to leave New England for good and emigrate to Jamaica. Anne was horrified that Samuel would risk his life, abandon the Puritan colony, and leave her so far behind. But there was nothing she could say to stop him from setting sail. Instead she had to console herself with the company of her daughter-in-law. Because Mercy was pregnant yet again, Samuel had decided to leave her behind and send for her when she had recovered from her travail. Sadly, Anne must have suspected what would happen next.

Mercy was even more worn-out than her mother-in-law and in even more pain. On the third of September 1670, she bore a little girl, whom she again named Anne, surrendering to her tragic wish to restore life to her other lost child. But a few days later both she and the infant died, leaving behind an inconsolable grandmother.
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If she had thought that the first little Anne’s death was the final straw, Anne knew this horror was all that she could bear. In the space of five years she had weathered the loss of her daughter-in-law and four grandchildren as well as the conflagration of her beloved house. Her eldest son had fled from New England, and Anne wanted only one thing, to join her father and mother in God’s eternal kingdom.

ANNE NEVER DID FULLY RECOVER
from the tragedy of Mercy’s death. God’s “corrective hand” had finally convinced her of the Puritan truth, that this world was nothing but a “vale of sorrow” and her thoughts should rest entirely in heaven. By 1671, at age fifty-nine, Anne had begun to suffer from a “consumption” that, her son Simon recorded, “wasted” her to “skin and bone.” Her arm was swollen with such a terrible ulcerous sore that one servant whispered that “[I] never saw such an arm in [my] Life.” Characteristically, Anne took pride in this new badge of suffering, her claim to being a good warrior for the sake of her and her father’s religion.
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No one could ease her pain, and Anne prayed incessantly for release, while her children, friends, family, and indeed most of the colony, awaited news with anxious hearts. Finally on September 16, 1672, Anne Bradstreet died quietly, her husband by her side. Her son Simon lamented that he was not there to hear her “pious and memorable expressions uttered in her sickness.” But he had something even more precious; after all, she had left him and his brothers and sisters more than most parents ever do, a little book of her “living . . . mind.”
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Epilogue

A Voice in the Wilderness

Mountainous, woman not breaks and will bend: sways God nearby: anguish comes to an end.

—
JOHN BERRYMAN
, “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”

A
NNE WAS BURIED
the Wednesday after she died in the cemetery not far from her house. Over the centuries this graveyard has gradually been obliterated, and now no one knows for sure where she lies. There is no surviving gravestone and no records of a funeral service or of any elegies written for her upon her death. Simon, as always, was silent—at least in writing—about his feelings, leaving no record of his grief for his wife. Even John Woodbridge was quiet. Anne’s daughters and sisters were far more traditionally inclined than she had been and had never shown any interest in writing or public speaking; Samuel was gone to a far-off land, gripped by his own grief. Her two youngest sons were ill equipped for uttering expressions of their sadness.