King's Survey: Anne's House

In which we learn the meaning of homes, lost and found, earthly and spiritual

OK, kids, today we’re going to start by reading a poem. Jonquil, you start us off.

Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666
BY ANNE BRADSTREET
Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our house, July 10th. 1666. 
Copied Out of a Loose Paper. 

In silent night when rest I took,
For sorrow near I did not look,
I wakened was with thund’ring noise
And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice.
That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,”
Let no man know is my Desire.
I, starting up, the light did spy,
And to my God my heart did cry
To straighten me in my Distress
And not to leave me succourless.
Then, coming out, behold a space
The flame consume my dwelling place.

Can’t you just see the house burning? The fire, a huge orange sheet, sweeps up toward the New England night, overrunning the wood, glass and thatching, gray smoke against a black sky. Clothing writhes, curls and blackens amid the overpowering heat. I'm stunned by the quietness of the destruction, which is punctuated by occasional crackling and the songs of crickets.

—You sound like you’re making another one of your movies, Mr. K.

She knew she couldn't bring that house—or the 800 books inside it—back. And deep down, she knew that she shouldn't be trying. In essence, that’s exactly what her poem was about. Keep going, Jonquil.

And when I could no longer look,
I blest his grace that gave and took,
That laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea, so it was, and so 'twas just.
It was his own; it was not mine.
Far be it that I should repine . . . .

The problem is that she does repine. She saying all the right things: that the house was never really hers to begin with, that all glory should go to God, that while his ways may be difficult to understand, they are always right—period. And yet as the poem proceeds, it's clear that she can't quite let the matter rest.

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.
Under the roof no guest shall sit,
Nor at thy Table eat a bit.

She walks among the ashes. No, no, no, it doesn't bother me a bit that this place I loved has gone up in smoke. I won’t miss the furniture, or my trinkets, or the company of friends and family that gave it life. My faith is so secure that I need not grieve for it. Really. Jonquil?

No pleasant talk shall 'ere be told
Nor things recounted done of old.
No Candle 'ere shall shine in Thee,
Nor bridegroom's voice ere heard shall bee.
In silence ever shalt thou lie.
Adieu, Adieu, All's Vanity.

A funny thing had happened to Anne Bradstreet: a foreign land had become home. By 1666, she was 54 years old, and it had been 36 years since she made her voyage across the sea. She spent most of her life in a new world, and that burning house was at the center of concentric circles that included the town of Ipswich, where she was living, the Massachusetts Bay colony, and America. She was still English; that would never change. But if that was her nation, this was her country—a word that connotes something a little different than a set of boundaries or a form of government. A country is the place where your heart lives.

The problem was that she knew that her country was not the place her heart should live. That heart belonged to God. And so it is that she censures herself. Again, Jonquil.

Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide,
And did thy wealth on earth abide?
Didst fix thy hope on mold’ring dust?
The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?

And so she fixes her gaze on her heavenly home. Bring it on home, Jonquil. You've done a great job. Thank you.

Thou hast a house on high erect
Framed by that mighty architect …
It’s purchased and paid for too
By him who hath enough to do.

As always in her work, otherworldly commitments always have the last word. "The world no longer let me love," she concludes. "My hope and Treasure lies above."

Does she mean it? Sure. Entirely? Surely not. If there wasn’t a struggle, there wouldn’t be a poem.

There’s no trace of the house that burned down on July 10, 1666. For that matter, there’s no trace of Anne Bradstreet, either: she died in 1672 and no grave has been located. There’s a plaque honoring her near the location of the Ipswich house, and the one at the gates of Harvard Yard in Cambridge. In the end, she lives in the word.

Anne Bradstreet shares very little with us. As a matter of imagination, though, we share a country. Between us lies a Revolution, a Constitution, a republic, an empire. But we speak the same language (more or less), and as someone who also adopted New England as my home—I left it to come teach at this school—I relate to her love and longing. Do you?

—I like the way she shows her struggle. I don’t really relate to the religion thing. But I get feeling conflicted.

What do you feel conflicted about, Sadie?

—I dunno. Lots of things.

Do you love your country?

—You mean am I a patriot? Not really.

Do you love your home?

—What do you mean by “my home?”

What do you think I mean?

—You mean my actual house? Sure.

Do you know how old your house is?

—I think my dad said it was built in the fifties.

Do you know what was there before?

—No.

Do you know who owned it before you?

—No. My parents bought it when my sister was born.

So they own it legitimately?

—Well, sure. Though I think my dad did something with the basement that he told me could be a problem when it comes time to sell the house.

How much do you think the Indians were paid for the land your house sits on?

—I have no idea.

Do you think the Indians got a fair deal on it?

—Probably not. But that was a long time ago.

Yes. But the circumstances were like an original sin, no?

—You mean like Adam and Eve? I guess so. I don’t spend much time thinking about it.

No, I reckon you don’t. You said a minute ago that you don’t consider yourself a patriot. Why is that?

—Well, because I don’t think the United States always does the right things.

And yet you benefit from the security and benefits the United States offers its citizens.

—Yes. Are you saying I’m a bad person, Mr. K.?

I’m saying you’re like Anne Bradstreet. You enjoy aspects of your life which, if you’re honest with yourself—and I applaud you for your honesty here, Sadie—you know are a little suspect. If not downright wrong.

That’s certainly the way I feel. I too know that my attachments are suspect. I feel uneasy for some of the same reasons Anne Bradstreet does: we pledge our faith to the same God, read the same Bible. There are other things Bradstreet appeared to feel little guilt about: she didn’t seem to worry about the occupation of Indian territory any more than you do, Sadie. She doesn’t say anything the presence of slavery (which infected Massachusetts and all the other English colonies). And while a lot of the poems she wrote depicted nature as beautiful, she was no environmentalist—nature was something more likely to threaten her than she considered something requiring protection.   There are all kinds of things that are wrong with the world today, which we’re all taught to reject and resist. I say all the right things, just as Bradstreet does. Do I mean them? Surely. Entirely? Surely not.

The most important thing I share with Anne Bradstreet is a sense of shame. Her shame derives from a deep, but not altogether justifiable, attachment to the house that burned down in 1666. Our house—our country house, as it were—has not burned down. Yet I live in it with a sense of foreboding, because I know it cannot last forever, and I sometimes fear it will be destroyed sooner rather than later. But my unease is not simply a sense of anxiety about the future; it also involves a sense of nagging unease about the past. I love our house even as I’m aware, however vaguely, of the displacements that made it possible, as well as the evasions that allow it to stand even as I stand before you. We cannot really expect mercy, kids. But, God help us, we hope we’ll be lucky. Here, for now, for the grace of Anne, we lie in our beds on autumn nights.

Next: Sex and other ways of dealing with boredom

King's Survey: Anne's Growth

In which we experience a simply beautiful artistic vision of early American life.

  —What are we doing today, Mr. K?

Well, Sadie, I wanted to say a little more about Anne Bradstreet.

—Really?

Sure. Why not?

—Well, I mean there’s a lot of stuff to cover. Don’t get me wrong: I really like Anne Bradstreet. But aren’t there other people so to talk about?

More than we can ever hope to get to. And it’s a problem: we have so little time together relative to what we’re supposed to cover. Coverage: the bane of a history’s teacher’s job. But every once in a while I think we need to pause and look at someone, at something, closely. Otherwise it will all go by in a blur.

—Plus Mr. K. has a crush on her.

 Yeah, Emily, I kinda do. I’m not the only one who has. There was a poet named John Berryman about a half century ago who got a little carried away with her, in my opinion. There’s a lot to like with Anne Bradstreet. Maybe you’ll fall in love with her, too. Or maybe not. Either way, she’s worth considering.

The Tenth Muse, which we talked about the other day, was the only book that Anne Bradstreet published in her lifetime. In an important sense, though, that was just the beginning. It was only after the publication of that collection that she embarked on the period of greatest creativity in her life.

To at least some extent, that flowering happened because of her book. Its initial publication spurred her to write more poems for a second edition, which would not appear until 1678, six years after her death. One such poem, “The Author to Her Book,” was a direct response to the publication of The Tenth Muse—and an indication of where her work was heading. Read along with me:

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true
Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge)

You tell me, kids: what’s happening here?

—She’s talking about her baby.

—No she’s not.

—Yes she is. She’s talking about her “offspring.”

—She doesn’t mean that literally, Jonah. It’s the offspring of her brain. In other words, her book.

What’s she saying about the book?

—That it’s not very good.

Right. What do you make of the “friends less wise than true?”

—That her friends are being nice to her, even though the book isn’t very good.

—I don’t get the rags thing.

Paper at the time was made from rags. She’s a little embarrassed by how her ideas—her brainchild, as it were—looks once it gets published. “Yet being my own, at length affection would / Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.” She’s embarrassed, but she can’t help love the offspring of her brain. The artist was at heart a mother.

Which points to an irony that I want to talk about today. Bradstreet’s emergence as a transcontinental artist, at a time when England and the colonies are gradually growing more stitched together, coincide with a turn toward home in her work. Remember: this is a woman who never wanted to come here. But by now she’s made a life and made a home on this side of the ocean. This is a story that would be repeated many times in the next four centuries among men and women of all ages, races, and nations. The locus of Bradstreet’s work became a domestic drama, as the experiences—the mysteries—of everyday life moved to the center of her imagination.

—You’re saying she’s an immigrant.

Exactly. Nice job, Brianna.

Bradstreet was an immigrant, but she was also a Puritan immigrant, and her experience of everyday life was filtered through this lens. The key virtue at the heart of the Puritan imagination was simplicity: in the words of a much-repeated adage, “God’s altar needs not our polishings.” The challenge at hand was achieving artlessness, which she achieved with striking visual images, like these opening lines from “Contemplations,” which affirm the majesty of nature in a way that would become characteristically American for centuries to come:

Some time now past in the autumnal tide,
When Phoebus wanted but one hour to bed
The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,
Where gilded o’er by his rich golden head.
Their leaves and fruits seems painted, but was true
Of green, of red, of yellow, mixed hue;
Rapt were my senses at this delectable view.

That’s an interesting expression on your face there, Sadie. What are you thinking?

—I like that: “trees richly clad, yet void of pride.”

 Why?

 —Because it’s simple and it’s beautiful.

Right. Simply beautiful. That’s Bradstreet.

The most important dimensions of this domestic turn, however, were cast in terms of the relationships in her life. Her love for her husband could be feverishly frank: “I wish my Sun may never set but burn / within the Cancer of my glowing breast / the welcome house of him my dearest guest,” she wrote in “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Among Public Employment.” (People wrongly believe the Puritans were sexual prudes relative to their peers.)

—I don’t get it. Why is that sexy?

—Because she talks about her breast.

—Actually, I think it’s the thing about the house. She’s letting him in.

Ahem, let’s move on.

—Puritan porn!

As I was saying….

As a young woman, one of the greatest sources of anxiety in Bradstreet’s life is that she would be deprived of the experience of motherhood—“It pleased God to keep me a long time without child,” she wrote after her eight were grown. Her affection for them, and her grandchildren, especially four who died in rapid succession, are the focus of her late work.

Death, especially the prospect of her own, suffused the work of her later life. That many of her poems celebrate the “return” of relatives suggests the degree to which this was something she never took for granted. However badly she wished for children, every pregnancy carried with it the prospect of her own demise. In one of her most famous poems, “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” she addressed her fears and hopes to her husband, pre-emptively asking for charity in her memory:

The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave; 
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory

Part of what made Bradsreet’s poetry so emotionally charged is not simply an awareness of death, but the way that awareness was also accompanied by an acute consciousness of a (Christian) afterlife. This religious consciousness infused even the most ordinary events with psychic intensity. “There is no object that we see, no action that we do, no good that we enjoy, no evil that we feel or fear, but we may make some spiritual advantage of all,” she wrote to her son at the end of her life. “He that makes such improvements is wise as well as pious.” This might be boilerplate Puritan rhetoric, but she was capable of expressing collective sentiments in more vivid terms as well: “Iron, till it be thoroughly heat, is uncapable to be wrought; so God sees good to cast some men into the furnace of affliction and then beats them on his anvil into what frame he pleases.”

—Ouch!

That's the idea. The chief furnace of affliction in Bradstreet's life appeared to be health problems (even if she lived to be sixty). “My race is run, my thread is spun / lo here is fatal death,” she wrote of an illness she experienced in 1632, when she was twenty years old. But such agonies, she reported without fail, were transient given the prospect of salvation: “Yet live I shall, this life’s but small / in place of highest bliss.” She viewed illness in spiritual terms, conveying anguish at her pain but gratitude for the prospect of relief into the afterlife.

In a way, though, she doth protest too much. The Puritans tried hard to live out the biblical injunction to live in the world, but be not of the world. Anne Bradstreet’s later work dramatizes just how hard it was to do this. She loved her life—and her home. Never was this more clear than in what I regard as her greatest poem, when she denied it. That’s where I feel closest to her.

—We going to do that next?

We are.

Next: Bradstreet’s burning question

King's Survey: Anne's Work

In which we see a working woman mark time in verse

—So what great adventure do you have planned for us today, Mr. K?

Well, I thought I’d we’d pay another visit to our friend Anne Bradstreet, Kylie.

—Who is she, again?

—She’s that Puritan woman one who didn’t want to come Massachusetts. Whose father made her.

—And her husband. Great time to be a woman.

That’s right, Sadie and Emily. As I’ve tried to make clear in recent days, women in Puritan society were more assertive than just about anywhere on the face of the earth. But New England remained a patriarchal society. Still, while Bradstreet's father, Thomas Dudley, was notorious for his haughty severity, Bradstreet never wrote about him or her mother with anything but the deepest affection. He was clearly attentive to her welfare as a child from the time of her birth in 1612, procuring the very best schooling for her back in England. Her also hired the tutor, Simon Bradstreet, who became her husband shortly before their departure for Massachusetts.

As we talked about the other day, Anne Bradstreet faced formidable challenges in leaving her English home behind and establishing a new one on these shores. But in most respects, it had to have been easier for her than her approximately 750 fellow travelers, about 200 of whom died in the first year and another 200 of whom returned. She lived her days as a member of an important family that laid the foundations of our national history. Her father, husband, and son all served as major government officials over the course of her life, and as such she would have had a proverbial window seat for some major events. (She may well have also influenced them, though her fingerprints are invisible.) Of all the momentous events involving her migration and subsequent public events, however, she had virtually nothing to say. That’s not surprising; this was generally not a woman’s place.

And yet the reason why we know about Anne Bradstreet is that she did ultimately enter the public square. She did not do it the way Anne Hutchinson did, with a bold challenge to the authorities. Instead, she approached the matter artfully—in a number of senses of that term: she became a writer.

—What did she write?

Poetry, mostly. And some prose. It’s not clear how she did it. We know little of her everyday life. As a woman from a prominent family, she surely had resources most others in her community did not, whether as a matter of creature comforts or household help she could direct in running a family that included eight children. But the fact remains that she was living in a frontier society without many of the comforts of civilization. After serving a term as governor in 1634, her dad relocated his family to the remote town of Ipswich, some thirty miles away, and the Bradstreets followed. In subsequent decades, Simon Bradstreet was often traveling, and Anne frequently served as a deputy husband, managing family finances, disposing property, and supervising (male) laborers.

It was also in Ipswich that she seems to have begun her writing career in earnest. As a recent biographer has noted, in the decade between 1638 and 1648, she wrote over six thousand lines of poetry, more than most English writers on either side of the Atlantic produced in a lifetime. (Some of that productivity occurred in the nearby town of Andover, where the Bradstreets moved in the 1640s.) Most of that stretch she was pregnant, recovering from childbirth, or nursing. A 1967 edition of her works, reissued in 2010, runs over 300 pages.

We might never have known about her had not her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, taken a copy of her poems to England in 1647. Woodbridge was on a mission to help with negotiating tense relations between Parliament and the King during the English Civil War, but while he was there he shopped around her work. He teamed up with Bradstreet’s friend and former Ipswich neighbor, Nathaniel Ward, and made a deal with Ward’s English publisher. Woodbridge titled it The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (implying that his sister-in-law was the heir of the nine muses of Greek mythology). It was the first book of poetry to be published by an English colonist. By 1658 it was listed as “one of the most vendible books in England.”

—Vendible?

Best-selling. By the strictly literary standards of its time—and in the estimation of most critics in the three and a half centuries since—The Tenth Muse (the first edition, that is—I’ll be getting to the second shortly) is not an especially arresting work. Bradstreet was clearly a fan of sixteenth century poets Philip Sydney and (especially) Frenchman Guillaume du Bartas, and her verse is generally derivative of theirs. She also expressed some garden-variety anti-Catholicism. Later in life, she would question the intensity of her vitriol. “Why may not the Popish religion be right? They have the same God, the same Christ, the same word. They only interpret it one way, we another.” But Bradstreet remained a dyed-in-the-wool Puritan.

Insofar as there was really anything unusual about the initial publication of The Tenth Muse back then—and really, the thing that most people who know about the book care about now—was the fact that it was written by a woman. This was both a problem and an opportunity. Woodbridge and his allies maintained, improbably, that Bradstreet and her family knew nothing about his efforts to get her published: it would be unseemly—and probably impossible—for a woman to engage in a campaign of self-promotion. She was promoted on the basis her freakish appeal: a great work of art, by a woman no less, is really worth a look.

In terms of its gender politics, The Tenth Muse exhibits a curious combination of modesty and self-assertion. Her dedication to her father speaks of “ragged lines” that can hardly do justice to all Dudley had done for her. Such language what makes the fifth stanza of “The Prologue” all the more startling: 

            I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
            Who says my hand a needle better fits
            A poet’s pen all scorn I thus should wrong,
            For such despite they cast on female wits:
            If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
            They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

—Wow.

Wow is right.

—I mean that you memorized it. But wow also in what she says.

What’s so interesting in what she says, Sadie?

—She sounds so feminist.

What do you mean by that?

—I mean that … she’s so strong. So powerful.

—So angry.

Is feminism about anger, Brianna?

—Sometimes. It’s about speaking out about what don't have.

Anne Bradstreet strikes me as a mighty privileged woman, Brianna. Not many of us, no matter when or where we are, get our poetry published.

—That’s not the point.

Oh no? Why not?

—Because even though she’s rich, she’s not treated fair. Men poets who are as good as she is don’t have to put up with what she does.

—Men have to put up with all kinds of things, Brianna.

—It’s different, Paolo.

Paolo, I’m glad to hear from you. Do you think that men and women are mistreated equally?

—Yes. I mean no. I mean they don’t necessarily have to deal with the same things. But men have their own problems.

What kinds of things do men have to deal with?

—I dunno. We’ve all got stuff.

—We have to deal with being called sexist!

—Sometimes men are sexist, Ethan!

—And sometimes we’re not, Emily!

Let’s remember we’re back in the seventeenth century. Ethan and Paolo, would you agree it was tougher for women, then?

—I guess.

Remember that Bradstreet saw what happened to Hutchinson when she dared to wander onto male turf.

—But you said that wasn’t because of sexism. You said it was because what Hutchinson was saying was dangerous.

I did say that. And I believe it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m right.

—Yeah, Mr. K. How do we know you’re not an agent of Satan?

You don’t, Emily. Maybe you’d like to teach the class?

—Ummm, no thanks. You go ahead. But I’ll let you know if you get out of line.

Gee, thanks. I’ll note that you’re a little like our friend Goody Bradstreet here—

—Goody?

Seventeenth century slang. Short for “goodwife.” That’s how Bradstreet would have been known to her peers. Anyway, she struck a more moderate note than Hutchinson did in challenging authority, one that reflected her temperament as well as perhaps a more general Puritan pragmatism. Bradstreet returned to this theme at the end of The Tenth Muse, in a poem honoring Queen Elizabeth: “She hath wiped off th’ aspersion of her sex / That women wisdom lack to play the rex.” She pushed the point into a contemporary context. Here, I have it on the Smart Board:

Now say, have women worth? Or they have none?
Or had them some, but with our Queen is’t gone?
Nay masculines, you have taxed us long
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our sex is void of reason
Know ’tis slander now but once was treason.

Check out that last line: “’tis slander now but once was treason.” Once upon a time, she’s saying, you could be punished for making a sexist remark about a woman.

—Just like today.

—Oh, shut up, Ethan.

The Tenth Muse put Anne Bradstreet on the literary map. She enjoyed a measure of fame in her lifetime, which tapered gradually over the next two centuries, after which she disappeared from literary anthologies. Her reappearance a 1929 poetry collection marked the beginning of a comeback that’s really picked up steam since the 1970s, when the women’s movement kicked into gear. So you’re on the right track there, Sadie, when you called her feminist. Which is wonderful. But it’s not why I love Anne Bradstreet so.

—Why do you love her so?

I’ll get back to you on that.

Next: The next chapter of Bradstreet’s life