34 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers
anticipating the ultimate end of all her “sins,” “cares,” and “sorrows” (20). As the poem opens, Bradstreet casts herself in the role of “weary pilgrim, now at rest” (1). The metaphor is an apt one because the Puritans referred to themselves as pilgrims once they arrived in America; by using this term, Bradstreet identifies the religious context for her poem as well as the conventional sense of the term, one who has journeyed. As does a bird, she “hugs with delight her silent nest,” grateful for having all dangers in the “past, and travails done” (2, 6). Once again, the pilgrim metaphor operates on two levels: It represents the toils and strife that are humans’ fate in a postlapsarian world, and it signifies the reflections of a person for whom death is nearer than life. For Bradstreet’s “weary pilgrim,” life offers nothing more than suffering, psychological, spiritual, and physical. The second stanza represents the landscape itself as hostile: fi lled with a “burning sun,” “stormy rains,” “briars and thorns,” and “hungry wolves.” For the pilgrim anticipating the end of life, these antagonistic elements no longer pose a threat because “He erring paths no more shall tread” (11). The dangers of an earthly existence are identified as the results of treading a sinful path, or living a life of sin, which was considered to be an inevitability for Puritans given the fall of humankind with their expulsion from Eden. As further support for Bradstreet’s link between suffering on earth and the sinfulness of the flesh, the second stanza concludes with the metaphor of diet: “Nor wild fruits eat instead of bread” (12). Readers should be attentive to the presence of the morally corrupt adjective wild as a descriptor of fruits as well as the marked absence of any adjective describing the bread. Bradstreet makes clear that the abandonment of the “erring paths” is intimately linked to abstaining from a diet of “wild fruits.” The weary pilgrim is no longer tempted by the ways of the physical world, nor victim to its devices for suffering. This theme of renunciation of the physical world for the spiritual gifts of the afterlife informs the remainder of the poem, in which Bradstreet, her
“clay house mold’ring away,” anticipates the day when the “corrupt carcass” is transformed into a “glorious body [that] shall rise” (22, 35–36). The resurrection of the body is a power reserved “by Christ alone” (38). Such a moment when “soul and body shall unite” becomes the poem’s ultimate hope as it shifts from the early images of decay and suffering in a hostile environment to “lasting joys” that “ear ne’er hear nor tongue e’er told” (39, 41–42).
For Discussion or Writing 1. As Bradstreet does, Emily Dickinson imagines Death or Christ as a bridegroom in her famous “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.” Compare the use of this characterization of either death or Christ in the two poems. 2. How does Bradstreet’s anticipated spiritual deliverance relate to that of her fellow Puritan and poet EDWARD TAYLOR in “The Soul’s Groan to Christ for Succor”?
“The Author to Her Book” (1678) Responding to the publication of her book without her knowledge, Anne Bradstreet narrates the process by which her brother-in-law and minister—“friends, less wise than true”—planned to print the book in England. Through an extended metaphor, a conceit, she represents her book as a child. Addressing this child-book, this “ill-formed offspring of [her] feeble brain,” heightens the stakes for a poet and mother in Puritan society, writing about poetry and child rearing in such a way that they are inseparable, hovering together as metaphor. Although the poem’s conceit structure is influenced by the English metaphysical poets Bradstreet read, it differs greatly in subject. Bradstreet’s ability to cast herself as the book’s multifaceted mother, and to do so modestly, lovingly, and cruelly, performs feats of wit that rival any of her predecessors’. Although the poet initially wants to reject the book for being prematurely published/born, hid-