Anne Bradstreet 39
the doe seeking out her buck, waiting, hoping to detect some sign of his return. She thus subverts the common, masculine trope, while also lamenting her husband’s absence. Comparing her state to the mullet fish thought to leap, suicidally, to shore when her mate is caught, Bradstreet expresses a level of sorrow deeper than in the other marriage poems. She feels she “seem[s] no wife” without her husband’s physical presence.
For Discussion or Writing 1. The last two lines of each poem have a different rhythm than those that precede them. Instead of five stresses, there are four. Why do you think Bradstreet crafts her poem this way? How does this rhythm affect the ending? 2. Small words like here, there, where, thence, and hence are very important to these poems. In their use, does Bradstreet ultimately conflate their separate meanings? In other words, do these repeated markers dissolve the difference between them? 3. JOHN A DAMS AND A BIGAIL A DAMS spent several years apart while he was functioning as an emissary for the fledgling republic. Compare the letters between John and Abigail Adams with Bradstreet’s “letter” to her husband. How do they imagine their relationship?
“In Memory of My Dear Grandchild, Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old” and “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet, Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old” (1678) In her marriage poems and in these poems marking the death of her grandchildren, Bradstreet is perceived by contemporary readers to portray the role of loving wife and mother. But Puritan dogma warned that earthly love may distract the flock from their duty and love of God. Notes Wendy Martin: “Although they accepted the necessity of marriage, Puritans worried that conjugal love
would tempt the married couple to lose sight of God. . . . Similarly, it was important not to love one’s children excessively” (69). She cites Benjamin Wadsworth’s treatise in 1712: “ ‘Let this caution be minded, that they don’t love inordinately, because death will soon part them’ ” (quoted in Martin 69). According to this ideology, Bradstreet loves too much the things of this world, and doing so constitutes a transgression. By lamenting the loss of her grandchildren, Anne Bradstreet seeks some sense of reason for their departure, a lesson about attachment. Not only does poetry provide her the “outlet” that Josephine Piercy writes of, but we can see the poet’s striving to come to terms with her grief and having trouble doing so. The poetic form of these poems is the elegy, whose purpose is to lament and “fi nd consolation in the contemplation of some permanent principle” (Preminger 215). However, locating a sense of consolation proves difficult with each of these elegies. The lessons seem thin compared with the enormity of her grief. One could say that the frequency of deaths among children in the 17th century may have necessitated the doctrine of not loving one’s children too much, a protective measure against grief. Bradstreet’s elegies present contemporary readers with the harsh reality of child mortality in the Massachusetts colony. But the poems are also significant because Bradstreet recognizes the tragedy of her condition: As her full life is nearing its close, her grandchildren are mown down, having barely lived. It goes against what is assumed to be the natural order of things. The elegy for her grandchild Elizabeth takes its form as a sonnet with a complicated rhyme scheme. Most of the lines are ordered in iambic pentameter meter, which helps contain the poet’s sorrow. All but one. In the fi nal line, which attempts to confi rm God’s reason, which is beyond our earthly control, “Is by his hand alone that guides nature and fate,” the rhythmic structure breaks down. Instead of the five-beat line structure of the rest of the poem, this fi nal line has six stresses, and the meter is far less regular. In resigning the baby’s death to the sphere of God and accepting his power