Mistress Bradstreet

by Charlotte Gordon

  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.”38 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.39

  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.”40

  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.41

  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.”42 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.”43 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.44

  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.45 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.46 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.”47

  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”

  ANNE 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.

  Only her son Simon, Anne’s most literary child, commemorated his mother’s demise in his journal with an entry that was oddly reminiscent of Anne’s own words upon her father’s death. He longed “to walk in her steps . . . so wee might one day have a happy & glorious greeting,” just as Anne had hoped to “follo[w]” her father’s “pious footsteps” to heaven.1 And yet, despite Simon’s diary entry, Anne’s death was greeted with an echoing silence, at least from the perspective of the historian. The great elegist had no one to memorialize her.

  It was not that her family did not grieve. Indeed, Anne’s death left Simon and her children bereft. In the months before she died, her two younger sons had gotten into trouble with the law, as though they wanted their mother to know they still needed her supervision and were not yet ready for her to go. None of the other Bradstreet children had ever strayed like this, and perhaps Simon shielded Anne from their misdemeanors. John was caught “smoking late at night” with his buddies, and Dudley had been seen “shooting pistols and drinking in the Quartermaster’s house.” Both young men were dragged before the county court on May 1, and Anne would have to have been very ill not to be aware of their “crimes.”2

  Their mother’s teachings were not so easily forgotten, and Dudley and John pulled themselves together after the chastening experience of an official remonstrance from the court’s officials. John went on to become a successful gentleman farmer in Topsfield, the next town over, and Dudley grew into a “leading citizen” of Andover, “serving as town clerk, selectman, magistrate, and deputy of the General Court.”3 Mercy, Anne would have been glad to know, got married only a month after her mother’s death and went on to bear eight children, just as her mother had. With one exception—her daughter Dorothy died in childbirth—all of Anne’s children lived to a ripe old age and contributed to New England with the pious zeal and talent bequeathed to them by their parents. Even while Puritanism as a religious movement began to decline, they and their progeny kept Anne’s ideals alive, becoming ministers, lawyers, doctors, and leaders of American society. For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes was one of her descendants.4

  Simon himself went on to live another thirty years. But he mourned Anne’s death for four years—an extremely long period for an eligible New England Puritan widower to remain unwed—appearing inconsolable to the many eager widows who regarded him as an excellent catch. Finally he married another Anne, the widow of a Captain Gardner, who had been killed in King Philip’s War against the Indians.

  Simon also remained true to the Dudley tradition of public service. He was governor from 1679 to 1686 and then again at the end of his life, when he was called in 1689 to rescue the colony, in crisis over the loss of its charter. In his final years, Simon proved that as well as being an idealistic, orthodox Puritan, he was also a compassionate and reasonable man. He was one of the few heroes of the witchcraft crisis in Salem, serving as a moderating force during the hysteria in 1692, as he was profoundly disturbed by the excesses of the trials and the many executions. When he died, all of New England grieved the loss of such a noble public servant.

  ANNE MUST HAVE SUSPECTED that her family would be heartbroken but mute after her demise. She knew her loved ones well. Besides, she knew what happened after women died. How could she forget the silence that had greeted her own mother’s death? Even though she was a celebrity of sorts—the only real poet of her generation, a spokesperson for New England as well as a public figure in her own right—she had long been aware that if she wanted to be remembered, she would have to create her own legacy; and of course, this is what she had done, leaving behind a spiritual guidebook for her children and for future New Englanders.

  For two hundred years, her strategy worked. Only after the Civil War did her name disappear from the lists of notable American poets, not to be restored until the modernist poet Conrad Aiken in 1912 placed her poems at the beginning of his famous American anthology of poetry. Since then, her reputation has been revived in fits and starts. In 1953 the great poet John Berryman turned to her for inspiration, advancing his own career with his poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.”5 In the 1970s her reputation enjoyed another upsurge during the feminist commitment to uncovering “lost” women in history. Now, as a matter of course, her poems can be found in most American literature anthologies.

  Anne had labored to ensure her written legacy, working to create a fair copy of her emendations to The Tenth Muse before she died. Six years after her death, the second edition of her work was published in Boston, probably by Anne’s old admirer John Rogers, the husband of her niece.6 This volume was very different from The Tenth Muse because Anne had had the opportunity to revise her early poems and include new ones. She inserted “The Flesh and the Spirit” and “Contemplations,” and so the book as a whole reflected her mature commitment to New England and her use of the Puritan “plaine style.”

  In an interesting gesture of self-awareness, Anne had decided against John Woodbridge’s title (The Tenth Muse) for this edition, and the book went to press as Several Poems. At this point in her life it must have seemed safe enough to acknowledge the truth: She had never thought of herself as a “muse” and in fact had always had a rocky relationship with those Greek goddesses. She was not a woman who inspired poetry but one who wrote it. Her readers, especially her male sponsors, had insisted on thinking of her this way, and she had at first complied, knowing that self-effacement was the only way her work would be accepted in her society.

  Nonetheless, even fear of recriminations could not stop her from protesting against such strictures and proclaiming her worth, as one female character she had created many years before had declared:

  Who is’t that dare, or can, compare with me?

  My excellencies are so great, so many,

  I am confounded, fore I speak of any.7

  In the end Anne had won. She would no longer be the nameless tenth muse but would be remembered as a flesh-and-blood woman, the author of a book of poetry that changed the way people would think about America, about women, and about American literature. Despite her modesty in life, she would be the star of a story that would be told for centuries, the tale of what one individual, even a person of exceedingly “small frame,” could accomplish if she were brave enough, smart enough, and like the country she had helped create, boldly independent.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK WOULD NOT have come into existence without my agent, Brettne Bloom. I have relied on her faith in the importance of Anne’s story and on her wisdom throughout the process of writing Mistress Bradstreet. I am especially grateful to Michael Janeway for introducing me to Brettne, Ike Williams, and Jill Kneerim, and their literary agency, Kneerim and Williams at Fish and Richardson.

  I am also indebted to my dear editor, Asya Muchnick, who “curtailed” hours from her sleep to give this book the benefit of her skill and intelligence, and to her wonderful assistant, Zainab Zakari, for her good cheer and practical assistance. Thank you also to Deborah Baker for believing in Mistress Bradstreet from the very beginning and to Peggy Freudenthal and DeAnna Satre for all of th
eir hard work copyediting this manuscript.

  Many people at various institutions have helped support this book, especially Sally Hinkle at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Pat Boulos at the Boston Athenaeum, Anne Bentley and Megan Milford at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Sue Ellen Holmes and Jill Baker at the Stevens Memorial Library in North Andover, Massachusetts. I am also grateful to The Waring School in Beverly, Massachusetts, for providing me with office space for so many years, and to Deborah Coull, the creator-owner of the most important beauty salon in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

  David Hall, Laura Korobkin, Jill Lepore, and Rosanna Warren gave me superlative and generous guidance when I was writing my dissertation on Anne. A generous postdoctoral fellowship from Boston University allowed me to begin writing this book. Thank you to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Mary Beth Norton, David Hall, and Francis Bremer for reading selected chapters of the early manuscript and catching many of my mistakes. Those that are left are due to my errors in judgment, not theirs.

  My family and friends have provided me with tireless support. I am especially grateful to Geoffrey and Brooks Richon for their loving patience. Thank you also to Carolyn Cooke, Paul Fisher, Laila Goodman, Carol Hong Richon, Johanna Rittenburg, and all of my running buddies for listening to me over so many miles.

  Finally, this book could not have been written without the babysitters: Talia Allenburg, Charlee Bianchini, Ben Dulong, Olivia Gale, Ben Glickstein, Max, Becky, and Julia Lang, Casey and Reeve Moir, Margot Morse, Clea Paine, Luke Schoel, Nicole Simpson, Chet Sharp, Danielle Smick, Chris Stodolski, Becky White, and Lyda Winfield.