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| Warrick. [Painter]. (n.d.) |
Anne Bradstreet, one of the first colonial era poets, sets a strong base for later poets. A marvel before her time, Bradstreet was able to create amazingly intricate and beautiful poems that extended past the memoires and religious texts supported during the times by men like John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Thomas Harriot. "Today... we view Bradstreet simply as “the first authentic poetic artist in America's history” and even as “the founder of American literature” (Caldwell, P. 1988). Her poetry truly influenced the beginning of an independent mindset during the early colonial period.
What makes Anne so amazing, on a personal level, is the staying power she is able to enact with poems like To my Dear and Loving Husband, In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet, and Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666. With these highly affective and emotional poems, Bradstreet creates a new scheme of poetry - where the ability to create and imagine is rewarded.
During this era, many of the poems were highly religious in nature. Bradstreet follows this theme through in poems such as In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet:
With troubled heart and trembling hand I write.
The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight.
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.
More fool, then, I to look on that was lent
As if mine own, when thus impermanent.
Farewell, dear child; thou ne'er shalt come to me,
But yet a while and I shall go to thee.
Meantime my throbbing heart's cheered up with this--
Thou with thy Savior art in endless bliss.
Such an absolutely beautiful poem so full of longing, and inherent sorrow - yet her only deemed point of joy is expressed in the final two lines - that in the midst of all her sorrow her religion allows her to stay sane.
It's poems like these, where the imagination and fluidity of her poem truly shines. There so much raw emotion in her poetry.
Another example of a different type of passion shows through in her tributes to her husband. As a housewife and mother to many children, the love she held for her husband was expected to be something similar to servitude. She excels in bringing out not only her matronly love for her husband in the following poem, but also a strong sense of companionship and true passion:
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye woman, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the east doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so perservere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
This truly paves the way for later authors, like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Emerson, to be able to clearly and construtively outlet their emotion. She also provides another new trend in poetry, the ability to manipulate words not for political or religious meaning alone - but also to write poetry for the sheer beauty of it. Her words are not at all like narrative works around the time she was born, because this isn't an inpersonal narrative, or a fiery sermon. They are musings and thoughts, constructed not to gain affliliation or to prove anything - but written because she felt the way she felt.
She is truly a marvel.
References
Bradstreet, A. (1678). To My Dear and Loving Husband. Ed Baym, N et all. (2008). The Norton anthology of American literature. p. 108.
Caldwell, P. (1988). Why our first poet was a woman: Bradstreet and the voice of an American poet voice. Prospects, 13 , pp 1-35 doi:10.1017/S0361233300006670
Warrick. [Painter]. (n.d.) Anne Bradstreet. [Oil on Canvas]. Retrieved 27 Oct 2011 from http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/amv/artists_catalog/bwarrick.html
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