Anne Bradstreet’s Use of Religious Doctrine in Her Poetry
December 7, 2007
Anne Bradstreet accepted the tenets of Puritanism and was a very religious person. Anti-Puritan themes are, however, to be found in her poetry in terms of her religious doubts, and her expression of personal emotions and thoughts. She did not write to preach or teach, as Puritan writers were instructed to, but to express herself. It is this personal expression that forms the basis of the heretical elements in her poetry.
To understand why personal expression may be considered heretical, the society in which Bradstreet lived and wrote must be examined in order to comprehend what kinds of human activities and behaviors were acceptable and how Bradstreet deviated from these behaviors.
Bradstreet was not truly unorthodox in that she did not dissent from accepted beliefs and doctrine. She was a woman of the 17th Century and lived in a male dominated, intensely religious society. She lived within the limitations not only of the beliefs and standards of her society, but of her sex. A woman’s place was definitely in the home in Colonial America. The experiences of women were considered narrow and trivial in comparison with men’s.
Puritanism was more than a religious belief; it was a way of life. Aside from a literal belief in the Bible, Puritans wholly accepted the doctrines of
John Calvin and his stern legalistic theology. The Puritans held that religion should permeate every phase of living. The purpose of life was to do God’s will; everything else was subordinate to this basic doctrine. New England was founded at a time when almost everyone who could read at all, read poetry, and many attempted to write it. Poetry in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like other manifestations of intellectual life in the 17th Century, was dominated by religion.
Unlike most young women, Anne Bradstreet was well educated. At age 16 she married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Emmanuel College. Two years later, the Bradstreets and Dudleys came to Massachusetts with John Winthrop and other prominent settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anne’s husband became a magistrate, and later a Governor as did her father.
Soon after arriving in Massachusetts, Anne wrote: "I changed my condition ad was married, and came into this Country, where I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God".
The Bradstreets had eight children, and Anne was a devoted wife and mother as well as a busy one. From the start, however, she made the time to write poetry. Typically, Anne Bradstreet did not seek to have her poetry published as a male poet would have. Her early poems were published, however, when her brother-in-law, John Woordbridge, took a manuscript of her poems to London and had them printed in 1650. The edition contained many errors, and was the inspiration for a poem on the subject by Bradstreet.
Bradstreet’s poems reveal that she valued herself as a woman, as a wife and mother. She wrote of daily experiences, her love for her children and husband, the beautiful New England landscape, the small pleasures of life and domesticity. Religion was a dominant theme in her work, including her religious doubts. A feminine consciousness can also be found in her work. As she wrote in The Prologue:
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus 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.
The heretical themes in Bradstreet’s poetry, however, spring from her domestic poems which reveal passionate love for her husband, Simon, maternal devotion and pleasure in worldly goods, and from her religious poems, which reveal her conflicts and doubts.
Many of Bradstreet’s poems reveal that she could not accept in entire submissiveness the sterner aspects of New England Puritanism. The last stanza of her poem on the death of Elizabeth Bradstreet, her grandchild, illustrates this:
By nature trees do rot when they are grown,
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown, to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.
Bradstreet writes with apparent emotion using imagery as an explanation of the situation at hand until it seems that suddenly she realizes that she is perilously close to writing rebelliously against God’s decrees and then pulls herself up at the very end. This seems to not be her true feeling but rather deference to the orthodox doctrine of the day.
For the pioneer Colonists, home was a refuge from the often harsh, new environment. For Anne Bradstreet, the burning of her home (in "Verses upon the Burning of Our House") and belongings in July, 1666 was a great loss for someone so devoted to her family and domestic pleasures. The poem, however, contains no self-pitying elements. Instead, Bradstreet uses the personal loss to reconcile it with her belief in the wisdom of God’s will.
There are two homes referred to in this poem, "my dwelling place," and the "house on high erect, Framed by that mighty Architect." In the poem, Bradstreet states that both homes are God’s.
The first five stanzas of the poem relate the pleasant things – a trunk, a chest, and a table – that the poet enjoyed in her home. The pleasure is evident. In the sixth stanza, the tone changes as the poet accepts the fire as the will of God, acknowledging that earthly objects are vanity, that her wealth on earth had no real meaning, and that real wealth lies with God. The poem ends:
Farewell, my pelf, farewell my store.
The world no longer let me love,
My hope and treasure lies above.
The poem can easily be read in two lights, what the poet should feel, she does feel. Yet, upon re-reading the poem there is a sense of conflict; the expression of domestic pleasures are rooted in genuine feeling. It is these private feelings, and enjoyment of domestic details that give the poem its heretical tone. The doctrine seems to be accepted more intellectually than emotionally.
Anne Bradstreet felt that her love of the pleasant things of life was unchristian. This conflict is clearly presented in "The Flesh and The Spirit". The Spirit is the victor, but the Flesh even though vanquished, reasserted again and again its claims.
Flesh is the unsettled, questioning heart, while Spirit is the settled heart. Flesh and Spirit are personified by two sisters:
One Flesh was called, who had her eye
On worldly wealth and vanity;
The other Spirit, who did rear
Her thoughts unto a higher sphere:
Although Bradstreet presents the correct dogma in her poem, its purpose is not to instruct but, again, to express her personal feelings. It is the personal feelings that provides the heretical aspects.
"To My Dear and Loving Husband" is a passionate love poem that is lovely, human, and simple. It is also free of any religious dogma. For this reason, it may be considered to have the most heretical elements of any of her poems. The poem is universal as it can be read as a modern one, as well as one from early America. It is openly passionate:
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 women, 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.
The only reference to religion is to pray the heavens reward her husband, hardly a Puritan prayer.
Anne Bradstreet loved her husband and her children and God with a troubled realization that she fell short of God’s, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart". Anne Bradstreet’s poetry shows a merging of the private life with the religious life, but also a rebellious, inquiring spirit. The heretical themes in her poetry stem from this spirit and her need for self-expression.
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