Anne Bradstreet
Selected Poems
American
Age of Reason
Anne Bradstreet was born in England and educated at home by her father, a feat uncommon for women of her time. Like many of her male contemporaries, she read the classics, the bible, and the great English poets. After she married, she and her husband, along with their families, left England for life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Her fame rests on the fact that she is the first published American poet, and her poems give us a glimpse into life in Puritan New England. Her verse describes the harsh realities of primitive living in New England, the universal struggle with faith in challenging circumstances, and the tension between being a Puritan wife and a writer. Her themes transcend the day-to-day life of a Puritan wife, however, and she writes with the authority on the human condition in a register heretofore reserved for men. Her brother-in-law took her work to London and published it without her permission under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). Thereafter, Bradstreet negotiated the embarrassment of feeling her poems unworthy of attention and the exhilaration of knowing her words were out in the wide world.
Consider while reading:
- Note the speaker’s fear of death in childbirth in “Before the Birth of One of her Children.”
- Discuss the speaker’s imagery of distance from the divine and mortality in “Contemplations.” Does the vastness of nature contribute to the distance?
- Discuss the difference in the speaker’s nearness to God in “By Night When Others Soundly Slept.” Does the close setting inform the tone of the poem?
Written by Karen Dodson