Anne Bradstreet was a well known poet. Her poems reflect her Puritan culture. They are simply documents that have recounted many important events in her life and have influenced her cultural perspective. Bradstreet was a woman, a daughter, wife, mother, Puritan, a well educated woman, a poet and an English person who tried her best to adjust her lifestyle in the New World in New England struggles. All of these experiences are reflected back to her poems. Each and every poem has something significant about the way that she lived and the way she portrays women in some of her poems. In my account, two of the poems that I read, “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House…,” and “To my Dear and Loving Husband,” were both really interesting in my opinion. In the first poem she describes how her house burns and cries out to God for help. She uses strong words and adjectives to describe this action. “And to my God my heart did cry….the flame consume my dwelling place… my pleasant things in ashes lie (Bradstreet 212).” These quotes imply how she feels about her house burning. She further on, goes to describe how no guest will ever come to her house again, nor eat on her tables. It helps us, the readers to understand the poem by how she wrote it. She describes in a way that we can feel the action that is happening in front of our eyes, and she uses rhyming words to add a flow to the poem.
Bradstreet understood her daily life to be very hard as a mother, wife, and a woman. In the poem she states that after she looked at her burning house she “blest his name that gave and took…that laid my good now in the dust (212).” In these lines she conveys to the audience that she is not angry at God as to why He burnt her house. She accepts what God has done and appreciated what God had given her. One Puritan value that she establishes here is that she has no attachment to the worldly objects. She believed that everything belonged to God to begin with.
In the second poem, “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” Bradstreet conveys her love towards her husband. She wished that her love will be honored even after her death. “if ever wife was happy in a husband. She feels for him like no other person in the world. She challenges woman who may have claimed to have the same kind of love that she has towards her husband. She further describes that “my love is such that the rivers cannot quench (206).” His love is the sole satisfaction for her in her life. At the end of the poem she conveys that there is no way she can repay a price for such love. She sums up by saying that we should value a person’s love when they are live rather than when they pass away.
When Bradstreet came into the New World, she faced many difficulties. She fell sick, and had to go through several other problems. yet she didn't give in. She struggled to make a family and a living as a mother and a wife. She did her best in all and even after she found time to write her poems and be well recognized for it. As she conveys, “at first when I came into this country, my heart rose…but after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined the church at Boston (187).” Bradstreet’s poetry help us to examine the Puritan culture and lifestyle of each in the New World; they help us to understand what it was like to live in the New World and what kind of hardships each person faced. Bradstreet lived a hard life but she never gave in. She was a strong women and a strong believer and she depicts that in all her writings.
Acknowledgements:
The following specific poems and quotes and some lines were taken from the “The Norton Anthology: American Literature" Seventh Addition (Volume A).
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