Almost a golden world: Sidney, Spenser, and Puritan conflict in
Bradstreet's "Contemplations"
Renascence; Milwaukee; Spring 2000; Lee Oser

Volume:
52
Issue:
3
Start Page:
187-202
ISSN:
00344346
Subject Terms:
Literary criticism
Writers
Religion
Personal Names:
Bradstreet, Anne (1612-72)
Spenser, Edmund (1552?-99)
Sidney, Philip (1554-86)

Abstract:
Oser tries to mediate with tact and sense between Anne Bradstreet's artistic concerns and
her religious life. Her work is compared with that of Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney.

Full Text:
Copyright Marquette University Spring 2000

Scene Along a Riverbank
(Oil on canvas)
(Dutch)

ANYONE who has studied Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser at the historical
level will acknowledge that both are, in some significant sense, Puritan writers. For
instance, one can point to well-known passages in the Arcadia and The Defence
of Poesy, in the Fowre Hymnes and The Faerie Queene, that reveal the influence
of Calvinism on their authors' political, aesthetic, and cosmological ideas. While
neither poet is technically a theologian, theology tinctures and stimulates their
writings, and combines fruitfully with their national and cultural interests. Criticism
divides on the type, extent, and application of Sidney's and Spenser's Puritanism,
but not on the presence in their work of Puritanism itself.

Anne Bradstreet inherited from Sidney and Spenser a sense of the Puritan poet's
compass, in part through their examples of how theology and poetry can interact.
She received from her English precursors not only a strong affirmation of Puritan
art, but also the uncanny legacies of form and style that major writers bequeath to
their heirs. Such legacies have unpredictable consequences. They are radicals in
the world of writing and culture, and their impact can easily be neglected by critics
who deal in large theoretical constructs. For instance, Elaine Showalter, glancing
at Bradstreet, offers the remark that "Bradstreet's revisionary rewriting [i.e. her
important later writing] is more inflected by gender than by nationality; it is not
uniquely American . . ." (9). I demur from this judgment because the poet of
"Contemplations"-the main topic of this essay and a touchstone for discussion of
Bradstreet's poetic importancemay be said to project Spenser's "wandring wood,"
the labyrinthine forests of The Faerie Queene, onto the Bay Colony. It is her
transformation of Spenser's wood, in a stanzaic form reminiscent of Spenser, that
allows her to assimilate the American wilderness to her writing; one recalls that
Spenser was himself a great assimilator of landscapes. In its geography,
Bradstreet's poetry thus anticipates the work of another Spenserian, Nathaniel
Hawthorne. As I will suggest, historical, political, and theological strands in her
work also connect Bradstreet, albeit allusively, to New England.

By arguing for the recovery of a Puritan way of reading poetry, Jeffrey
Hammond's Sinful Self seeks to establish an authentic literary milieu for
Bradstreet, but I will take issue with Hammond's reading of "Contemplations" by
which Bradstreet's "confessed preoccupation with natural beauty" is the "reason
for her meditative failure" (II 111 ); I find a specific weakness in Hammond's lack
of engagement with the English poetry that Bradstreet knew and admired, with,
most especially, Sidney and Spenser, who depart from the straits of Calvinism in
their regard for earthly beauty. Like these poets, Bradstreet lingers lovingly over
the classical traditions that she assimilates to a Christian world, and her work
draws on their neo-Platonism. It seems odd to say, but Bradstreet
scholarship-beyond the usual show of token references-is almost blind to the
formative effect that English poetry had on Bradstreet.' This neglect is doubly
curious given that Bradstreet, a woman to whom family obviously meant a great
deal, was distantly related to Sidney on her father's side. Bradstreet's elegy to the
author of Astrophil and Stella is charming and somewhat light; it insists, however,
on the presence of "divinity" in Sidney's work, and it defends its subject (against
the opinion of a certain "beetle-head") as the "brave refiner of our English tongue"
(190).

My aim in this essay is to mediate with tact and sense between Bradstreet's
artistic concerns and her religious life.2 I will be looking at Bradstreet's work
against the rich background afforded by Sidney and Spenser, but I must first
observe an important feature of Bradstreet's poetic career in New England.
Bradstreet's writing responded in various ways to local theological conflicts: more
particularly, it responded to the rival orthodoxies that nearly destroyed each other
and the Bay Colony in the 1630s.3 These rivalries found their most famous
expression in the Antinomian Crisis of 1636-1638, when John Winthrop and
Thomas Dudley, who favored the preparationist doctrine of purifying the soul for
Christ's entry, triumphed over the anti-preparationism of John Cotton and Anne
Hutchinson. When Hutchinson affirmed that "sanctification" (or Christian behavior)
was neither cause nor proof of Christ's free gift of redemptive grace (what
theologians call "justification"), Dudley saw, astutely, that such a doctrine would
subvert his own brand of civil and religious authority. Hutchinson had called into
question the practice of many prominent ministers, whom she accused of
preaching a covenant of works, whereby legalism provided the basis for probity,
and the sinner could take steps toward purification in order to gain God's worldly
blessings, if not his grace.

Dudley was Bradstreet's father. He had sailed from England to the New World with
his daughter and his son-in-law, the future Governor Simon Bradstreet, aboard
the Arbella in 1630. He first served as governor in 1634. In 1637, as deputy
governor under Winthrop, he emerged as Hutchinson's shrewd and pressing
questioner during her arraignment before the church. Bradstreet's personal
connection to the controversy was intensified by the fact that Hutchinson had
discovered her spiritual way through Cotton, whom she first heard preach at St.
Botolph's church in Lincolnshire, where the Dudley family was known to attend. As
Bradstreet's biographer Elizabeth White has pointed out, "Thomas Dudley and his
family, in nearby Newtown, must have welcomed" Cotton on his arrival in Boston
in 1633. White continues: "It is likely that Anne Bradstreet attended [Cotton's]
lectures and sermons as often as she could. After the move to Ipswich in 1635
she would have been able to read his teachings in manuscript copies, as they
must have been widely circulated in the colony before being published in London"
(170-71). Hutchinson's trial thus pitted the Bradstreet family's honored minister,
the most illustrious clergyman in the colony, against Bradstreet's father, the
deputy governor, with the center of debate being an outspoken and highly
intelligent woman. As feminist scholars have shown, Bradstreet's poetic
statements of deference to male superiority gain a local flavor because of
Hutchinson's banishment.4

Perry Miller, making a judgment that no one has objected to, called Dudley "a
hard, single-minded man" (Johnson and Miller Puritans xx), but in Bradstreet's
loving words, he is honored for having been "pious, just, and wise, / To truth a
shield, to right a wall, / To sectaries a whip and maul . . ." (203). One can get a
feeling for Bradstreet's theological sensibility in a sonnet called "To Her Father
with Some Verses." On a small scale, the poem realizes the alliance of levity and
seriousness that Eliot would praise in the metaphysical poets:

Most truly honoured, and as truly dear,

If worth in me or ought I do appear,

Who can of right better demand the same

Than may your worthy self from whom it came?

The principal might yield a greater sum,

Yet handled ill, amounts but to this crumb;

My stock's so small I know not how to pay,

My bond remains in force unto this day;

Yet for part payment take this simple mite,

Where nothing's to be had, kings loose their right.

Such is my debt I may not say forgive,

But as I can, I'll pay it while I live;

Such is my bond, none can discharge but I,

Yet paying is not paid until I die. (231)

What impresses me most about this sonnet is its urbanity, its surprising but
sure-footed courtliness. The rhyming couplets, the purity of diction, and the tight,
logical structure are more characteristic of the "Tribe of Ben," the very un-Puritan
Cavalier school, than of the school of Spenser. And yet, Puritanism speaks
through every line: the sonnet reminds us (if we need reminding) how at once
compelling and subtle theology's role can be in Christian art. Having squandered
her "principal," Bradstreet bows to her father's authority while alluding to a
Christ-like mercy that, by her own admission, she has no grounds for petitioning.
Her humility and selfperceived failure demand that she labor until death to repay
her "bond" or "debt." In the sestet, though, she discovers a way of negotiating
paternal omnipotence, metaphorically compared to the "right" of "kings." Her
position in fact carries a unique power: "none can discharge but 11" she writes of
her debt. From a theological point of view, one finds signs of preparationist
doctrine: the poem is legalistic (though witty); the legatee takes the initiative in
paying her debt to the testator; and a covenant of works (with the parable of the
talents in the background) informs the entire conceit.

While Dudley's theocratic politics were forceful, and while it is wrong to suggest
that Bradstreet ever simply rebelled against her father's precepts, it is clear that
Bradstreet's best poetry is not versified preparationism. Orthodoxy is in any case
a vexed issue. We have learned to view Puritan religious orthodoxy not as an
adamantine column, but as a crowded hall. The range of differences within the
governing coalition of magistrates and ministers, of differences that reached back
into the class relations and political tactics of earlier generations of English
Puritans, has begun to be appreciated. With Janice Knight's Orthodoxies in New
England as a good example of the new scholarship, the picture has changed-I
would think permanently. Putting aside the familiar centerversus-margin
paradigms of theoretical critique, Knight shows that American Puritan culture was
basically unstable, with various inchoate formations of social, political, and
religious power competing publicly in the 1630s, in a process whose end wavered
for most of that turbulent decade, while many dissenting voices remained active,
despite some grievous setbacks. Knight's work nurtures a view of Bradstreet as a
poet intimately acquainted with religious schism, a writer who gave a habitation to
spiritual differences that were intimately lived but politically dangerous. To trace
the paths by which theological conflict and contradiction enter into her poetry, I will
need to pay close attention to Bradstreet's idea of grace, for the mystery of grace
both divided the polity and nourished Bradstreet's intricate sensibility. As Andrew
Delbanco has remarked, "Puritanism was a movement that arose out of a sense
that the available language of official religion could not give adequate expression
to the complexity of experience" (148). Bradstreet realized this complexity in part
through her poetry, and subsequent American poets (and a few bold critics) have
followed her in voicing contradictions that withstand doctrinal systematizing.

"CONTEMPLATIONS" comprises thirty-three stanzas rhyming ababccc, in which
six iambic pentameter lines culminate with an alexandrine. Adopting the models of
Fletcher and Quarles (Stanford 101), Bradstreet, with her three "c" rhymes and
closing alexandrine, modifies the nine-line stanza of The Faerie Queene; this
formal kinship with Spenser is compounded by the pace of her narrative. The
work was probably completed in the 1660s. First appearing in the posthumous
Several Poems, "Contemplations" belongs to a later group of writings, often
domestic in their subject matter, in which Bradstreet's personal voice achieves its
graceful maturity.

The opening stanza is an interpretive crux:'

Some time now past in the autumnal tide,

When Phoebus wanted but one hour to bed,

The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,

Were gilded oe'r by his rich golden head.

Their leaves and fruit seemed painted, but was true,

Of green, of red, of yellow, mixed hue;

Rapt were my senses at this delectable view. (204)

On the ground that its author "painteth the outward beauty... of virtue" (218),
Sidney would have had reason to approve this stanza. The trees body forth
goodness. Their "painted" appearance does not deceive. Like the society of
saints, they are "all richly clad, yet void of pride." Bradstreet thus begins
"Contemplations" with a view of what her world, in Sidney's phrase, "should be"
(218).

Let us put this opening stanza alongside a central passage from The Defence of
Poesy:

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done;
neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweetsmelling flowers, nor
whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is
brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. (216)

Building on my earlier remarks about Bradstreet's poetic inheritance, I would
argue that Bradstreet's "golden" world derives from the golden world of Sidney. To
be sure, Bradstreet's debt to Sidney does not wholly accord with her Calvinism,
but this debt plays a crucial role from the start of the poem. For Hammond,
Bradstreet is "arrested at the sensory level" in her opening stanza (109). But the
wording Hammond uses to support this contention, "Rapt ... at this delectable
view," is in fact pregnant with neo-Platonic associations; for example, there is a
similar usage in Milton's 11 Penseroso": "[With] looks commercing with the skies, /
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes." In her neo-Platonizing mode, Bradstreet is not,
as Hammond would have it, facing down a "worldliness" that she "discovers and
confesses" (108). Knowing full well the allure of "the too much loved earth,"
Sidney had claimed a moral prerogative for the poet, and Bradstreet could claim
the same: both want to "draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls,
made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of (Sidney 219).

Hammond's error lies, I think, in his tacitly Calvinist assumptions, which do indeed
shed light on Bradstreet's writing. What complicates things is that Bradstreet
learned a good deal from Sidney, who had granted visionary powers to the poet in
his quest for divine knowledge: such sublimity poses a problem to the
Augustinian-Calvinist strain of thought and feeling, which stressed the idea of the
chasm between man and God. Guillaume Du Bartas, the French Calvinist poet
whom Bradstreet read through Joshua Sylvester's translation, The Divine
Weekes, dampens the visionary impulse, and his slight forays into neo-Platonism
are a far cry from Sidney's. On balance, and certainly with respect to the
Reformation, the Augustinian school, despite its Platonic roots, does not extol the
visionary imagination. In its religious thinking, Sidney's Defense makes an
unambiguous if restrained departure from Calvin-at least for readers attentive to
matters of theology (see Craig 68-72).

Over the next six stanzas, Bradstreet turns from a sense of divine intimacy
through nature to a Calvinistic realization of God's preternatural distance. At the
same time, she mediates God's distance through a neoPlatonic ascent, her eyes
climbing from an oak tree to the sun to the ineffable divinity beyond them. In all
this, theology and politics mingle. The abstract treatment of God's distance and
power, of "He that dwells on high" (205), agrees especially well with the
preparationist rhetoric favored by Winthrop and Dudley. Conversely, the hints of
millenarianism, the sense of rapture, and the warmth and intimacy of the divine
sun, a type of Christ, convey feelings more typical of the defeated orthodoxy of
Cotton and Hutchinson.' The affinities between Cotton's theology and Bradstreet's
neo-Platonism cohere in a shared picture of God as an emanating source, like a
sun or fountain, in images of earthly joy and fulfillment, and in the complex relation
between neo-Platonism and sacramentalism. In other respects, neo-Platonic
theory and Cotton's ecstatic faith diverge: neo-Platonism appeals more to the
eyes of the mind and the intellect, while Cotton and his followers, perhaps with a
tinge of Calvinist anti-intellectualism, preach more to the heart and the emotions.
But a poem is not a sermon, and attentive students of Bradstreet-as of her
Elizabethan models-will observe the way finely shaded theological and literary
idioms abut and cross.

With the advent, in stanza eight, of a heightened solitude, Bradstreet leaves the
opening scene and enters the deep wood. Frank Shuffleton has described this
narrative movement in terms of an alteration between garden figures and
"rhetorical silva" (32). The Spenserian model of temple (cf. contemplation) and
labyrinth is also helpful: Bradstreet's temple is her pure heart, the soul's temple
where she communes with God, and Shuffleton's garden figures are emblems of
this purity. In the labyrinth, by contrast, the poet is quite appropriately "mazed":

Silent alone, where none or saw, or heard,

In pathless paths I lead my wand'ring feet,

My humble eyes to lofty skies I reared

To sing some song, my mazed Muse thought meet.

My great creator I would magnify,

That nature had thus decked liberally,

But Ah, and Ah, again, my imbecility!

I heard the merry grasshopper then sing.

The black-clad cricket bear a second part;

They kept one tune and played on the same string,

Seeming to glory in their little art.

Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise

And in their kind resound their Maker's praise,

Whilst 1, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays? (206-07)

As artistic and religious expression become inseparable, the American setting of
Bradstreet's "pathless path" grows more distinct. The New England landscape
answers with a peculiar rightness to the poet's needs, for it enables her to
configure her movement in space and time with the allegory of her God-seeking:
the pun on metrical "feet," which had seen use in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella,
serves to connect the related levels of literal "wand'ring" and moral-poetic
labyrinth. At this moment of apperceptive tension, in an ironic and powerful fusion
of the poetic and the religious, silence enters to mark the poet's fallenness, her
distance from God's harmonious works.

These verses obey a dialectic of thought and action reminiscent of Sidney, who
wrote, "our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected
will keepeth us from reaching unto it" (217). Having obtained a sense of divine
perfection, Bradstreet grows doubly conscious of her own imperfection, of her
"infected will." In the labyrinthine wood, she reflects upon this will; to do so, and to
recover from her crippling selfconsciousness, she directs her thoughts to biblical
tableaux of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel. In effect, her memory of scripture allows
her to express her own fallibility. It is yet a further aspect of the poem's high
artifice that, with the kind of universalizing vision Spenser and Milton bring to
English politics, she dwells on the fate of exiles and on bloody deaths-on such
types of persons and events as would easily find examples in the recent history of
New England.

Against the ubiquity of sin, the machinery of salvation stands ready, as Bradstreet
again shifts the scene:

Under the shadow of a stately elm

Close sat I by a goodly river's side,

Where gliding streams the rocks did overwhelm,

A lonely place, with pleasures dignified.

I once that loved the shady woods so well,

Now thought the rivers did the trees excel,

And if the sun would ever shine, there would I dwell. (210)

To interpret this place, I turn to an emblematic passage from The Faerie Queene,
from the climax of Book I, where the Red Cross Knight miraculously survives his
contest with the Dragon:

From that first tree forth flowd, as from a well,

A trickling streame of Balme, most soueraine

And dainty deare, which on the ground still fell,

And ouerflowed all the fertill plaine,

As it had deawed bene with timely raine:

Life and long health that gratious ointment gaue ... (I.xi.48)

A. C. Hamilton has noted that "gratious" here quite literally means 11 endowed
with God's grace" (153). Through the superabundant grace of God, Red Cross is
cleansed of sin and proceeds to overcome his adversary.

Bradstreet's "stately elm" and "goodly river's side" show a number of suggestive
parallels with Spenser's Tree and Well of Life. The setting of the single tree, the
stream, and the stream's overflowing or overwhelming strength connects the two
poets. Bradstreet's depiction of a "goodly river's side" refers, by way of syllepsis,
to Christ's pierced side, from which issued the water of life, while Spenser
telescopes Christ, cross, and tree to achieve a cognate allusive force. Her
subsequent diction and riparian mythology point, I believe, directly to Book IV,
Canto xi of The Faerie Queene:

While on the stealing stream I fixt mine eye,

Which to the longed-for ocean held its course,

I marked, nor crooks, nor rubs, that there did lie

Could hinder aught, but still augment its force.

"O happy flood," quoth I, "that holds thy race

Till thou arrive at thy beloved place,

Nor is it rocks or shoals that can obstruct thy pace,

Nor is't enough, that thou alone mayst slide

But hundred brooks in thy clear waves do meet,

So hand in hand along with thee they glide

To Thetis' house, where all embrace and greet.

Thou emblem true of what I count the best,

0 could I lead my rivulets to rest,

So we may press to that vast mansion, ever blest." (210-211)

The "stealing stream"-it is hard to imagine a more Spenserian phrasecarries the
poet's outward and inward vision with it, to the land's horizon and to the soul's
haven.8 A symbolic, primordial doubling accompanies this movement, as the
stream, "stealing" or creeping stealthily along, intimates the presence both of
Satan (the Eden snake) and the redeemer: as in Spenser and Milton, the
imaginative act is troubled. The language of gratified desire, the effortless flowing
of the river, the poet's freedom in her mystical union with Christ to "slide and
glide," unoppressed by 11 crooks"-one hears the significant "crux," the worldly
cross having been lifted by the redeemer in his glory-all combine in the figuration
of grace as a moment of unmediated and ramifying sweetness. As I have
suggested, the overflowing sense of Christ's love belongs more to the Cottonian
pulpit than to the preparationist ministry. Not one to surrender her anxieties,
though, Bradstreet worries about her children, her own "rivulets." Her hope begets
a prayer; and as Cotton remarked to those in doubt, "If we have received the spirit
of prayer, we have received the spirit of Grace" (Knight 84).

An idyll of two stanzas follows, where Bradstreet describes the fish as "wantons"
who "frisk to taste the air" then visit Neptune's "glassy hall . . . / "To see what trade
they great ones there do drive." The imagery of fish, river, and sea, embellished
with figures from classical mythology, bears a very strong resemblance to
Spenser's neo-Platonic visions of divine effulgence and plenitude, while it
counterpoints Bradstreet's spiritual anxiety. Blissfully ignorant, the wantons play
like nymphs and satyrs: the pastoral genre-broadly conceived-briefly ascends
over the poem. But as the Greek is to Nature, so, in the poem's economy, is the
aspiring Saint to Heaven: each has his or her proper home. Familiar to readers of
Spencer, this shunting between pastoral and meditative lyric serves the poet's
nuanced self-consciousness. The pastoral assimilates the world of political power,
much as the poet's own retirement evokes its counterpart in his or her social and
political activity.

AFTER her pastoral interlude, Bradstreet binds together her pagan and Christian
topoi through a dazzling chain of metaphors for voice, Word, self, and Christ. Like
the earlier image of rivulets, the ensuing movement suggests the convergence of
a single voice with a unifying harmony:

While musing thus with contemplation fed,

And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain,

The sweet-tongued Philomel perched oe'r my head

And chanted forth a most melodious strain

Which rapt me so with wonder and delight,

I judged my hearing better than my sight,

And wished me wings with her a while to take my flight.

"0 merry Bird," said I, "that fears no snares,

That neither toils nor hoards up in thy bam,

Feels no sad thoughts nor cruciating cares

To gain more good or shun what might thee harm.

Thy clothes ne'er wear, thy meat is everywhere,

Thy bed a bough, thy drink the water clear,

Reminds not what is past, nor what's to come dost fear."

"The dawning mom with songs thou dost prevent,

Sets hundred notes unto thy feathered crew,

So each one tunes his pretty instrument,

And warbling out the old, begin anew,

And thus they pass their youth in summer season,

Then follow thee into a better region,

Where winter's never felt by that sweet airy legion." (211-12)

Bradstreet's vision of a European nightingale is only slightly curious. As C. S.
Lewis has observed, naturalistic detail had little merit for Sidney and other
neo-Platonic theorists of poetic inspiration, for whom the poet could create a
golden world that was more responsive to divine principles than unassisted nature
(Lewis 318-22).

"Philomel" means "lover of song," and Bradstreet's poetic naming underscores her
awareness of Greek traditions-traditions of natural beauty that she had lingered
over in the "Prologue" to The Tenth Muse, where in fact she had adjoined the
recurring epithet "sweet-tongued" to the noun "Greek" in describing Demosthenes
(15). English Renaissance poets sometimes treated Philomel as a figure of grief
and sadness; Bradstreet's imaginary bird is notably "merry": she, "Philomel," might
thus signal a movement away from the classical myth of loss and metamorphosis
toward a joyous syncretism. Overlooked in the criticism, yet of major importance
to the poem, is the fact that Bradstreet describes Philomel in language taken
largely from the Sermon on the Mount:9

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what
ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than
meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not,
neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth
them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add
one cubit to his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies
of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. (Matthew 6:25-29
[KJV"])

In her biblical art, Bradstreet, to follow Sidney, adopts a vatic mode of writing and
seeks to "imitate the unconceivable excellencies of God" (217). The nightingale,
signifying at once the cause and effect of faith, is the deferred complement to the
poet's voice, the formal companion of the "merry grasshopper" and "black-clad
cricket," her own "pretty instrument." But the nightingale, as a harbinger of the
kingdom of God, puts Bradstreet in the role of reader and auditor, and thus in the
role of choosing (or not choosing) to embrace the divine. This fleeting moment of
choice presents, therefore, much the same ground over which the preparationists
and anti-preparationists had battled.

Puritan poetry-especially in its more imaginative moments-is distinguished by
theological tensions that are fruitful but incapable of resolution. Sidney's attempt
to arbitrate between the wit to imagine and the will to act represents a kind of
peace treaty between poetry and Puritan theology. In "Contemplations," the poet
must ask if Philomel's song is a vehicle not only of a divinely inspired wit, but of its
shadow, the poetic will-imagination in the modern sense. What would it mean for
Bradstreet to join the "feathered crew," if it is a crew of her own making? A
diabolic reading of the poem might conclude that Bradstreet's selfwilled faith had
laid the poetic groundwork for the figurations of grace that she herself
constructed.

Grace for the Puritans, as Hutchinson insisted to her opponents' discomfort, was
prevenient, so that faith should be the effect or fruit of grace, not its prerequisite.
And Bradstreet, Thomas Dudley's daughter, says just this in her nightingale
stanzas: "The dawning morn with songs thou dost prevent." To judge from the
OED, "prevent," referring to the "action of God's grace," was very common in
theological writings. Cotton uses the word in his sermon Christ the Fountaine of
Life: "When God gives us hearts ... to agree with him, he alwaies prevents us, he
is ever before us, then Christ thou hast, and in him thou hast life" (Knight 116).
Still, it is hard to vanquish the will. Only the nightingale's song, which apparently
transcends time and language, hints that the poet, like the fowls of the air, has no
need for preparationism. In the soul's templum, she is freed from "cruciating
cares," including the risk of persecution for unauthorized beliefs. Twice-"rapt," she
contemplates the mystical body of Christ and his Saints.

Then the vision dissolves. Bradstreet returns abruptly to the perspective of her
late father and her own quotidian experience. Christ's kingdom must have
seemed a long way off from the fractious shores of New England, and
"Contemplations" ends with the poet leaving the soul's temple and reconsidering
the present lot of her race, of "Man at the best a creature frail and vain, / In
knowledge ignorant, in strength but weak" (212). Under such conditions,
preparationism and the laws of church and state could claim an urgent
prerogative.

By devoting her thirty-first and thirty-second stanzas to a wellwrought figure of the
poet as "mariner," Bradstreet extends a venerable tradition that had been
renewed by Spenser in The Faerie Queene (Curtius 130). The final stanza of
"Contemplations" rings with tantalizing suggestions of Sidney and Shakespeare:

0 Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,

That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;

Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,

Their names without a record are forgot,

Their parts, their ports, their pomp's all laid in th' dust

Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape times rust;

But he whose name is graved in the white stone

Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. (213-14)

Commentators speculate that Bradstreet drew on certain lines and passages from
Shakespeare, though "no printed copy of any part of Shakespeare's works is
known to have existed in New England during the seventeenth century" (White
351). Still, fire and flood destroyed many a library (including Bradstreet's), and I
would venture the remark that if one or two folios did cross the Atlantic in
Bradstreet's day, their Puritan owners may have preferred to keep them private.
In any event, this closing passage harbors an interesting likeness to Sonnet 55,
"Nor marble, nor the gilded monuments," a syntactical and verbal kinship that
cannot be explained simply in terms of a common source in Horace's "Exigi
monumentum aere perennius / regalique situ pyramidum altius," which speaks of
bronze and pyramids in a foreign word order. Where Shakespeare magnifies the
durability of his "powerful rhyme" as a "living record," Bradstreet refers to the
mysterious inscription on the white stone of Revelation 2:17 as the one true sign
of immortality. Her Shakespearean syntax, "nor wit nor gold," may signal her
subordination of Sidney's "erected wit" and "golden" world-those keynotes of the
Defence-to ultimate concerns. Spenser had concluded the Mutabilitie Cantos with
a prayer to the "great Sabbaoth God," a maker of worlds, not poems, and the one
refuge from time. Bradstreet is spiritually closer to Spenser than to Shakespeare,
but for some curious reason she forgoes a final alexandrine in favor of iambic
pentameter, as if echoing Shakespeare's heroic confidence to voice her own
message of devotion to faith above all things.

When Thomas Dudley interrogated Anne Hutchinson in 1637, she summarized
her religious experience, as well as her case against the New England clergy
(excepting Cotton and one or two others), in a compelling statement:

If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be
true. Being much troubled to see the falseness of the constitution of the church of
England, I had like to have turned Separatist; whereupon I kept a day of solemn
humiliation and pondering of the thing; this scripture was brought unto me-he that
denies Jesus Christ to be come in the flesh is antichrist-This I considered of and in
considering found that the papists did not deny him to be come in the flesh, nor
we did not deny him-who then was antichrist? Was the Turk antichrist only? The
Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open
it unto me. So after that being unsatisfied in the thing, the Lord was pleased to
bring this scripture out of the Hebrews. He that denies the testament denies the
testator, and in this did open unto me and give me to see that those which did not
teach the new covenant had the spirit of antichrist, and upon this he did discover
the ministry unto me and ever since. I bless the Lord, he hath let me see which
was the clear ministry and which the wrong. Since that time I confess I have been
more choice and he hath let me to distinguish between the voice of my beloved
and the voice of Moses, the voice of John Baptist and the voice of antichrist, for all
those voices are spoken of in scripture. (qtd. in Heimert 159-60) "The voice of my
beloved" is Christ's, and recalls the language of Canticles, much favored by
Cotton; "the voice of Moses" means churchly legalism; "the voice of John Baptist"
means making straight the paths of the Lord, the task of a "clear" minister like
Cotton; cruellest cut of all, "the voice of antichrist" signifies the voice of all pastors
who, in theory or in practice, taught faith as the condition of Christ's absolute
grace, and hence denied Christ as testator. Was Anne Bradstreet in attendance
when that other Anne spoke these hard words to Thomas Dudley? We do not
know. What is clear is that Hutchinson exacerbated rifts that had existed within
English Puritanism since the time of Elizabeth, and that widened among the rival
orthodoxies of the Bay Colony.

As a religious poet, Bradstreet transposed the rival voices of the Antinomian
Crisis-the great spiritual expressions of her day-into her best and most richly
ambivalent poem. Basic to this achievement was her allegorical use of the temple
and labyrinth. For Bradstreet, the labyrinthine wood exacts the steps of
preparation. In it, she dwells on the fallen state of human kind, on her own and the
world's distance from divinity. In the soul's temple, where the mystical presence of
Christ overflows through sun and river and nightingale's song, grace surprises the
poet, relaxing her anxieties of conscience and self-knowledge: her glimpse of a
golden world, her daring flight of wit and intellect, ultimately reflect her faith in the
God who sustains her faith. In either place, the temple or the labyrinth, Bradstreet
seeks a spiritual fulfillment that religious doctrine had failed to foster.

For many readers, Bradstreet's depiction of human suffering, joined with her
sense of a dissolution into the rhythms of time and season, into an order beyond
her life or society, is both deeply moving and a source of strange calm. In her
balance of perspectives, she avoids the doctrinaire legalism of her father as well
as Hutchinson's Manichean intensity. Like other writers who withdraw in their late
works to a vantage above life's battles, she takes her place among the wise, so
that, finally, what impresses one most about "Contemplations" is its mature
tolerance of human contradiction.

[Footnote]
NOTES

[Footnote]
1. Stanford is unusually sensitive to the reality of the English background, but she does not go into
depth.
2. Though my work, with its view of Bradstreet as a theologically minded Puritan poet, does not advance
the current movement to study American Puritan culture in terms of "lived religion" or, alternatively,
"popular religion," I am not intrinsically opposed to that movement. One of its leading exponents, David
D. Hall, places Bradstreet within the pale

[Footnote]
of his recent collection of essays, Lived Religion in America (Brown and Hall, "Family" 6602). In his
Introduction, Hall upholds the familiar doctrine of a "questioning of boundaries," to which he joins "a
sympathy for the extra-ecclesial, and a recognition of the laity as actors in their own right" (viii). Of
course, few modem historians have failed to recognize "the laity as actors in their own right." Hall's
subsequent essay, which is learned and concise, argues that the American Puritan laity had a full
awareness of theological "complexities" (50), so that he and his co-author present theology itself in a
"lived" or "popular" aspect. Insofar as the spirit of feminism directs the essay, it underscores a
resistance by women, in their own interest and the interest of their children, to churchly centers of male
authority. It would be a dreary mistake to reduce Bradstreet's poetry to this paradigm alone.

[Footnote]
At a critical distance from Hall, Birgit Meany and Timothy Whelan, recent essayists on
"Contemplations," concentrate on Bradstreet's theological underpinnings; I differ from them in
approaching Bradstreet as a literary artist.
3. This is not hyperbole-Winthrop and others were afraid that the Antinomian Controversy would end in
chaos, and recent scholarship has shown Winthrop's fears to be well grounded (see Knight 15-16).
4. There is a very interesting subtext here in the family scandal caused by the public preaching of
Bradstreet's younger sister, Sarah Keayne, whom Winthrop himself identified with Hutchinson
(Schweitzer 150-51).
5. Viewing the Puritans against the failure of their spiritual aspirations, Delbanco chooses to emphasize
a "relinquishing" of "the capacity to live with unresolved contradictions" as more typical of American
writers (147-48).
6. Hammond offers a helpful synopsis of the critical literature (262).
7. Knight acknowledges that the comparatist deployment of such broad categories has problems: "On
any given issue, the knowledgeable reader will be aware of examples that complicate and at times
contradict the general conclusions drawn" (74). This may well be true, but Knight's adroit conclusions
receive support from Bradstreet's filial verses, which virtually identify her father's theological-political
outlook with the Amesian legacy that Knight outlines.

[Footnote]
8. Bradstreet's allusions to baptism take on an allusive cast in the setting of the HalfWay Covenant
(1662), and her association of the sacrament with regenerative experience may reconfirm the Cottonian
piety of her youth. For the importance of baptism in the lives of women and mothers, with special respect
to the synod of 1662, see Brown and Hall.
9. Meany (90), alone among the critics I have read, remarks in passing that Bradstreet paraphrases the
Gospel of Matthew.
10. Bradstreet is actually closer to the King James text than to the Geneva Bible, which was more
popular in Puritan New England during the poet's lifetime, and which I cite for comparison: "Therefore I
say unto you, be not careful for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drinker nor yet for your
bodie, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more worth then meat? and the bodie then raiment? Beholde
the foules of the heauen: for they sowe not, neither reape, nor carie into the barnes: yet your heauenlie
Father feedeth them. Are ye not muche better then they? Which of you by taking care, is able to adde
one cubit unto his stature? And why care ye for raiment? Learne, how the lilies of the field do growe:
they labour not, nether spin . . . ." I find this quite suggestive. One infers that Bradstreet, sensitive to
language and cadence, preferred the King James text in this instance, because

[Footnote]
it is sublimely beautiful. Here we have evidence of a purely poetic preference overruling, as it were, the
habits and associations of Calvinism.

[Reference]
WORKS CITED

[Reference]
Bradstreet, Anne. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Ed. Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967.
Brown, Anne S. and David D. Hall. "Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord's
Supper in Early New England." Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Ed. David D.
Hall. Princeton: Princeton UP: 1997. 41-68.
Craig, D. H. `A Hybrid Growth." Sidney in Retrospect: Selections from ELR. Ed. Arthur F. Kinney.
Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. 62-80.
Curtius, E. R. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. 1948. New York:
Pantheon, 1953.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
Hall, David. D. Introduction. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Ed. David D. Hall.
Princeton: Princeton UP: 1997. vii-xiii.
Hammond, Jeffrey. Sinful Self, Saintly Self. The Puritan Experience of Poetry. Athens: U of Georgia P,
1993.
Heimert, Alan, and Andrew Delbanco, eds. The Puritans in America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.

[Reference]
Johnson, Thomas H., and Perry Miller, eds. The Puritans. 1938. New York: Harper, 1963. Knight,
Janice. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.
Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1954. Meany, Birgit. "The
Contemplative Art of Anne Bradstreet's `Contemplations.' " Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 4
(1993): 71-103.
Schweitzer, Ivy. The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England. Chapel Hill: U
of North Carolina P, 1991.
Showalter, Elaine. Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1991.
Shuffleton, Frank. "Anne Bradstreet's `Contemplations,' Gardens, and the Art of Memory:' Studies in
Puritan American Spirituality 4 (1993): 25-43.
Sidney, Sir Philip. Sir Philip Sidney: The Oxford Authors. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1989.
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. 1596. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 1977.

[Reference]
Stanford, Ann. Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan. New York: Burt Franklin, 1974. Whelan, Timothy.
"`Contemplations': Anne Bradstreet's Homage to Calvin and Reformed
Theology." Christianity and Literature 42 (Autumn 1992): 41-68. White, Elizabeth. Anne Bradstreet.
New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

[Author note]
Lee Oser took his B.A. at Reed College (1988) and his Ph.D. in English from Yale University (1995).
Presently he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross, where he is an Edward Bennett Williams Fellow
and an Assistant Professor in the English Department. The author of T. S. Eliot and American Poetry (U
of Missouri P, 1998), he is currently working on a second book, False Consciousness and the
Avant-Garde. He is active as a poet and a reviewer.

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