ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
receive renewed point in the final answering rhyme: “I here, thou there, yet both
but one.”
Daughter, spouse, and mother, the domestic Bradstreet monitors the
household, awaits arrivals, marks the many exits, registers the bittersweet passing
of generations:
I had eight birds hatched in one nest,
Four cocks there were, and hens the rest.
I nursed them up with pain and care,
Nor cost, nor labour did I spare,
Till at the last they felt their wing,
Mounted the trees, and learned to sing.
(“In Reference to her Children, 23 June, 1659”)
And as a grandmother grieving the early deaths of her grandchildren, she is
sufficiently seasoned in the ways of Calvinism to resist the emotional logic of
her own utterance, but only just barely:
No sooner came, but gone, and fall’n asleep,
Acquaintance short, yet parting caused us weep;
Three flowers, two scarcely blown, the last i’ th’ bud,
Cropt by th’ Almighty’s hand; yet is He good.
With dreadful awe before Him let’s be mute,
Such was His will, but why, let’s not dispute.
(“On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet”)
So fully has Bradstreet internalized her maternal role that her concept of
authorship as represented in the much anthologized “The Author to her Book”
is inseparable from notions of childbearing and child rearing:
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th’press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
We might think of this poem in a familiar genre—both Jonson and Herrick
wrote epigrams to their books—as an example of the modesty topos with teeth.
The circumstances referred to in the opening lines involve the surreptitious
printing of The Tenth Muse by in-laws and friends, all male, who used the
occasion to commend “Anne Bradstreet” to Old England from America, and like
the lyric to her husband, but in a still plainer register, Bradstreet’s poem is one
to set the record straight and in more ways than one. We learn not simply how
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