ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
these poems came into print but whose poems they really are; and the claim of
authorship is a matter of both nature and nurture—a mother’s right to speak
with blunt humor to and about her offspring, how she raised them and how she
sent them out the door, with unsentimental apologies. Hers is a distinctly
“different” send-off from what we find in either Jonson or Herrick, right down
to the paternal disavowal at the end:
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’house I find.
In this array ’mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.
In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
In this highly artful self-portrait of the author as mother, Bradstreet, the single
parent, claims little for her poems except that they are indubitably and
undeniably hers—warts, or rather joints, and all.
The idea of the Puritan female saint in the New World was clearly a
motivating one for Bradstreet. We can only speculate as to why, at age 55,
Martha Moulsworth decided to write her unusual “Memorandum,” a 110-line
poem in mostly pentameter couplets that survives in a single manuscript in a
commonplace book in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Moulsworth
clearly did not think of herself as an “author” in Bradstreet’s sense, although
in “The Memorandum” she registers a sense of her early affinity with the
muses; and while her modern editors note that “memorandum,” from the
Latin, means “[it is] to be remembered,” it is not clear by whom or for what
purpose. 27 By her own admission, those who meant most to her are no longer
alive: “roote, & ffruite is dead, wch makes me sad,” she ruefully notes at one
point (l. 72). Nor do her observations amount to religious self-scrutiny.
Although piety and numbers are important to Moulsworth, as we shall see,
“The Memorandum” is not written in the spirit of someone preparing a final
account.
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