Before the Birth of One of Her Children
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh inevitable.
How soon, my dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
We are both ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that’s due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory.
And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These to protect from stepdames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent hearse;
And kiss this paper for thy love’s dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.
Anne Bradstreet was born in England in 1612 and arrived in the Puritan colony in Massachusetts at the age of 18. She remained in America for the rest of her life and the new geographic location no doubt fed into her work, but to call her as American as any other “American” poet (let alone apple pie) would nonetheless be a bit of a stretch, not to mention confusing. It would be like calling her colonial contemporary Sor Juana Inèz de la Cruz (1648-1695) a Mexican poet–one to a certain extent sequestered from the political and cultural influence of the Spanish Golden Age–for beside the fact that Bradstreet spent her formative years in the Old World, she also wrote in a period when the very notion of American national independence and the even semblance of an American national myth simply did not exist.
On a purely literary level, it is also impossible to divide Bradstreet from the poetic undercurrents of her natal soil. Linguistic archaisms aside, how much don’t some of the metaphoric complexities and the richness of contrasts in the poem above read like the late flourishings of the English metaphysics? I have written a couple of posts about the metaphysics before, wanting to highlight how underappreciated they are as a whole is and I highly encourage my readers to compare Bradstreet’s poems with other poets of the school such as Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Robert Aytoun, John Donne, Aurelian Townshend, Edward Herbert, Sir Francis Kynaston, Henry King, Francis Quarles, George Herbert, Thomas Carew, James Paulin, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Philipot or Andrew Marvell.
The really lamentable result of having discouraged women from artistic pursuits throughout history is that we have such a relatively small corpus of good works that properly express the joy and suffering of the female experience–poems like the one above. I admire the feminist pursuit of going back in history in order to resurface forgotten works produced by women but feel they have been largely unsuccessful in bringing to light pieces of real quality. Ironically, they have often done a fair bit to diminish the work of women of true artistic power, like Anne Bradstreet, obfuscating their quality by juxtaposing them alongside writers of little skill such as Aphra Behn or the Duchess of Newcastle.
Gender, as any peruser of modern poetry will know, is a red-hot topic among contemporary poets, and has been for some time. Yet the irony is that, having largely been weaponised as a political pursuit (which on a purely political level I can often sympathise with), I scarcely find a single work that is artistically successful in capturing the personal passion of the likes of the poem featured here. On a qualitative level, can we justly say that the current state of poetry written by women is in any better shape?
Form
Five rhymed stanzas in iambic pentameter. The first four are sestets and the final a quatrain. The rhymes are all in couplets.
Analysis
The title reveals very well what the poem is about, yet the first stanza is a more general meditation on the human condition and how close to us death is. Writing in a time when childbirth claimed the lives of many women, Bradstreet had all the reason to be contemplating her departure from this world. In the second stanza there is a narrowing however, as Bradstreet addresses someone–one can read this as an address to the baby in her womb or even to the reader, yet the terms of endearment hint that this is her husband that she is speaking to:
How soon, my dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
We are both ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
The idea that this is her husband she is writing to is made more obvious in the succeeding stanza, in which she talks of what he will remember of her when she is gone:
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory.
In the next stanza it is almost as though Bradstreet is certain that she will predecease her husband. What comes next is almost as cold as a will–a message for when grief has died and her husband reasonably be allowed to remarry, that he will protect the poet’s children from a mean stepmother:
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These to protect from stepdames injury.
Yet the personal suffering packs a punch in the final stanza. Once again, it really feels like Bradstreet is convinced she is going to die giving birth to her baby, and she wants to use this poem as a means of bidding farewell:
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent hearse;
And kiss this paper for thy love’s dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.