UDC 821.111(73)

THE TENTH MUSE

Streltsov Aleksey Aleksandrovich
South federal university
M.Ed., Ph.D, assistant professor of the Translation and IT in linguistics department

Abstract
The article is dedicated to Anne Bradstreet, the first poetess of North America. Her poems illustrate her feelings and emotional experiences; reflect her life happenings, sad or joyful.While writing the article, we referred to open (internet) sources. The article can be of interest to the students of American literature.

Keywords: American literature, Bradstreet, colonists, Dudley, poetess, puritans, the New World


Article reference:
Streltsov A.A. The tenth muse // Philology and literature. 2014. № 2 [Electronic journal]. URL: https://philology.snauka.ru/en/2014/02/702

View this article in Russian

The name of the first woman to write poetry in North America, moreover the author of the first poetry volume published by a colonist was almost obscure for centuries. Not that she was completely forgotten, but the importance of her work in literature was not fully recognized until the 1960′s. Then her poetry was rediscovered (doctoral dissertations, numerous scientific articles), her contribution to early American literature acknowledged, she was put next to her male contemporaries and proclaimed a near-feminist. True, some of her lines show, that she was not humble like a Puritan woman should have been (no wonder, since she received an education superior to that of her female peers), and made it clear, whether appealing to facts:

“Now say, have women worth? or have they none?
Or had they some, but with our queen is’t gone?
Nay Masculines, you have thus taxt us long,
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong,
Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason,
Know tis a Slander now, but once was Treason.”

In Honour Of That High And Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth

or justice:

…Men can do best, and women know it well,
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgment of ours.”

The Prologue

and sometimes with bitterness, bordering on pent-up rage:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits;
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits.
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance;
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

Ibid.

However, she was no rebel, as some investigators are trying to portray her. Women’s emancipation movement met with strong opposition even two hundred years later, and the poetess we are writing about deserved a praise from a dominant Puritan minister, a New England’s religious and intellectual leader of the time Cotton Mather. In his “Magnalia Christi Americana” he compared the poet to the learned ladies of the Old World, considered her poetry “a Monument for her Memory beyond the Statliest Marble”, and stated, that it “has been Celebrated in both Englands”. None of her work was censored.

But since she herself wrote, that “Men have precedency and still excel”, we shall start our essay with a brief biography of a man, who influenced her most.

Thomas Dudley was born in Yardley Hastings, a village near Northampton, England, on 12 October 1576. His father was a militia captain Roger Dudley. It is believed that he married, on June 8, 1575, at Lidlington, Bedfordshire, Susannah (née Thorne), herself recorded as having been born on March 5, 1559/60 in Northamptonshire, and baptized at Yardley Hastings, the daughter of Thomas Thorne and Mary Purefoy. Roger Dudley fought under the banner of Henry of Navarre, and for some time was thought to have been killed at the Battle of Ivry, France in 1590. However, modern historians consider more probable that he died at the Siege of Zutphen, the Netherlands, in 1586 (like Sir Philip Sidney, a famous poet of the Elizabethan era). His widow didn’t outlive him much, leaving Thomas and his sister orphans.

Thomas inherited 500 pounds from his father and was raised as a page in the family of Lord William, 2nd Baron Compton ( in 1618 he was created 1st Earl of Northampton). Also he was trained in Latin, probably by some relative of his mother’s, a Mrs. Purefoy. Thus, he gained a competent education and was able to understand any Latin author as well as most educated people of his time.

Like his father, Thomas saw military service. In 1596, at the age of twenty, he received a Captain’s commission in the army. According to Cotton Mather, “the young sparks about Northampton were none of them willing to enter into the service until a commission was given to our young Dudley to be their Captain, and thus presently there were four-score that listed under him.” Having raised a company of volunteers following a call to arms by Queen Elizabeth, Thomas and his men went to France. They fought on the side of Henry IV of Navarre during the French Wars of Religion, and were present at the 1597 Siege of Amiens.

On the conclusion of peace in 1597, Thomas returned to England, settled at Northampton and became acquainted with some Puritan leaders and himself became a Puritan. In 1603, he married Dorothy Yorke, daughter of Edmonde Yorke, yeoman, of Cotton End, Northamptonshire (She was described by Cotton Mather as “a gentlewoman both of good estate and good extraction.”), with her had five children. Samuel, the first, and next four daughters.

Anne Bradstreet was the second oldest child, born in 1612 (or 1613) in Northampton, England. Her father became a clerk to his maternal kinsman, layer Augustine Nicolls (since 1612 Judge Nicolls; knighted the same year). After Sir Nicolls’ sudden death “of ague” in 1616, Dudley took a position with Theophilus Clinton, 4th Earl of Lincolnshire, serving as a steward responsible for managing some of the earl’s estates. The family moved to Sempringham. After only a few years of management by Thomas the Earl was out of debt and came to depend on Dudley for financial advice.

Thanks to her father’s position, Anne had unlimited access to the great library of the earl’s manor, where she could satisfy her hunger for knowledge through her extensive reading. Thomas Dudley, who loved history and was
widely read — Cotton Mather described him as a “devourer of books” — encouraged his elder daughter in her studies and was always willing to teach her. Thus, despite the fact she never attended school, Anne was privileged enough to receive her education from private (eight) tutors and her father. She was tutored in literature, history, and several languages: Greek, Latin, and French (the humanities). She read classical authors: Vergil, Plutarch, Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Seneca, and Thucydides, as well as the works of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spencer, Guillaume du Bartas (or maybe Joshua Sylvester’s 1605 translation of his “Divine Weeks and Workes”), Cervantes, and not only these. As Anne herself later wrote: “I also found much comfort in reading the Scriptures, especially those places I thought most concerned my condition, and as I grew to have more understanding, so the more solace I took in them”.

In 1622, Dudley acquired the assistance of Simon Bradstreet (baptized March 18, 1603/4, in Horbling, Lincolnshire), the second son of a minister (rector of the parish church) and a graduate of Emmanuel College, at Cambridge. As the family moved temporarily to Boston, England in 1624, he took over the position. The Dudleys were known to be back on Lincoln’s estate in 1628, when his daughter Anne came down with smallpox and was treated there. A short time after she “changed her condition” and married Simon Bradstreet, 25.

That same year a group of very successful men decided to protect Puritan values and establish their own society in a new land, and for that purpose form the Massachusetts Bay Company. Anne’s father and husband joined them. In October 1629 John Winthrop was elected governor, and John Humphrey was chosen as his deputy. However, as the fleet was preparing to sail in March 1630, Humphrey decided he would not leave England immediately, and Dudley was chosen as deputy governor in his place.

The Winthrop Fleet, – a group of eleven vessels carrying 700 passengers (200 of them died the first year in New England), left England on April, 8 1630. Dudley and his family sailed for the New World on the flagship Arbella. The voyage took three months and was quite difficult, with several people dying from the experience. Life was rough and cold, quite a change from the beautiful estate with its well-stocked library where Anne spent many hours.

They arrived in Salem Harbour on June, 22. Not approving of Salem as the capital, John Winthrop ordered the fleet south along the coast to Charlestown, but it was found to have inadequate water.

When Bradstreet stepped foot on the soil of the New World, she was overwhelmed by the sickness, lack of food, and primitive living conditions. The Bradstreets and Dudleys shared a house for many months; Thomas Dudley complained that there was not even a table on which to eat or work. In the winter of 1630–31the two families were confined to the one room in which there was a fireplace. A quotation from Anne Bradstreet describing her emotions at that time could be found on a plaque at the Bradstreet Gate (located next to Canaday Hall, a new dormitory) in Harvard Yard: “I came into this Country, where I found a new World and new manners at which my heart rose.” The following sentence is, however, omitted: “But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the church at Boston.”

In the spring of 1631 the leadership agreed to establish the colony’s capital at Newtowne (near present-day Harvard Square in Cambridge), and the town was surveyed and laid out. Dudley is considered its chief founder, because he built the town’s first home. Simon Bradstreet and others followed his example. Here in 1632 and wrote her first known poem “Upon a Fit of Sickness”. But to Dudley’s anger, Winthrop decided to build in Boston. This decision caused a rift between them — it was serious enough that the same year Dudley resigned his posts and considered returning to England. After the intercession of others, the two reconciled and Dudley retracted his resignations. Winthrop reported that “[e]ver after they kept peace and good correspondency in love and friendship.” One can even say “fraternity”, as next year Samuel Dudley married Winthrop’s daughter Mary; and the same year Anne gave birth to her first long-awaited child – Samuel. Anne’s younger sisters Sarah and Patience married colonial militia officers, but Sarah’s union with Benjamin Keayne resulted in the first reported instance of divorce in the colony.

About 1634/35 the Bradstreets moved from Newtowne (since 1636 – Cambridge) to Ipswich, where they stayed for ten years. During the time Dorothy (1635), Sarah (1638), Simon (1640) and Hannah (1642) were born. Anne was frequently ill and anticipated dying, especially in childbirth, but struggled to raise her children, take care of her home, and she still found time to write during “some few hours, curtailed from sleep and other refreshments”. She lived a hard life, but, following the saying, made the best of it.

Simon Bradstreet played a crucial role in many of Bradstreet’s works. She wrote love poems about him when he was around as well as when he was away on trips on colony business (In 1631-1644 he was colonial secretary, and later was sent on a number of diplomatic missions, dealing with other English colonies, and the Dutch in New Amsterdam). Her poems tell us that she loved her husband deeply and missed him greatly.

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than the whole mines of gold
Or all the reaches that the East doth hold.
To My Dear and Loving Husband

She never hesitated to sing his “excellencies”:

My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay, more,
My joy, my magazine of earthly store…
A Letter to Her Husband, Absent
upon a Public Employment

Beside love lyrics, by 1643 she had a store of other poems: “The Foure Elements”, “Of the foure Humours”, “The Four Ages of Man”, “The four Seasons of the Yeare”, A Dialogue between Old England and New…”, “The Foure Monarchies…” and some others, but here we will quote the one showing a Puritan attitude to women’s virtues:

Here lies,

A worthy matron of unspotted life,
A loving mother and obedient wife,
A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor,
Whom oft she fed and clothed with her store;
To servants wisely aweful, but yet kind,
And as they did, so they reward did find:
A true instructor of her family,
The which she ordered with dexterity,
The public meetings ever did frequent,
And in her closest constant hours she spent;
Religious in all her words and ways,
Preparing still for death, till end of days:
Of all her children, children lived to see,
Then dying, left a blessed memory.

An Epitaph on my dear and ever honoured mother, Mrs. Dorothy Dudley, Who deceased December 27, 1643, and of her age, 61

This memorial eulogy didn’t stop “the most honoured father” Thomas Dudley from marrying the widow Katherine (Dighton or Deighton) Hackburne, in 1644. They had three children, Deborah, Joseph, and Paul.

In the epitaph Anne Bradstreet shows her mother as an ideal wife, mother and house keeper, in full accordance with the then belief was that a woman’s place was in the home attending to the family and her husband’s needs.

Her domain was to be domestic, and any woman who sought to use her wit, charm, or intelligence in the community at large found herself ridiculed, banished, or executed by the Colony’s powerful group of male leaders. An example is the fate of Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), an intelligent and educated woman, of a prosperous family and deeply religious.

She had come to the colony in 1636. The mother of 14 children and a dynamic speaker, Hutchinson held prayer meetings where women debated religious and ethical ideas. The colony was split over the her actions, since governor Vane and John Cotton supported her. Vane was turned out of office in 1637 partly because of this affair and was replaced by Winthrop, who, like most of the older leadership, espoused a more Legalist view. Anne Hutchinson’s belief that the Holy Spirit dwells within a justified person and so is not based on the good works necessary for admission to the church was considered heretical. She was labelled a Jezebel and in 1638 banished from the colony; and a number of her followers left the colony as a consequence. She settled in Rhode Island.

Anne Bradstreet’s literary work could as well be considered as a strange aberration of womanhood. No wonder she was not anxious to publish her poetry. The Bradstreet family made a final move to Andover in 1645, where they finally settled. The same year Anne gave birth to her daughter Mercy, and three years later – to Dudley. She was now raising a very large family, and her works of art could have never seen the light, had it not been for her brother-in-law.

Minister John Woodbridge (married to Anne’s youngest sister Dorothy), took a collection of her poems to London and had it printed there as “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America” (1650). Although Anne later said that she did not know Woodbridge was going to publish her manuscript, she wrote him a letter while he was in London, indicating her knowledge of his intention. So by stating, that it was published without her knowledge or permission, she tried to downplay her ambitions as an author, and avoid criticism:

…My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings;
And this to mend, alas, no art is able,
‘Cause nature made is so irreparable.

The Prologue

In her self-deprecatory poem, which tells of Bradstreet’s reaction to the publication of the “Tenth Muse”, she characterizes it as an “ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain:

… 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 wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht 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 home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find….

The Author to Her Book

We doubt that the poetess was sincere, trying to depreciate her talent. It was rather a trick she resorted to even later, to calm down those, thinking women to be “intellectual inferiors”:

My great Creator I would magnify
That nature had thus decked liberally,
But Ah and Ah again, my imbecility!

Contemplations

In 1652 Anne Bradstreet gave birth to her youngest son, John. Next year was marked by two events: her eldest son graduated from Harvard college, and her father died on July 31, 1653, at the age of 77 at Roxbury (now a suburb of Boston), Massachusetts. There was a great funeral. He was buried near his home, where his tomb may be seen on the highest point of land:

Within this tomb a patriot lies

That was both pious, just and wise,

To truth a shield, to right a wall,

To sectaries a whip and maul,

A magazine of history,

A prizer of good company

In manners pleasant and severe

The good him loved, the bad did fear,

And when his time with years was spent

In some rejoiced, more did lament.

In the church now standing at Berkley and Marlborough streets in Boston is a tablet with the following inscription:


THOMAS DUDLEY. FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS GOVERNOR OR DEPUTY GOVERNOR OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY. AS GOVERNOR HE SIGNED THE CHARTER OF HARVARD COLLEGE. BORN IN ENGLAND 1576. DIED IN ROXBURY 1653. A MAN OF APPROVED WISDOM AND OF MUCH GOOD SERVICE TO THE STATE.

Thomas Dudley was as strong in body as he was unyielding in temper and unbreakable in will, a man with marked executive and business ability. His integrity was unimpeachable. Nathaniel Morton, an early chronicler of the Plymouth Colony, wrote of Dudley, “His zeal to order appeared in contriving good laws, and faithfully executing them upon criminal offenders, heretics, and underminers of true religion. He had a piercing judgment to discover the wolf, though clothed with a sheepskin.” Early Massachusetts historian James Savage wrote of Dudley that “[a] hardness in public, and rigidity in private life, are too observable in his character”.

As Anne entered the third score of her life, her main joy became her children:

I had eight birds hatcht in one nest,
Four Cocks were there, and Hens the rest.
I nurst them up with pain and care,
No 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

From this extract we can see, that she did not neglect her duties as a Puritan woman in order to write.

It is to them she addresses her brief autobiography, rather a confession, “To my Dear Children”.

In it she writes: “In my young years, about 6 or 7 as I take it, I began to make conscience of my wayes, and what I knew was sinfull, as lying, disobedience to Parents, etc. I avoided it…. “.

She further describes her religious experiences, and writes about how she feels that God has punished her through her sicknesses, – “About 16, the Lord laid his hand sore upon me and smott mee with the small pox”… “After some time I fell into a lingering sickness like a consumption, together with a lamenesse, which correction I saw the Lord sent to humble and try me and doe mee Good…” and other problems, – “It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great greif to me, and cost mee many prayers and tears before I obtaind one…”.

However, Anne didn’t repine, for the Puritans believed that suffering was God’s way of preparing the heart for accepting His grace: “I have had great experience of God’s hearing my Prayers, and returning comfortable Answers to me, either in granting the Thing I prayed for, or else in satissfying my mind without it; and I have been confident it hath been from him, because I have found my heart through his goodnes enlarged in Thankfulnes to him.”

We also learn that although Anne’s faith was exemplary, she often doubted, questioning God: “Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the scriptures, many times by Atheisme how I could know whether there was a God; I never saw any miracles to confirm me, and those which I read of how did I know but they were feigned?”

It indicated that love between wife and husband and a strong connection to her family did not distract Anne from devotion to God.

Though the aforecited work is a piece of prose, Anne Bradstreet’s works later works, – a sequence of religious poems: “What God is like to him I serve”, “Religious Experiences and Occasional Pieces”, “My thankfull heart with glorying Tongue”, “Meditations Divine and Morall”, “The Flesh and the Spirit” were more personal and, as some critics say, more original. “Contemplations” has been considered her most mature work:

…Man at the best a creature frail and vain,
In knowledge ignorant, in strength but weak,
Subject to sorrows, losses, sickness, pain,
Each storm his state, his mind, his body break -
From some of these he never finds cessation…

Contemplations

The author, however, seemed to disprove her lines. When on the wrong side of her fifties, Anne’s faith was put to the test by a series of tragic events that nonetheless inspired a series of poems.

Their family home burned down, supposedly because of “the carelessness of the maid”, leaving the Bradstreets homeless and with few personal belongings; an irretrievable loss was Anne’s personal library of books that was said to have numbered over 800, destroyed by fire. She rejected the anger and grief and instead looked toward God and the assurance of heaven as consolation:

…And when I could no longer look,

I blest His grace that gave and took,

That laid my goods now in the dust.

Yea, so it was, and so ’twas just.

It was his own; it was not mine.

Far be it that I should repine.

Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666

Anne Bradstreet’s will remained strong, and she maintained the same attitude to other misfortunes, that have befallen her. And as a reflection of her religious devotion and knowledge of Biblical scriptures, she found peace and reconciliation with God in the firm belief that her daughter-in-law Mercy and her grandchildren were in heaven:

…Such was His will, but why, let’s not dispute,
With humble hearts …
Let’s say He’s merciful as well as just…

On my dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet, Who Died
on 16 November, 1669, Being But a Month, and One Day Old

This shows that Anne Bradstreet commanded herself fully into His hands and viewed her life as “God’s gractious Dealings with me”.

Her health was slowly failing. Anne Bradstreet suffered from tuberculosis and died on September 16, 1672 in North Andover, Massachusetts at the age of 60. Her elder daughter Dorothy Cotton passed away the same year, and Samuel Bradstreet outlived them by ten years.

Her other writings were collected by her son Simon (died 1683) and published in America, under the title “Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning” in 1678, when Simon Bradstreet Sr. was first elected deputy governor. Next year the governor died and Bradstreet as deputy succeeded him, and held the office for 5 years. After the Glorious revolution Bradstreet resumed the governorship until 1692.

In 1676 he married Ann, the widow of Captain Joseph Gardner. Simon Bradstreet died at his home in Salem on 27 March 1697 at the age of 93; due to his advanced age he was called the “Nestor of New England” by Cotton Mather.

Vocabulary:

obscure – неизвестный, малоизвестный

peer – ровесник, сверстник

to tax – зд. порицать, осуждать

slander – злословие, клевета

preeminence – первенство, превосходство

obnoxious – неприятный, оскорбительный

to carp – придираться, критиковать

despite – злоба, презрение

minister – священник

stately – величественный, роскошный

militia – народное ополчение

tutor – зд. домашний учитель

smallpox – оспа

rift – размолвка, разлад, отчуждение

intercession – посредничество

magazine – склад

community – община

to banish – изгнать

brother-in-law – зд. зять

to downplay – преуменьшить, умалить

irksome – раздражающий

to hobble – прихрамывать

integrity – честность

consumption – чахотка

to repine – роптать

to smite – поражать (о болезни)

to feign -подделывать

a score – двадцать

Task 1. Find additional information and answer the questions:

  1. Why did the English fight on the continent in the 1580-s?
  2. How come that English people served in the army of a French king, since the two nations were never too friendly?
  3. Why do we only know when the people in olden times were baptized, not born?
  4. Who were the first Puritans?
  5. Why were they leaving England in 1620-s and 1630-s?
  6. Why were some American towns named Salem, Boston, and Cambridge? What other European (and Russian) town names were used by the American colonists?
  7. In the text there is a sentence: “She lived a hard life, but, following the saying, made the best of it”. What is the original saying the author alludes to?

Task 2. Find equivalents in the text to the words and phrases given below:

родственник с материнской стороны, молитвенное собрание, флагманский корабль, паж, приходской священник, уйти в отставку с должности, вклад, роды, решающая роль, правонарушитель, взять назад прошение об отставке, добрые дела, уволить с должности, замужняя женщина и мать семейства, офицерский патент, законник, принизить значение, благородного происхождения, отклонение от стереотипа женственности, домотканый, приобрёл помощника (в лице), за пятьдесят, проницательное суждение, литературовед, устав, мелкий землевладелец, волк в овечьей шкуре, Священное Писание.

Task 3. Find equivalents in the text to the personal names given below:

Битва при Иври, Генрих Наваррский, Плутарх, Овидий, Осада крепости Зютфен, Сенека, Сэр Филипп Сидни, Нортгемптоншир, Осада Амьена, Вергилий, Тит Ливий, Плимут, Компания Массачусетского залива, Коттон Мазерс, Плиний, Фукидид, Гильом дю Бартас, Иезавель, Салемская гавань, Гомер, Гесиод, Сэр Уолтер Рэли, Ипсвич, Джон Уинтроп

Find additional information about these events, places and people and make a report.


References
  1. An Early American Reader. / edited by J.A. Leo Lemay. USIA, 1993
  2. Ramon Gonzalez Anne Bradstreet, 1612-1672. URL:http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/16071783/lit/bradstre.htm
  3. Ann Woodlief Anne Bradstreet Biography. URL:http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/anne_bradstreet/biography
  4. Biography of Anne Bradstreet. URL: http://www.poemhunter.com/anne-bradstreet/biography/
  5. Thomas Dudley. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dudley
  6. Esther Lombardi Anne Bradstreet. URL:http://classiclit.about.com/cs/profileswriters/p/aa_abradstreet.htm
  7. Roger Dudley. URL: http://www.geni.com/people/Captain-Roger-Dudley/6000000006376988467
  8. Bill Kauffman Gov. Thomas Dudley. URL:http://www.dudleygenealogy.com/gov.html
  9. Wendy Martin Anne Bradstreet. URL:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/anne-bradstreet
  10. The works of Anne Bradstreet. / edited by Jeannine Hensley. Harvard University Press, 1967


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