Benevolent Phantom

THE WORKS OF ANNE BRADSTREET edited by Jeannine Hensley. 320 pages. Harvard. $5.95.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was hardly the place to look for a poet. It was an offshoot of England's Puritan century--righteous, suspicious, humorless and stern. The most trivial event seemed like a personal message from God to be read as a rebuke or reward.

Yet America's first poet is to be found among the Puritan settlers. She was Anne Bradstreet, a high-spirited girl from a wealthy family, whose work is being published as part of a Harvard University Press series on American cultural history.

Tenth Muse. Anne Bradstreet was 18 when she came to Boston in 1630, but already a scarred combatant in the battle for salvation. Two years earlier, God had chastised her "carnal heart" with smallpox but, later the same year, relented and presented her with a husband she loved passionately. For several years she was plagued by fear of barrenness, though eventually she bore eight children. Life evolved around them and the two men she adored, her husband Simon, a busy government envoy, and her father Thomas Dudley, who succeeded John Winthrop as Governor of Massachusetts.

Anne herself left no explanation of why or how, with this full life, she wrote poetry, but write it she did--reams of it, in relentless iambic pentameter. It was dourly didactic, endlessly hortatory: "Come, come, I'll show unto thy sense,/ Industry hath its recompense." Some of it was inadvertently funny: "Was ever gem so rich found in thy trunk/ As Egypt's wanton Cleopatra drunk?" Yet when her work was published in London in 1650 as The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up In America, it became one of the "most vendible books in England," and when its author died in 1672 her eulogist said: "Time will a poet raise/Born under better Stars, shall sing thy praise."

Velvet Verse. After three centuries, time has tossed up just such a poet in John Berryman, whose Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, published in 1956, is one of the best long poems in English since Eliot's Four Quartets. He knew Anne's limitations: . . . all this bald abstract didactic rime I read appalled

harassed for your fame

mistress neither of fiery nor

velvet verse . . .

Yet he found himself possessed by this "benevolent phantom," because of a tiny part of her work, unpublished and unknown in her time. It is her occasional private poetry, addressed to her family. When she wrote to them, the woman could take over.

The occasions can be read in the titles: A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment; In My Solitary Hours in My Dear Husband His Absence; Before the Birth of One of Her Children. To her husband there are outpourings of diffident ardor: "My head, my heart, mine eyes, nay, more." His business trips rankled:

If two be one, as surely thou and I,

How stayest thou there, whilst I

at Ipswich lie?

Her father gets his graceful due:

To truth a shield, to right a wall,

To sectaries a whip and maul. . .

A prizer of good company,

In manners pleasant and severe;

The good him loved, the bad did

fear.

When fire destroyed the family home in Andover, she mourned:

Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,

There lay that store I counted best. . .

No pleasant tale shall e'er be told,

Nor things recounted done of old.

Nor candle e'er shall shine in thee,

Nor bridegroom's voice e'er heard shall be.

There is little real poetic content in her work, but enough to inspire Berry-man's vision of sexuality imprisoned by a tyranny of conscience. Enough, too, to make Mistress Bradstreet a valid foot note to the age of Milton and Marvell, the honorable inaugurator of American poetry, and one of the first female voices in literature to speak intimately and directly in its own behalf.

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