Journal #5 Anne Bradstreet: Maybe Sorrow Brings The Best Poetry

QUOTE:

“Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate, / Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate, / Sith thou art in an everlasting state” (Bradstreet 210).


SUMMARY:

Bradstreet has written several poems about the deaths of her grandchildren. This line seems to be her struggling with the question of why she should mourn if the child barely had a chance to live.


RESPONSE:

The feeling I originally got from this quote was that Bradstreet is expressing how her sorrow is too great to only mourn for her grandchild once. However, after the class discussion, I realized that she is most likely expressing her feelings of how it may seem pointless for her to grieve more than once for the child. Since there are at least three poems of mourning for different grandchildren, with each child being under three years old, reading these poems opens a small window on this aspect of Bradstreet’s life as a grandmother. She lost many grandchildren before they were old enough to even speak, and that may explain why she may deal with her grief as if she lost a plant or crop from nature, as she seems to explain in the second stanza.

I would expect to see a lot of “God” mentioned in this sort of poem, but Bradstreet has no mention of God until the very last line. In the first stanza Bradstreet writes about her grandchild being “ta’en away unto eternity” (line 4) and “in an everlasting state” (line 7), but she doesn’t seem to be referring to the child going to heaven, or being taken by God himself. Only at the very end does she add in God having control over “nature and fate” (line 14), which could be a last minute thought, or could be Bradstreet finding the easiest explanation for the loss of a baby.

It seems like Bradstreet also writes as a way to deal with her inner-most thoughts and emotions, which is probably why she didn't want her work published. It's like everyone reading her diary, that just happened to be amazing writing, but her private diary nonetheless.