1. Ellis, John Harvard, ed., The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse (Charlestown, Mass., 1867; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962), p. xiGoogle Scholar; “first authentic”: Heimert, Alan and Delbanco, Andrew, eds., The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge,: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 130Google Scholar; “founder”: White, Elizabeth Wade, Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. ixGoogle Scholar; “restless”: Murdock, Kenneth B., “The Colonial and Revolutionary Period,” in The Literature of the American People, ed. Quinn, Arthur H. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), p. 64.Google Scholar

2. Two important recent feminist treatments are Walker, Cheryl, The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), ch. 1 and pp. 142–43Google Scholar; and Martin, Wendy, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Martin earlier proposed the notion of subversiveness in her essay, “Anne Bradstreet's Poetry: A Study of Subversive Piety,” in Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 19–31Google Scholar. Karl Keller takes a contrasting view, arguing that Bradstreet's Puritan “piety was her freedom” and that she turned “womanly duty into poetic power” (The Only Kangaroo among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], ch. 1, pp. 12, 18Google Scholar). Jennifer Waller also discusses the advantages of Puritan domesticity for Bradstreet's art and examines her relation to female contemporaries in “‘My Hand a Needle Better Fits’: Anne Bradstreet and Women Poets in the Renaissance,” Dalhousie Review 54 (1974): 436–50Google Scholar. See also Durr, Jimmie Carol Still, “Anne Bradstreet in the Tradition of English Women Writers,” DAI 39 (1978): 3577A.Google Scholar

3. Abel, Elizabeth, ed., Introduction, Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 1.Google Scholar

4. Walker, , p. 17.Google Scholar

5. Roy Harvey Pearce suggests that Bradstreet's poetry is not representative in this way: “What she lacks, is a characteristic Puritan insistence on fixing once and for all the meaning of the event as that meaning is somehow bound up in a communal experience” (The Continuity of American Poetry [1961; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977], p. 24Google Scholar). Jeannine Hensley also sets Bradstreet's work apart from the communal enterprise: “Although she shared the frontier experiences, she ignored most of the signs of a New World to write of the lore of the Old World and of hope for the next. She praised God and ignored the Indians; she eulogized her husband and ignored colonial politics” (Introduction, The Works of Anne Bradstreet [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1967], p. xxiii).Google Scholar

6. “Writing relates,” “attitudes”: Abel, , p. 1Google Scholar; “act of writing”: Walker, , p. 2.Google Scholar

7. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), esp. ch. 2.Google Scholar

8. “Our Country,” Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau, ed. Bode, Carl (Chicago: Packard, 1943), p. 135.Google Scholar

9. And who, in time, knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, T'inrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in th'yet unformed Occident May come refin'd with th' accents that are ours?

Daniel, , Musophilus (1599), 11. 701–706Google Scholar

And as there plenty grows Of laurel everywhere, Apollo's sacred tree, You it may see A poet's brows To crown that may sing there.

Drayton, , “To the Virginian Voyage” (1606), 11.61–66Google Scholar

10. From “Commendatory Writings,” The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. McElrath, Joseph R. Jr., and Robb, Allan P. (Boston: Twayne, 1981)Google Scholar: Ward, untitled, p. 526; C. B., “Upon the Author,” p. 530Google Scholar; Rogers, , “VPON Mrs. Anne Bradstreet Her Poems, &c,” p. 532.Google Scholar

11. However, on the importance of the early work, see Eberwein, Jane Donahue, “The ‘Unrefined Ore’ of Anne Bradstreet's Quaternions,” Early American Literature 9 (1974): 19–26Google Scholar, and von Frank, Albert J., The Sacred Game: Provincialism and Frontier Consciousness in American Literature, 1630–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 16–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Partisan Review 20 (1953): 489–503Google Scholar. The quotation is from stanza 12.

13. “American quality”: Eberwein, Jane Donahue, Early American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 8Google Scholar; “withhold themselves”: Heimert, and Delbanco, , p. 129.Google Scholar

14. “New England,” “primeval forest”: Morison, Samuel Eliot, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930Google Scholar; Sentry Ed., Rev. and Enl., 1962), pp. 331–32; “sensitive recording”: Eberwein, , Early American Poetry, p. 8.Google Scholar

15. Berryman, , Homage, stanza 12.Google Scholar

16. Eileen Margerum surveys the scholarship and argues her own view that Bradstreet's apologies are pure convention, not evidence of self-doubt, in “Anne Bradstreet's Public Poetry and the Tradition of Humility,” Early American Literature 17 (1982): 152–60.Google Scholar

17. The operative lines are: “Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, / Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite, / ‘Fool,’ said my muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write’” (11.12–14). On the question of kinship between the Sidneys and Bradstreet's paternal ancestors, the Dudleys, see White, pp. 11–12.

18. “Begetting”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letter to R. W. Dixon (1886), cited in Gilbert, and Gubar, , Madwoman, p. 3Google Scholar; “essence”: Gilbert, and Gubar, , Madwoman, p. 4.Google Scholar

19. “An Elegie upon that Honourable and renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney … By A.B. in the yeare, 1638” [from The Tenth Muse (1650)], Complete Works, ed. McElrath and Robb, pp. 151–52]. All excerpts from Bradstreet's writings are cited by page number from this edition. Although it contains some errata of its own (see notes 75 and 95 below), McElrath and Robb's edition is the one that adheres most faithfully to the texts in order and form in which they were originally published: Excepting a few emendations, it contains the whole of The Tenth Muse poetry as it appeared in 1650, the additional poetry found among Bradstreet's papers and first published in the posthumous Several Poems in 1678, and exact renditions of the portions of the Andover manuscript written in Bradstreet's own hand and in her son Simon's hand. Unlike John Harvard Ellis and Jeannine Hensley, both of whose editions reordered the materials and both of whom relied on the 1678 Several Poems on the assumption that its contents were corrected by the author before she died, McElrath and Robb have adopted a conservative editorial policy, preserving Bradstreet's earlier work in a state that reflects at least her original intentions and impulses, and therefore permitting some insight into her beginnings as a poet in the new world. The present poem is a case in point. By 1678, it had been considerably altered, and much of the material I have quoted had been excised. (For a convenient comparison of the two versions, see Ellis, pp. 349–51.) McElrath and Robb argue persuasively that the numerous changes in such poems by the time of the posthumous second edition cannot be established as having been made solely and entirely by Bradstreet herself. For a full discussion of their findings and methods, see their Introduction, pp. xxiii–xlii.

20. Margerum, , p. 156.Google Scholar

21. Here and throughout, I follow “A Chronology of the Works of Anne Bradstreet,” in Stanford, Ann, Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Puritan (New York: Burt Franklin, 1974), pp. 125–27Google Scholar. All of the poems cited in this paragraph were probably written in the 1640s. Stanford's “Chronology” does not list the elegy to Queen Elizabeth or “The Prologue,” but she gives their dates on pp. 65 and 63, respectively.

22. It is worth noting that the poet's opening lament for the great female monarch is that “thou now in silence lie” (p. 155, emphasis added).

23. If American women poets have had to carry “the nightingale's burden,” as Cheryl Walker suggests (p. 19), then Bradstreet's metaphorization of elite male poets into hawks has a deep resonance, especially in a poem so conscious of ancient Greece. Walker reminds us that in the legend of Philomela, King Tereuswho raped Philomela, then cut out her tongue to silence her-“was changed into a bird of prey, possibly a hawk” (pp. 21–22) at the same time that Philomela became a swallow (later, in Roman legend, a nightingale).

24. OED, s.v. “obnoxious,” def. 1.

25. Most critics have assumed that Bradstreet was genuinely worried about the “carping tongues,” but Jane Donahue Eberwein gives an opposing reading in “‘No Rhet'ric We Expect’: Argumentation in Bradstreet's ‘The Prologue,’” Early American Literature 16 (1981): 19–26Google Scholar. Eberwein suggests that the carping tongues are “probably imagined” and that “there is simply no evidence of the attacks to which she retorts in ‘The Prologue’” despite the colony's condemnation of verbally active women like Anne Hutchinson and Anne Hopkins (p. 21). McElrath and Robb also argue along these lines (pp. xii–xiii). I agree that far too much has been made of a supposed contemporary hostility to this evidently muchadmired poet. But to claim, as these critics do, that “The Prologue” merely plays with the “alleged inferiority of women” (McElrath, and Robb, , p. xiii)Google Scholar or that on the whole it resolves the battle of the sexes with irony and “conscious artfulness” (Eberwein, , pp. 24, 19Google Scholar) is to neglect the real pain and fear that inhere in this poem alongside the wit. Such self-imposed and self-perpetuated emotions need not issue from any overt opposition by the poet's peers in order to be real.

26. As indicated in note 23 above, there are echoes of the Philomela myth in Bradstreet's fear of tongues and speech. Yet curiously, where Philomela is actually named in Bradstreet's poetry, she plays an unusually positive role. See the discussion of Contemplations below.

27. “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Showalter, Elaine (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 302–03.Google Scholar

28. White, , p. 4.Google Scholar

29. “Worth”: “To her Father with some verses” (p. 183); “duty”: “To her most Honoured Father” (p. 6).

30. An American Triptych, p. 29.Google Scholar

31. “To the Memory of my dear and ever honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq;…” (p. 165).

32. “‘Come Slowly-Eden’: An Exploration of Women Poets and Their Muse,” Signs 3 (1978): 574.Google Scholar

33. Diehl, , p. 576Google Scholar. Part of Diehl's discussion is based on the work of Harold Bloom (see pp. 572–73 and note 4).

34. “Cannot ‘beget’”: Gilbert, and Gubar, , Madwoman, p. 49Google Scholar; Gubar quotation, see above and note 27; “doubly potent,” “fears”: Diehl, , p. 576Google Scholar. Diehl is referring chiefly to Emily Dickinson, but her analysis is apt for other women poets. For further discussion of women writers and the muse, see Gilbert, and Gubar, , Madwoman, ch. 2, esp. pp. 45–53.Google Scholar

35. Diehl, , p. 577.Google Scholar

36. For a more traditional reading of the herbal imagery in stanza 8 of “The Prologue,” stressing Bradstreet's ironic pose of submissiveness, see Martin, , An American Triptych, p. 32Google Scholar. Eberwein, however, suggests that Bradstreet may have shunned the bay not so much out of humility as out of chastity, given its mythic origins in Apollo's lustful pursuit of Daphne (“‘No Rhet'ric We Expect,’” p. 25Google Scholar). We may further recall (and wonder whether Bradstreet did) that at least in Ovid's version of the story, it was Daphne's father who saved her from rape by turning her into a laurel tree. That she was known in English as “Peneian” Daphne (her father's name being Penaeus) and that Panaeus was a river “gushing full of froth,” according to Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid, may also be worth some speculation. White (pp. 383–90) lists no copy in Thomas Dudley's library of either Golding's 1567 Ovid or George Sandys's 1626 translation, and the Bradstreets' library burned with their house in 1666, but the classically educated Bradstreet does mention both “Ovids Book” (The Foure Monarchies, p. 63Google Scholar) and “Daph'nes tree” (“The Foure Elements,” p. 15Google Scholar). One assumes that Bradstreet read Ovid in English: White (p. 66) suggests that her command of Latin was limited.

37. The verses are from Bradstreet's “To the Memory of my dear and ever honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq;…” (p. 165). “My Epitaph's, I Dy'd no Libertine” was the last line of a poem by Dudley, found in his pocket after his death. See Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana: Books I and II, ed. Murdock, Kenneth B. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1977), p. 232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. Bremer, Francis J., The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (New York: St. Martin's, 1976), p. 62Google Scholar. Murdock reports an 18th-Century assessment of Dudley: “Strict justice is the rule … It was wrote over Govr Thos Dudley's Tomb,-‘Here lyes Thos Dudley, that trusty old stud,/ A bargain's a bargain & must be made good’” (Mather, , p. 234, note 26).Google Scholar

39. Morison, , p. 331.Google Scholar

40. An American Triptych, p. 32.Google Scholar

41. “Pathless paths”: Contemplations, stanza 8, p. 169Google Scholar. “Had no father” is a paraphrase of line 22 in “The Author to her Book” (p. 178).

42. Stanford's dates are “1650–1670?” (p. 127), but the earlier date is far more likely if the poem reflects a crisis in Bradstreet's art.

43. Sacks, Elizabeth, Shakespeare's Images of Pregnancy (New York: St. Martin's, 1980), pp. 4, 6, 7, 4, 10–11, 9, 8, 107Google Scholar, note 13, and ch. 1 passim. See also Castle, Terry J., “Lab'ring Bards: Birth Topoi and English Poetics 1660–1820,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 193–208Google Scholar. On the ancient roots of “the book as a child,” see Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Trask, Willard R. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 132–34.Google Scholar

44. “To His Booke,” The Shepheardes Calender, in Poetical Works, ed. Smith, J. C. and de Selincourt, E. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 416.Google Scholar

45. “To My Dear Lady and Sister,” The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, in The Renaissance in England, ed. Rollins, Hyder E. and Baker, Herschel (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1954), p. 738.Google Scholar

46. A Character Of the Province of Mary-Land (London, 1666), pp. 27–29.Google Scholar

47. “Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, / … And kis the steppes, where as thow seest pace / Virgil, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace” (Bk. 5,11. 1786–1792).

48. These things may even be said of Alsop's New World poem, which, while very different from Bradstreet's, uses the childbirth convention in a distinctly unconventional way, and is especially hard on English critics and highbrows. But Alsop is thought to have emigrated in order to escape from Cromwell, and he resettled in England at the Restoration. Whatever resentment toward old England is in his work would be of a different nature than Bradstreet's.

49. Couvade: Reik, Theodor, Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies, trans. Bryan, Douglas (New York: Norton, 1931), pp. 27–28Google Scholar; Bloch, M. and Guggenheim, S., “Compadrazgo, Baptism and the Symbolism of a Second Birth,” Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (1981): 375, 379–86CrossRefGoogle Scholarpassim; Schmidt, Peter R., “Cultural Meaning and History in African Myth,” International Journal of Oral History 4 (1983): 167–83Google Scholar; Bettelheim, Bruno, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954), p. 109Google Scholar (italics in original). I am grateful to Sarah Caldwell Morales for these references.

50. In Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, ed. Juhasz, Suzanne (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 67–79.Google Scholar

51. “Artists and Mothers: A False Alliance,” Women and Literature 6 (1978): 3–15Google Scholar. On shifting notions of “artistic production and biological reproduction” in fiction written by women, see Gubar, Susan, “The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the Künstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield,” in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. and Higgonet, Margaret R. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 19–59Google Scholar. See also Gubar, , “‘The Blank Page,’” esp. pp. 307–09Google Scholar, and Ostriker, Alicia, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,” pp. 319–21Google Scholar, both in New Feminist Criticism, ed. Showalter. The most comprehensive treatment of this subject is Friedman, Susan Stanford, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” Feminist Studies 13:1 (1987): 49–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. True Stories (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 63.Google Scholar

53. From “The Churchyng of Women,” The Boke of Common Prayer (London, 1552)Google Scholar, in The First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward VI (1910; rpt. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1975), pp. 428, 429.Google Scholar

54. Fraser, Antonia, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 76.Google Scholar

55. Here and elsewhere, scriptural citations are from the Geneva Bible, which is the version that Bradstreet read (White, pp. 60–61).

56. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Random, Vintage, 1983), pp. 42, 41, and ch. 3 passim.Google Scholar

57. Warner, , pp. 58, 57Google Scholar, and ch. 4 passim. Gilbert, and Gubar, , Madwoman, ch. 1Google Scholar, is also excellent on this topic, but Warner's emphasis is useful because it is rooted specifically in Christianity.

58. White, , pp. 9–10, 39.Google Scholar

59. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 147–52.Google Scholar

60. Pearce, , p. 30.Google Scholar

61. Parker, Roscoe E., ed., The Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of Saint Anne (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. ix.Google Scholar

62. Craig, Hardin, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 276Google Scholar; see also p. 267.

63. Parker, , pp. ix–x.Google Scholar

64. Ibid., pp. xxxix, xlvi; Craig, , p. 249.Google Scholar

65. Craig, , p. 362.Google Scholar

66. Parker, , pp. x–xi, xxxv–xxxvi, liv.Google Scholar

67. Warner, , p. 25.Google Scholar

68. Ibid., pp. 26, 239.

69. Parker, , p. 4Google Scholar. This is the stanzaic version associated with Lincoln and the miracle plays. Thorn and yogh are here transliterated to th and gh.

70. Warner, , p. 31.Google Scholar

71. She must have known it well, for in the account of her religious experiences that she left for her children, Bradstreet made direct use of 1 Samuel 7:12 by writing that in times of doubt, “[I] haue sett vp my Ebenezr” (p. 217). The word “Ebenezer” (“stone of help”) appears only in the Book of Samuel.

72. See also 1 Samuel 1:6, 7, 11.

73. For a photograph of the window, see White, Frontispiece.

74. “Quaintly absurd”; White, , p. 310Google Scholar; Walker, , p. 11.Google Scholar

75. McElrath and Robb give “languages” here with no indication of press variants. It is apparently a misprint.

76. These notions of self-assertion are in turn projected onto the “child,” as in Northrop Frye's dictum that “the poet's task is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations, his desire for self-expression, and all the other navel-strings and feeding tubes of his ego” (“The Archetypes of Literature,” in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Bate, Walter Jackson [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970], p. 603Google Scholar). Similarly, T. S. Eliot imagined the poet expelling a “demon against which he feels powerless” (“The Three Voices of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Noonday Press, 1957], p. 107).Google Scholar

77. See Alicia Ostriker's remarks on Rachel Du Plessis, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov in “Thieves of Language,” pp. 319–21.Google Scholar

78. The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 20.Google Scholar

79. “Anne Bradstreet and Her Poetry,” in Bradstreet, , Works, ed. Hensley, p. xixGoogle Scholar. But Rich subsequently raised new questions about Bradstreet in a “Postscrit” to this essay (Hensley edition, 1981 printing, pp. xx–xxi).

80. On the distinction between style and voice, see Berry, Francis, Poetry and the Physical Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 189–91Google Scholar. Berry's book must be used with some caution: He has an astonishing theory that “women, with few exceptions, do not become poets” because they do not “undergo the primary qualifying condition for becoming poets,” i.e., the physical voice change of male puberty (pp. 37–38). Nevertheless, his remarks on style and voice are useful. According to Berry, style is essentially “manner,” which is acquired by training, reflects a “period or caste mode of speaking,” and tends to “muffle” the speaker's own real voice or timbre, that which “underlies ‘style’” and is an “index or betrayal of personality” (pp. 190–91). When I refer to Bradstreet's escape from style, I mean the inevitable departure from an English “period or caste mode of speaking” that she was “taught or adopted” and the emergence of her own vocal sound, which she “inherits, but which environment modifies and on which experience tells” (pp. 190–91). Although Berry stresses the uniqueness of a personal voice and suggests that it cannot be “representative of a group or ‘set’” (p. 191), I am arguing that in Bradstreet's voice, so painfully evolved, can be heard a resonance of feeling and response shared by others in her community.

81. “A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives,” in Ong, The Barbarian Within and Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 26–28Google Scholar. See also Berry, , pp. 3–8, 34–35.Google Scholar

82. Ong, , p. 27.Google Scholar

83. “Unfortunate”: Richardson, Robert D. Jr., “The Puritan Poetry of Anne Bradstreet,” in The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation, ed. Bercovitch, Sacvan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 119Google Scholar; “most renowned”: Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Boston: Beacon, 1953), p. 189.Google Scholar

84. Walker, , p. 16.Google Scholar

85. On the question of hope and disappointment, see Delbanco, Andrew, “The Puritan Errand Re-Viewed,” Journal of American Studies 18 (1984): 343–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Caldwell, Patricia, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. ch. 3.Google Scholar

86. Berry, , p. 191.Google Scholar

87. One of the most incisive of these commentaries is Mawer, Randall R.'s “‘Farewell Dear Babe’: Bradstreet's Elegy for Elizabeth,” Early American Literature 15 (1980): 29–41.Google Scholar

88. McElrath and Robb's is the only modern edition that prints a comma instead of a period at the end of this much-discussed line. No press variants are noted. A microfilm of the American Antiquarian Society's copy of the 1678 Several Poems shows a faint comma here, and I have retained it.

89. Anderson, Hugh, “The Book of Job,” in The Interpreter's One-Volume Commentary on the Bible, ed. Laymon, Charles M. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971), p. 252. Emphasis added.Google Scholar

90. “Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children,” The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Stanford, Donald E. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 469.Google Scholar

91. “On my first Sonne,” Poems of Ben Jonson, ed. Johnston, George Burke (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 23.Google Scholar

92. “Orinda upon little Hector Philips,” Selected Poems (Cottingham near Hull:J.R.Tutin, 1904), p. 22.Google Scholar

93. Gelpi, , p. 31.Google Scholar

94. Stanford's “Chronology” (p. 126) dates the poem as late as 1652, but the line “And if I see not half my dayes that's due” suggests 1646 or earlier, that is, before Bradstreet reached the age of thirty-five.

95. McElrath and Robb give “clear” instead of “dear,” with no indication of press variants. It seems to be a misprint.

96. In line 8, “How soon't may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,” Bradstreet seems deliberately to have capitalized the L in “Lot,” but all of her 20th-century editors, except McElrath and Robb, print a lower-case 1, thereby obscuring the word's double meaning. The Geneva exegetes explain that in looking back at Sodom, for which she was punished by being turned into a pillar of Salt, Lot's wife showed that she was “sorie to depart from that riche countrie and ful of vaine pleasures” and was unwilling to submit to God's judgment (Genesis 19:17, note i). Clearly, the speaker in the poem feels herself to be in an analogous dilemma.

97. There may be a deeper psychic meaning as well, salt being associated in the unconscious mind (and in much of the imagery of the Bible) with the idea of fertility as well as with its opposite, barrenness. See Ernest Jones, M.D., “The Symbolic Significance of Salt in Folklore and Superstition” (1912), Psycho-Myth, Psycho-History: Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis (New York: Hillstone, 1974), pp. 22–109, esp. p. 95.Google Scholar

98. See Gelpi, , p. 287.Google Scholar

99. Walker, , p. 11.Google Scholar

100. “Woman's image of herself as text and artifact has affected her attitudes toward her physicality and … these attitudes in turn shape the metaphors through which she imagines her creativity” (Gubar, , “‘The Blank Page,’” p. 295).Google Scholar

101. I borrow the latter term from Joel Porte, who demonstrates the fusion of self-expression with self-creation in a later male American literary psyche: “As Emerson was to say in ‘The Poet’: ‘The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression’ … Not to speak, in this high Emersonian sense of speaking in the service of self-culture, is not to be; and despair might be defined as the settled belief that one is unworthy to utter onself” (Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979], p. 153Google Scholar; see also pp. 151–52).

102. Afterword to Twain, Mark, The Innocents Abroad (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 478.Google Scholar

103. In 17th-Century parlance, conveyed to heaven (“said of the death of the righteous” [OED, s.v. “translate”]).

104. “I consider women's literature as a specific category, not because of biology, but because it is, in a sense, the literature of the colonized” (Rochefort, Christine, “The Privilege of Consciousness,”Google Scholar quoted in Showalter, Elaine, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,”Google Scholar in Abel, , p. 27Google Scholar). See also Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, “A Common Language: The American Woman Poet,”Google Scholar in Gilbert, and Gubar, , Shakespeare's Sisters, pp. 269–71.Google Scholar

105. “Women Who Write Are Women,” New York Times Book Review, 12 16, 1984, p. 33.Google Scholar