More E-texts

IV. PURITAN POETRY IN NEW ENGLAND: BAY PSALM BOOK, ANNE BRADSTREET, MICHAEL WIGGLESWORTH.

Early Puritan Poetry.

The Puritans were not susceptible to the charms of poetry. The strenuous life of the pioneer left little time for cultivating any of the arts, and the spirit of New England was too serious and too stern to permit indulgence in what was merely pleasant or beautiful. Even after the first critical years of danger and struggle were past, the intellectual life of the people was bounded by the narrow limits of religious discussion and theological debate. That the Puritan was not without imagination, however, is abundantly proved by the forceful figures and impassioned rhetoric of the prose writers whom we have been considering. Moreover, some of these same men did occasionally slip into rhyme. William Wood has been quoted. Even John Cotton was the author of verses, halting and rough-hewn, and full of the queer conceits which were common at the time. It is significant that this pious man wrote much of his verse in the pages of the household almanac, where it remained hidden from the public eye; and sometimes he disguised its metrical character by inscribing it in Greek.

Much ingenuity was expended upon epitaphs and obituary tributes -- so solemn a theme as that of death justifying poetical expression. If there were any opportunity to play upon the name of the deceased, the opportunity was gracefully seized. When the Rev. Samuel Stone, the successor of Thomas Hooker at Hartford, died in 1663, his colleagues vied with one another in their fervid appreciations of his virtues. He was compared to the stone which Jacob set up and called Ebenezer, and also to the stone with which David slew Goliath; he was termed

"Whetstone, that edgefy'd th' obtusest mind:
Loadstone, that drew the iron heart unkind."

One quotation will serve to show the skill with which these versifiers were sometimes able to conquer the difficulties of rhyme:--

"Here lies the darling of his time,
Mitchell expirëd in his prime;
Was four years short of forty-seven,
Was found full ripe and plucked for heaven."

If poetry be rare among our forefathers, it is nevertheless true that the first English book printed in America passed for poetry with them, and for poetry of an edifying and noble type. The Whole Booke of Psalmes, commonly known as the Bay Psalm Book, was printed on the new press at Cambridge in 1640. This work, designed to provide a metrical version of the Psalms of David, to be used in the churches, contains the joint efforts of three New England ministers -- "the chief divines in the country," -- Richard Mather of Dorchester, Thomas Welde, and John Eliot, of Roxbury. The preface, written by Mather, declares that

"It hath been one part of our religious care and faithful endeavor to keep close to the original text.... If, therefore, the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect, let them consider that God's altar needs not our polishings, for we have respected rather a plain translation than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any paraphrase; and so have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry."

In illustration of the art displayed by these divines in their paraphrase, historians have invariably cited some of the most atrocious of the compositions. This seems hardly fair. The following examples are sufficient to show the average result of "the sad, mechanic exercise" of these godly men:--

"I in the Lord do trust; how then
to my soul do ye say,
As doth a little bird, unto
your mountain fly away?

"For lo the wicked bend their bow,
their arrows they prepare
On string; to shoot in dark at them
in heart that upright are."
From paraphrase of Psalm xi.

"Praise ye the Lord, praise God
in's place of holiness;
O praise him in the firmament
of his great mightiness.
O praise him for his acts
that be magnificent,

"& praise ye him according to
his greatness excellent.
With trumpet praise ye him
that gives a sound so high:
& do ye praise him with the Harp
& sounding Psalterye."

Psalm cl.

The student may be sure that he will find many worse compositions in this collection; it is doubtful if he will find smoother. And yet the Bay Psalm Book served its sacred purpose in the New England churches for more than a century; it was even used to some extent by Puritan worshipers in England and Scotland until after 1750. At the Old South Church in Boston, the Bay Psalm Book, although it had been revised, was not displaced until 1786.

Anne Bradstreet, 1613-72.

From the midst of the crude and sombre compositions of Puritan verse-makers, there arose one writer for whom in some measure the poetical gift may be claimed. This was Anne Bradstreet. In 1650, the first volume of her poems was published in London. Upon the title-page of this volume the author was rather extravagantly introduced as "the Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America." Anne Bradstreet, a really gifted woman, was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, a Puritan soldier and scholar, who has been described as a "typical narrow-minded, straitlaced Calvinist, for whom it is so much easier to entertain respect than affection." Nevertheless, Anne Dudley was reared in comfort and enjoyed especially the dear delight of books. She was married at sixteen to Simon Bradstreet, a Puritan gentleman who afterward became a leader in colonial affairs and a governor of Massachusetts. In 1630, the entire family joined the company of emigrants to America, Thomas Dudley holding the position of deputy governor under Winthrop. The Bradstreets settled near the present town of Andover, not far from the beautiful Merrimac. For this young wife, accustomed to an atmosphere of comfort and refinement, the experiences of pioneer life must have been trying in the extreme. Yet, in the wilderness, amid its threatening perils, superintending the work which falls to the mistress of a farm, rearing and educating her eight children, Mrs. Bradstreet found comfort in literary occupation, and both time and spirit to write. The quality of her mind is shown in her prose, but it was as a poet that she found fame. In her verse, she is influenced by the work of such of the English poets as would naturally have impressed her: the devotional poems of John Donne, of Francis Quarles, author of the Divine Emblems; of the Puritan poet, George Wither, and the deeply spiritual poetry of the saintly George Herbert. The verse of these minor English poets who flourished in the time of James and Charles I -- the period of Anne Bradstreet's girlhood and early womanhood -- was characterized by an unusual and fantastic style of thought and diction. These men are sometimes called the "metaphysical poets," because of this artificial quality and on account of their grotesque conceits. The crude rhymes of the colonial epitaphs already quoted, with their incongruous puns, are rather extreme examples of this fantastic style. The work of the "Tenth Muse" shows the influence of this taste for a strained and laborious ingenuity of expression. Her longer works are didactic; so filled with the eager purpose to instruct and edify that the natural Puritan scruples regarding a woman's practice of the literary art were in large degree forgotten. The Four Elements and The Four Seasons are in the form of dialogue, wherein the speakers individually maintain their claims to preëminence; these poems are mechanical and heavy compositions, but show a facility of phrase and rhythm quite new to the readers of colonial verse. The Four Monarchies, her most ambitious poem, is a rhyming chronicle based upon Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World. When Anne Bradstreet's poems were published, in 1650, they were received with extravagant praise in America; and following her death, not a few of her admirers essayed to express their appreciation in flattering verse.

John Rogers, who before his death became president of Harvard College, paid his tribute to the genius of Anne Bradstreet in quite exalted utterance. One stanza of his composition may be quoted, in testimony to the effect produced in contemporary minds of literary taste by this gifted woman's work.

"Twice have I drunk the nectar of your lines,
Which high sublimed my mean-born fantasy.
Flushed with these streams of your Maronian wines,
Above myself rapt to an ecstasy,
Methought I was upon Mount Hybla's top,
There where I might those fragrant flowers lop,
Whence did sweet odors flow, and honey-spangles drop."

Let us now read a few stanzas written by Anne Bradstreet herself, taken from her best known and most attractive poem, Contemplations. It was written late in her life, at her home in Andover, and is properly described as "a genuine expression of poetic feeling in the presence of nature."

"I heard the merry grasshopper then sing,
The black-clad cricket bear a second part,
They kept one tune, and played on the same string,
Seeming to glory in their little art.
Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise?
And in their kind resound their maker's praise,
Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays?

"Under the cooling shadow of a stately Elm,
Close state I by a goodly River's side,
Where gliding streams the Rocks did overwhelm;
A lonely place with pleasures dignifi'd.
I once that lov'd the shady woods so well,
Now thought the rivers did the trees excel,
And if the sun would ever shine there would I dwell.

"While musing thus with contemplation fed,
And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain,
The sweet tongu'd Philomel percht o'er my head,
And chanted forth a most melodious strain,
Which rapt me so with wonder and delight,
I judg'd my hearing better than my sight,
And wisht me wings with her awhile to take my flight."

A few months before Anne Bradstreet's death, she composed the following lines, which illustrate the aspirations of Puritanism in their noblest form: --

"As weary pilgrim now at rest
Hugs with delight his silent nest,
His wasted limbs now lie full soft,
That miry steps have trodden oft,
Pleases himself to think upon
His dangers past and travails done;

"A pilgrim I, in earth perplexed,
With sins, with cares and sorrows vexed,
By age and pains brought to decay,
And my clay house mouldering away,
Oh, how I long to be at rest
And soar on high among the blest."

While Mrs. Bradstreet's verse at its best exhibits the highest poetical accomplishment of seventeenth-century Puritanism in New England, there was one other Puritan versifier whose inspiration appealed yet more strongly to contemporary minds. This most popular of early American poets was Rev.Michael Wigglesworth, minister at Malden, Massachusetts, author of a tremendous and dismal epic, surcharged with the extreme Calvinism of the time. This masterpiece of Puritan theological belief is entitled The Day of Doom; it was published in 1662, and for a hundred years remained -- as Lowell expresses it -- "the solace of every fireside" in the northern colonies. The Day of Doom.

This long and desolate composition is an imaginative account of the Last Judgment. The voice of the trumpet is heard summoning the living and the dead before the dreadful bar.

"Some hide themselves in Caves and Delves
in places underground.
Some rashly leap into the Deep,
to scape by being drowned:
Some to the Rocks (O senseless blocks!)
and woody mountains run
That there they might this fearful sight,
and dreaded Presence shun."

In this jingling ballad measure, so strangely inappropriate to his solemn theme, the reverend author pursues his gloomy way. It is not well to linger over this grotesque presentation of mediaeval art and logic; yet it is through these crude expressions of the early literature that we are brought in closest touch with some phases of the Puritan mind. First we are given the appeals of the condemned; the children argue with reference to Adam's fall: --

"Not we, but he ate of the Tree,
whose fruit was interdicted:
Yet on us all of his sad Fall,
the punishment's inflicted.
How could we sin that had not been,
or how is his sin our
Without consent, which to prevent,
we never had a power?"

The reply is heard that Adam stood not for himself alone, but for all mankind; that had he done well instead of ill, all would have shared in his benefits -- nor would they have then protested that they deserved not to share therein, on the ground now urged. The inexorable Judge does, however, yield a point in mercy to the children and infants:--

"Yet to compare your sin with their
who lived a longer time,
I do confess yours is much less,
though every sin's a crime.

"A crime it is, therefore in bliss
you may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
the easiest room in Hell.
The glorious King thus answering,
they cease and plead no longer:
Their consciences must needs confess
his reasons are the stronger."

Much of Wigglesworth's vision is too lurid to be described here; such raw strength as he applied in painting the details of his fiery picture but intensifies the horror of it and increases our wonder that such conceptions could have prevailed.

Puritan Types.

It is interesting to remember that at the very time when the Malden minister was writing his Day of Doom, John Milton was engaged upon the real epic of Puritan faith, one of the masterpieces of all literature. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. It was but a decade thereafter that John Bunyan completed his beautiful religious allegory, Pilgrim's Progress. But the Puritanism of New England -- its narrowness and hardness no doubt intensified by the isolation and, perhaps, the depression incident to life in a comparatively rude and struggling colony -- was represented by the zealot, Michael Wigglesworth, with his sing-song verse, and the stern ascetic Cotton Mather, with his laborious and often fantastic prose. It was eminently fitting that when Wigglesworth died in 1705, the author of the Magnalia should have preached his funeral sermon. The two stand appropriately together. They taught the same doctrine; and in their two great representative works they exhibit the literary attainment of Colonial America in the seventeenth century.

Suggestions for Reading.

The following books will be found especially helpful for reference and for supplementary reading: John Fiske's Old Virginia and her Neighbours; Beginnings of New England; George P. Fisher's The Colonial Era (American History Series); R.G. Thwaites's The Colonies (Epochs of American History). The one authoritative work on early American literature is Moses Coit Tyler's monumental History of American Literature during Colonial Times (2 vols.); for teachers and advanced students of the subject Professor Tyler's books are invaluable. In Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature are to be found extended selections from the works of all these early writers; this excellent Library should be in every school, and in constant use for illustration during the course.

The series of Old South Leaflets (published by the Old South Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts) contains reprints of various papers of interest, notably: A Description of New England, by John Smith (No. 121). Manners and Customs of the Indians (from the New English Canaan), by Thomas Morton (No. 87). The Lives of Bradford and Winthrop, by Cotton Mather (No. 77). Bradford's Memoir of Brewster (No. 48). Roger Williams' Letters to Winthrop (No. 54). Bradford's History of the Plimoth Plantation, with a report of the proceedings incident to the return of the manuscript to Massachusetts, was printed and published by the State at Boston, in 1901. The lives and times of Francis Higginson, Anne Bradstreet, and Cotton Mather have been presented in recent interesting biographies. The Scarlet Letter, by Hawthorne, F.J. Stimson's King Noanett, Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold, with other standard works of fiction dealing with this colonial period, may be read with great advantage also.

Discuss in my forum

• american literature
• students
• history