Anne Bradstreet And Her Poem The Four Ages Of Man

Anne Bradstreet was a powerhouse female poet in a time of self-referential moralistic puritanism. She had an affinity for language that challenged her Puritan faith and her bearings as a woman in a sententious society. Bradstreet may have appeared as an aberration of propriety and womanhood in her time, but she is known today in academia for her empirical verses on purity and the futility of egotism. One poem that seemed to exemplify these themes most accurately is The Four Ages of Man, a presentation of earthly fruitlessness through Puritan philosophy. Though even beyond The Four Ages lays Bradstreet’s magnum opus, Contemplations, a gripping and complex rumination on the eminence of nature and God, as well as man’s place in the known universe. Her strength as a poet gave her a poetic voice that was nearly mozartian in its distinction.

Anne was born in 1612 as Anne Dudley, the daughter of a nonconformist former soldier, Thomas Dudley. She led a comfortable life, and was tutored well in literature and history in Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and English. Her legacy is often lost in the distinction of her husband’s and father’s—both of whom were Massachusetts statesmen—just as any woman with a modicum of wit or intellect or inquisitiveness in that time. Anne was known to be a notable firebrand at times, showing “great discontent in the New World, wishing it had never appeared before her eyes, that she had never been ripped away from her beloved England. ” (Charlotte Gordon, Mistress Bradstreet). Bradstreet wrote epitaphs, dedicated to her mother and father, which demonstrated her love for them and also depicted a facsimile of Puritanical norms. There is little evidence about Anne's life in Massachusetts beyond that given in her poetry--no headstone or portraiture, though there is a house in Ipswich that is said to belong to her estate. She and her family moved many times, always to remote frontier plains where Simon Bradstreet, her husband, could accrue more property and political clout. They would have been particularly vulnerable to Indian attack there; families of prominent Puritans were often targeted for kidnapping and ransom. Her poems tell us that she loved her husband wholly and missed him greatly when he left on colony business to England and other settlements.

However, her feelings about him seem reserved and perhaps uncertain. They had eight children within a decade, all of whom survived childhood, a miraculous feat in any pre industrial time period. Anne was ill frequently and often anticipated death, especially in childbirth, but she lived to be 60 years old. Her fame came posthumously, in an unexpected wave of 20th century feminist interest in the writings of women from the colonial era. “What would draw people to her was not the glitter of her words, but the story that lay behind them. ” though Anne would not have expected, nor particularly welcomed, such veneration, as a patron of humility and ‘good Christian wife and mother’ (NPR Editorial Staff). The Four Ages of Man is one of Bradstreet's later works, from her collection of Quaternions (a poem depicting four individuals or subjects). It is perhaps her most experiential, as it makes references to her personal life, especially in relation to her children. The poem begins with an introduction of the characters: Childhood, Youth, Middle Age, and Old Age. Childhood and Youth voice how trying it can be for them to survive the many diseases and tribulations that threaten them, such as those that threatened Anne’s own children in their youth. All four of the ages understand that their social issues are rooted conceit, which is one of the most prevalent themes in Bradstreet's poetry. Old Age understands the hollowness of vanity, and makes it clear that only Heaven can offer redemption in your final moments, “ I shall see with these same very eyes/My strong Redeemer coming in the skies. /Triumph I shall, o’re Sin, o’re Death, o’re Hell,/And in that hope,/I bid you all farewell. ” (Bradstreet, The Four Ages of Man).

The poem itself is a testament to Anne’s intelligence; she makes it obvious that she has “a mastery of physiology, anatomy, astronomy, Greek metaphysics, and the concepts of medieval and Renaissance cosmology. ” (The Poetry Foundation). Bradstreet has 'the chance to experiment with varied logical and rhetorical structures. . . [and] closer review indicates a subtle variation in rhetorical patterns. ' She conceives the division between these four phases of life, and 'tensions, therefore, are rhetorically asserted but not logically resolved…” yet, Bradstreet regularly acknowledges a higher level of perception where the disparity simply does not matter – either because it is “all vanity”, as the ages conclude, or because “all is unity”, as asserted by Childhood. (Eberwein, Anne Bradstreet). Contemplations is Bradstreet’s magnum opus, a pseudo-epic poem comprised of thirty-three seven-line stanzas.

The poem is initiated by the poet wandering through nature, marveling at the beauty in the trees and the water and the sun. She feels an tremendous degree of satisfaction in contemplating the natural world, which leads her to think about her God, who must be even more glorious than this, His most beautiful creation. She thinks of “the great oak” and how its long life is nothing compared to eternity. Throughout the poem, the poet continues to vacillate back and forth between thinking about her Earthly surroundings and their Creator. In particular, she focuses on the sun, acclaiming its near-supernatural glory—she even writes that she would consider it a deity if she did not ‘know better’, calling attention to the sun’s ability to give life to the Earth and its creatures. (Gale Virtual Reference Library). Bradstreet focuses on her Puritism in this poem, though the theme of fallible vanity is still woefully prevalent in her religious focus. The speaker compares the flow of the river to that of life, noting that just as the river feeds into the sea, life feeds into Heaven.

The speaker is then interrupted by a nightingale, and she catches herself envying the bird. 'Man at best a creature frail and vain, / In knowledge ignorant, in strength but weak, / Subject to sorrows, losses, sickness, pain. ' (Bradstreet, Contemplations). She notices the bird’s lack of interest in anything but survival and is reminded of the natural vanity of humans. These later poems are far more candid than those of her earliest extant works, as they outline her moral and physical crises in an elegant and precisely metered fashion. Contemplations is a story about time and eternity, it examines various aspects of time in the natural world as it relates to the spiritual world. Human life, is eternal in all its vanity, not in consciousness, but if one's name “is graved in the white stone” then he will outlive all things. (Bradstreet, Contemplations).