Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Many people have the impression that the struggle for women’s equality began in the 19^th century, but there is evidence in women’s writing from much earlier that at least these women driving a pen across the page were not content with being subordinate to men, and there were stirrings here and there of rebellion.

Today’s Word Cloud was inspired by the 98^th anniversary this coming Sunday of the certification of the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which finally granted American women the right as citizens to vote. However, it celebrates the words of a rare woman author from the early days of the American colonies, three centuries before that fateful day in 1920.

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was the first woman to be recognized as a North American poet, and the first in print. Her book, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published in London in 1650, where it became a best-seller of the day. In her Prologue to her book, she says, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ That says my hand a needle better fits.”

She had been educated by her father, Thomas Dudley, who was the steward of the Earl of Lincoln. He had taken full advantage of his privilege to study the books in the Earl’s extensive library, and shared that privilege with his daughter. Anne was knowledgeable about history and literature, and could read in several languages.

Anne Dudley married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of  England’s Cambridge University, at the age of sixteen. Heeding the signs of rising intolerance against the Puritans, her father and husband decided the families should emigrate to America aboard the Arbella, one of four ships that were part of the Winthrop Fleet which brought Puritans to America. They arrived at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on June 14, 1630, but were shocked to find widespread illness and starvation in the village, and quickly moved on. Eventually, they settled in Newe Towne (now Cambridge, Massachusetts), where she gave birth to their first child. Both her husband and her father were involved in the founding of Harvard in 1636, and two of her sons were Harvard graduates. (In October 1997, the Harvard community dedicated the Bradstreet Gate at Harvard Yard, in honor of Anne Bradstreet, America’s first published poet.)

Life in this ‘New World’ was much harder than life had been in England. By the time she was pregnant with her sixth child, her husband moved their family again, this time to help found North Andover in 1646. On July 10, 1666, their family home was lost in a fire that left the Bradstreets homeless and with few personal belongings. Anne Bradstreet’s health was slowly failing. She suffered from tuberculosis and grief over the death of loved ones, but her strong will kept her going until September 16, 1672, when she finally succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 60.

Bradstreet was a loving mother of eight children and the devoted wife of a public official in the New England Puritan community, but she struggled inwardly with the limitations placed on women by the Puritanism in which she had been raised. She wrote her poetry, often late at night, after her familial duties were done for the day. Her poems are mainly about her family, marriage and motherhood, the sufferings of life, and a dutiful religious faith, but a subtle discontent sometimes seeps through, the never-resolved conflict between her ‘place’ and her desire for something more.

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Let’s begin with a poem about Anne Bradstreet, a tribute to her enduring inspiration written by Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944 – ):

Becoming Anne Bradstreet

It happens again
As soon as I take down her book and open it.

I turn the page.
My skies rise higher and hang younger stars.

The ship’s rail freezes.
Mare Hibernicum leads to Anne Bradstreet’s coast.

A blackbird leaves her pine trees
And lands in my spruce trees.

I open my door on a Dublin street.
Her child/her words are staring up at me:

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun cloth, i’ th’ house I find.

We say home truths
Because her words can be at home anywhere—

At the source, at the end and whenever
The book lies open and I am again

An Irish poet watching an English woman
Become an American poet.

“Becoming Anne Bradstreet” from Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries, © 2012 by Eavan Boland – Folger Shakespeare Library press

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