Sprung Up In America - Anne Bradstreet

1612–72

Eighteen-year-old Anne Bradstreet was a new wife living a new life in the New World. Along with her husband and parents, she had sailed from England in 1630 to join the Puritan colony in Massachusetts. Her husband, Simon Bradstreet, and her father, Thomas Dudley, would both serve as governors of that colony in the coming years.

Life in America was tough. Anne struggled to be a good wife (despite her husband’s business trips), a good mother (she would bear eight children), and a good Christian (though her faith was tested by frequent illness and loss). She was also a very good writer, and her disarmingly simple poetry offers a depth of insight on her hardscrabble colonial life.

Winters in New England were downright dangerous, and yet Anne found the perspective to write, “If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant.” Every challenge, it seemed, provided an opportunity to connect with God in a new way. One poem describes Jesus’ response to her tearful cries: “My hungry soul he filled with good; / He in his bottle put my tears, / My smarting wounds washed in his blood, / And banished thence my doubts and fears.”

That might seem like naive, easy-answer faith, until you read on and recognize her visceral experience of suffering. She’s not denying her trials; she’s committing them to the power of God. There’s no naiveté here. One poem, “The Vanity of All Worldly Things,” is as crisp a capture of Ecclesiastes as you could find. In “The Flesh and the Spirit,” Bradstreet imagines a conversation between two sisters by those names. “How oft thy slave hast thou me made / When I believed what thou hast said,” says Spirit, expressing the gritty conflict of, for example, Romans 7.

In 1650, Anne’s brother-in-law took a manuscript of her work to London and got it published as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, by a Gentlewoman of Those Parts, making her arguably the first published American poet.

Greek myth had nine Muses inspiring creativity. America now had a tenth one. Or maybe that Tenth Muse is actually the God of the Bible, who inspired Anne Bradstreet, as he inspires us, to express deeper faith to meet the challenges of everyday life.

Beautiful words stir my heart. . . . for my tongue is like the pen of a skillful poet.

Psalm 45:1