Anne Bradstreet's "Verses upon the Burning of our House"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

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🗓️ 4 December 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

“We only live, only suspire/ Consumed by either fire or fire.”…are not lines from today’s poem, but one gets the feeling Bradstreet understood their meaning as well as anyone could. Happy reading.

Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northamptonshire, England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at the age of sixteen. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents, immigrated to the American colonies with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children, and she became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. It was during this time that Bradstreet penned many of the poems that would be taken to England by her brother-in-law, purportedly without her knowledge, and published in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America.

The Tenth Muse was the only collection of Bradstreet’s poetry to appear during her lifetime. In 1644, the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Bradstreet lived until her death in 1672. In 1678, the first American edition of The Tenth Muse was published posthumously and expanded as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning. Bradstreet’s most highly regarded work, a sequence of religious poems titled Contemplations, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, December 4th, 2004. Today's poem is by Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, and it's called Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666. And while you might think that title is a mouthful, if you've read any
0:24.5	other Puritan writings, you know that we probably got off easy. This poem is disarmingly straightforward.
0:32.9	It's a fairly simple, linear narrative about the burning of a house. In fact, the title almost tells
0:38.8	the entire story. And then you get to the end and there's a turn that is reminiscent of
0:44.5	attending some free concert, only to be blindsided by an altar call at the end. And yet, Bradstreet
0:52.1	really finds the only acceptable departure in poetry from the concrete,
0:59.2	the particular and tangible, and that is the lifting into the eternal in a way that does not
1:05.5	seem forced or pathetic. It is the kind of conclusion that might only be earned by the loss of one's family
1:13.1	or the loss of one's home, but Bradstreet has certainly earned it. This poem also features
1:19.1	very intriguing, very suggestive use of the rhyming couplet. We tend to think of the rhyming
1:24.9	couplet as very boilerplate, very simplistic,
1:28.7	partly because more modernistic poetry has worked that prejudice into us,
1:33.2	but also partly, fairly or justly, because that is often a structural tactic or a rhyme scheme
1:41.6	that is easy to teach, and so we ask children to recreate it a lot.
1:47.3	But here, the pairs of rhyming sounds creates these bonds or dualities in which two separate
1:57.6	realities are being drawn together. The earthly is being contrasted with the heavenly
2:04.7	and yet ultimately the earthly reality of loss that the poem narrates is or has a heavenly
2:13.3	corollary as things are stripped away in one realm they are given in another, or only when
2:21.9	the love of the things of this world is overcome, can love truly be fostered for the next life.
2:30.4	And even on the level of the concrete images, you have two separate or discrete things blending together into one.
2:39.2	This happens for the first time in the fifth line.
2:41.8	That fearful sound of fire and fire.
	...

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