Homage to Mistress Bradstreet by John Berryman
"Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" is a poem by John Berryman that pays tribute to Anne Bradstreet, recognized as one of the first published American poets. Born in England in 1612, Bradstreet journeyed to colonial America with her husband and became a notable figure in Puritan New England. The poem explores her complex character, portraying her as a devoted mother and a passionate poet who wrestled with the rigid expectations of her time. Berryman's work is not a strict biography; rather, it seeks to encapsulate the spiritual essence of both Bradstreet and the colonial experience.
The poem employs innovative stylistic techniques, blending the voices of Berryman and Bradstreet to reveal her inner conflicts and aspirations. Themes of love, motherhood, rebellion, and the tension between physical and spiritual existence are interwoven throughout. While Berryman's language is often powerful and direct, it also reflects the nuanced struggles faced by women in Puritan society. Ultimately, "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" stands as a significant exploration of a woman's life and artistry in a challenging historical context, affirming her legacy in American literature. This work invites readers to engage with the complexities of identity, gender roles, and the human spirit in early America.
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Homage to Mistress Bradstreet by John Berryman
First published: 1956
Type of work: Poetry
The Work:
Anne Dudley was born in 1612, presumably in Northampton, England, of a well-read and intelligent Nonconformist father. In 1628, at the age of sixteen, she married twenty-five-year-old Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University. They sailed to America on the Arabella in 1631. Anne herself was a Puritan of profound religious conviction, but she was intelligent and well educated, and with her natural inclinations strengthened by her surroundings in the New World she became capable of strong-willed behavior, even to the point of rebellion. She could not unquestioningly accept the tenets of American Calvinism and energetically stood up to the demands of her father and her husband, both of whom became governors of Massachusetts Colony. At the same time, she became the mother of eight children, overcame illnesses, was a loving daughter and wife, and wrote enough poetry to fill a thick volume. She died in 1672.
In Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, John Berryman’s response to Anne Bradstreet is one of total approbation. He warms to her with a fervor that at times approaches adulation. The poem covers her whole life, yet the work is not a biography; rather, it provides an account only of the external aspects of her life. More important, the poem is an attempt to give a spiritual biography of the woman and of colonial Massachusetts. Berryman’s success in this attempt is notable because of the power of his language and style.
Berryman catches the essence of his subject’s conflicting characteristics, the power of her personality, in the first stanza. She is restless but patient. She is a loving mother but also a scholar of both literature and the Lord. As the stanzas develop, so does her character. She realizes that in the alien New World she and her husband must love each other. They must recognize worldly love and its importance because time is transitory. The years rot away.
In the fourth stanza, the poem’s art and power become apparent. The first three and a half stanzas are spoken by the poet about his subject, and then the poet’s voice blends with that of Mistress Bradstreet, who continues the poem with only occasional interruptions by the poet and occasional dialogues between her and someone else. This stylistic technique, which pushes back the limitations of poetry—a technique begun by the great innovator Ezra Pound and carried on by various followers—has been highly praised. By telescoping statements and feelings and by omitting transitions, the poet can reach more deeply into the very essence of poetry.
The fifth stanza, spoken by Mistress Bradstreet, continues the catalog of happenings in her world. She recounts the voyage on the Arabella and the death of the woman for whom the ship was named. The poet touches on her hopes and aspirations and fears, and on the Puritans’ troubles in the New World. All recountings are energized by the subject’s strong character and brightened by her personality. She breathes poetry and revels in life. She deftly switches from present to past, effectively overlaying one time with another. She goes back to her youth, when smallpox blasted the beauty from her face but when romance and mystery came to her in the person of Simon, her husband-to-be.
She is agonized by memories of her revulsion at the Calvinism of John Cotton and her attraction, despite being a good Calvinist, to Catholicism; she recognizes that she must be disciplined against the easier attraction. The uncertain journey of her life is reemphasized time and again as she remembers that her patience is short and that she rebels against the life around her. The conflict between body and soul—the weakness of the flesh and the hoped-for strength of the spirit—are especially powerful in her memory. Sex pulls her like a magnet, floods her very being, and rises to a crescendo of glory in the accomplishment of having children, especially her first, born when she was twenty-one. Perhaps no lines in the whole poem are superior to her statement of the joy of this accomplishment.
The iron bands of her environment are revealed in her reaction to the trial of Anne Hutchinson for “Antinomianism” and “traducing the ministers and their ministry” and to Hutchinson’s consequent excommunication and banishment by the synod of churches and by Governor Winthrop. Mistress Bradstreet’s reaction is ambivalent. She despises the mistreatment of Hutchinson for her dissenting views, but she burns inwardly more than outwardly.
As she reveals herself in her self-examination, Mistress Bradstreet is of the earth and of the spirit, but it is a balance never firmly and indisputably established. She is also Mother Earth and encompasses the whole of life. Like Walt Whitman at a later period, she is large enough to include all. She renounces nothing, however petty and repulsive. The poem’s ending is a great affirmation.
In the style and technique of the poem lie both its glory and its occasional lapses into weakness. The language is compact, muscular, and powerful; the words are simple, direct, earthy, slangy, idiomatic, and effective. The art of telescoping and compacting sometimes vitiates the poem’s own strength, however, as when a fifty-two-word, eight-line parenthesis separates, for no logical or aesthetic reason, the subject from its verb. Such technical weaknesses are few, however.
In outline, this curious but somberly moving poem of fifty-seven eight-line stanzas is effectively organized as the spiritual autobiography of a complex personality who lived, with physical hardship and spiritual travail, the double life of a woman and an artist. Despite the rough intellectuality of the verse and the elliptical intimacy of the material, a careful reading shows how apt the writer’s form and diction are for his task. In this work Berryman shows that one may employ the American past as a subject for serious poetry without reshaping it to the wonder of legend or exploiting it for sentimentality.
Bibliography
Coleman, Philip, and Philip McGowan, eds.“After Thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Collection presents essays by scholars who seek to reevaluate and restore interest in Berryman’s work. Topics discussed include Berryman and the twentieth century sonnet, and Berryman and Shakespearean autobiography. An essay by Page Richards, “The Written and Oral in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” focuses on this poem.
Halliday, E. M. John Berryman and the Thirties: A Memoir. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Provides an analysis of the thinking and writing that went into Berryman’s first important poem, the book-length Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.
Kelly, Richard J., and Alan K. Lathrop, eds. Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Collection of essays covers the whole of Berryman’s career, focusing primarily on his writing rather than on the events of his life. Includes discussion of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.
Mancini, Joseph, Jr. The Berryman Gestalt: Therapeutic Strategies in the Poetry of John Berryman. New York: Garland, 1987. Includes valuable discussion of the significance of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and why the work was an eye-opening adventure for a poet to undertake.
Matterson, Stephen. Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1988. Presents an examination of Berryman’s early poetry that reveals an understanding of and offers important revelations about Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Although Matterson treats the two confessional poets Robert Lowell and Berryman equally, he shows Berryman to be the more important of the two.
Schweitzer, Ivy. “Puritan Legacies of Masculinity: John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.” In The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, edited by Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Argues that the poem is “historical” because it is a “document of the continuity of certain cultural constructions of masculinity, most particularly, Puritan legacies of masculinity.”
Thomas, Harry, ed. Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. Collection of essays provides an excellent introduction to Berryman’s poetry, especially Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Topics addressed include the evolution of Berryman’s poetry over time and the revival of interest in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet.