Bliss Lost, Wisdom Gained: Contemplating Emblems and Enigmas in Anne Bradstreet's "Contemplations"

Long an anthology staple, Anne Bradstreet's "Contemplations" (first published posthumously, 1678) is immovably embedded in the core canon of early American literature and has been rightly accorded a copious amount of appreciative, even admiring critical treatments and source studies. Although not the most immediately appealing of works for latter-day readers, it is at once her most ambitious, most complex, and most artistically accomplished poem, but it is not without its puzzles and discordances, many of which have been critiqued while others remain unacknowledged. The poem's most obvious feature is its religious dimension, so that it has generally been received as a forceful, exemplary instance of Bradstreet's professed Christian faith articulated in poetic terms. Its religiosity has been construed to be roughly that of her New England contemporaries and their Calvinist predecessors, whether she has been perceived as advocating or discreetly subverting those views, admixed with prevalent Protestant poetics. However we gauge the nature of her subversion, resistance, or disquiet in religious terms, outwardly her poems, including "Contemplations," maintain a conformist, or non-alarmist, posture.¹

But the assumptions that undergird such readings, on both sides, tend to distract attention from the poem itself; that is, from the religious and theological conclusions we might draw from a focusing on the wording, symbolic network, allusive resonances (classical and scriptural), and thematic movements of the poem, without jettisoning background material for a work so historically remote. Considered by its own internal dynamics, the poem's overall design hardly resembles the structure of a well-planned treatise or Ramistically arranged sermon—or even most extant published examples of devotional and emblematic verse, meditation, and contemplation, all of which are more commonly characterized by a structural coherence and Christian thematic clarity not immediately evident in Bradstreet's poem.² I offer a reading that presents "Contemplations" more as an anomaly of devotional expression and thus not quite what critical readers have taken it to be. While composed by a professing Christian within a practicing Christian community, "Contemplations" is a mostly secular wisdom poem evocative of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes and its grim view of human vanity; its Renaissance humanist concerns for mutability and mortality exploit scriptural allusions and theological nuances without advancing an identifiably soteriological theme, the absence of which necessarily complicates its status as an apparently devotional-type poem in a Christian culture.

A reasonable paraphrase of "Contemplations" (with some supporting context) might run as follows: "Some time now past" (l. 1), on the scriptural model of the patriarch Isaac (Gen. 24:63) and certainly like countless sixteenth- and seventeenth-century godly English practitioners of Christian devotional disciplines, the speaker solitarily ventures into nature at eventide to consider the Deity's providential handiwork in the physical creation and thereafter to follow the train of her moral and spiritual reflections on divinity, temporality, and the human condition, juxtaposed against nature. She proceeds by way of what was then a conventional emblematic/ contemplative method: after delineating an object or scene in its sensus literalis, she interpretively "moralizes" or "spiritualizes" the same for edification. This was a practice she had neatly outlined in the first of the "Meditations, Divine and Moral":

There is no obiect that we see; no action that we doe; no good that we inioy; no evill that we feele, or fear, but we may make some spiritu[a]ll aduantage of all: and he that makes such improvment is wise, as well as pious.

(48)

Analyzing an array of such emblemata, the unspecified contemplator probes various related themes (biblical history, spiritual presumption, consciousness of mortality) alongside the blissful, trusting ignorance of natural creatures (trees, cricket, grasshopper, fish, birds). Despite an admitted inability to laud and magnify the Creator (as she had intended) and despite the ubiquitous horror, vicious arrogance, deliberate ignorance, and treacherous infidelity that characterize the human condition she surveys, along the way she herself experiences a meliorative resolution and an ultimate gain in wisdom and hope. The poem concludes on a sanguine, albeit abrupt and mysterious, note for the Elect "whose name...