Sparing Fame: Anne Bradstreet’s Elegiac Consolations

Editing the first complete collection of Anne Bradstreet’s writings in 1867, John Harvard Ellis selected for the frontispiece an etching titled “Brad-street House, North Andover, Mass.” The edition contains no pictures of Brad-street; none exist. But the two-story house looks tidy and pleasant, the gently sloping lawn offsetting the starkness of the bare trees in the foreground. While modern readers familiar with Bradstreet may wonder whether this is the home that burned in the catastrophic fire of 1666 that provided the occasion for one of her most famous poems, such a question would not have occurred to nineteenth-century readers: Ellis’s edition was the first to include Bradstreet’s famous “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of our House.” In fact, the house featured in Ellis’s frontispiece is not the home that burned. As Elizabeth Wade White notes, Bradstreet herself never lived in the so-called Bradstreet House pictured in the edition. Although local lore suggested Simon Bradstreet built it immediately after the fire, the home known in Ellis’s time as the Bradstreet House was not constructed before 1715 (Anne Bradstreet 226). But by opening with a picture of her home instead of the traditional frontispiece image of the poet, Ellis seems to offer it to readers as a replacement, and somehow it fits. The etching is the first link in a chain of substitutions—an image of the Bradstreet House stands in for the ersatz home, itself a replacement for the one that burned, the home that stands in readers’ imaginations in place of the poet herself.

Triggering a series of substitutions to replace what has been lost, Ellis’s choice of frontispiece follows the logic that Peter M. Sacks identifies as key to the consolatory power of the elegy.¹ Widely accepted as both a product and process of grief, as what Jahan Ramazani calls “a mimesis of mourning,” the elegy is a genre that provides both memorial to the dead and comfort to those they have left behind (28). Read this way, Ellis’s image is a fitting introduction to his volume of Bradstreet’s poems, and to my consideration of her early elegies, precisely because the replacement is so far from the original it claims to represent. Each substitution draws our attention to absence even as it provides a recompense for it. Like all elegies, the frontispiece asks us to accept an artistic substitute for the lost, but like Bradstreet’s elegies particularly, it highlights the insufficiency of such exchanges, inviting us to look to and through artistic representation to find a place for loss in the world. Disrupting the conventions of the elegy and directing her readers’ attention to the substitutions by which the genre supplies consolation, Bradstreet’s poems call into question both the function and the morality of the trades on which the elegy relies.

Although Bradstreet may be better known, and better loved, for personal, heartfelt poems like “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of our House,” in which she allows readers to see her struggle to find comfort in the face of loss, these poems can be better understood by examining some of Bradstreet’s earlier, more formal poems of mourning. In some ways—their ornate language, their engagement of pastoral and classical tropes, the fact that they take famous poets as their subjects—Bradstreet’s early elegies for Sir Philip Sidney and Guillaume Du Bartas are among her most conventional. In them, however, she enacts what scholars have read as a somewhat spectacular poetic failure, and both poems end with her leaving her subjects to other elegists, suggesting that the process of grief-work the genre claims as its motivation cannot be resolved in these poems alone.² Examining these elegies more closely, reading them against both the formal and the psychological conventions of the genre, I will show how Bradstreet’s poems for Sidney and Du Bartas dramatize and resist the elegy’s process of mourning. Troubling the conventions through which the genre helps poets and readers resolve their grief, these elegies question the methodology of, and...