‘In Memory of my dear grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet’ by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content, Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye, Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent, Then ta'en away unto eternity. 4 Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate, Or sigh the days so soon were terminate; Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state. 7 By nature trees do rot when they are grown. And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall, And corn and grass are in their season mown, 10 And time brings down what is both strong and tall. But plants new set to be eradicate, 12 And buds new blown, to have so short a date, Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.
Considering the Poem
In this elegy for her dead grandchild, Anne Bradstreet stares at the worst that can happen, and the worst that can happen stares straight back. The intensity of her pain is embodied in the first three lines, each one a salutation, in grief, to the ‘sweet’, ‘dear’ departed child who, in physical life, was the ‘pleasure’ of the poet’s eye. These tender repetitions set the mood of the poem and establish a relationship with us, the readers, that’s so intense that we may feel a little ashamed to be this close to such a personal anguish.
By the third farewell, however, something in Anne Bradstreet’s handling of the sadness is changing: the centre of gravity begins to shift from feeling to reasoning as she starts to consider how the death of such an innocent infant could happen in a world governed by a God who was both benevolent and all-powerful. Perhaps, this leaning into thought has begun even in the first three lines when we hear that the infant in the world was too much cherished in the grandmother’s heart, that the sight of the material child was a sensory pleasure that, like all such pleasures, cannot last, and that the infant’s life, if looked at from a Christian perspective, is ‘lent’ (3), not given. The pain felt and expressed by the grandmother tells us that no ill is meant by these implications. What Anne Bradstreet is doing is to start the process she follows in the rest of the poem, of justifying – or attempting to justify – the ways of God.
She does this by applying Christian ideas and concepts to the problem of innocent death. The child, after all, has passed from the material world of space and time into an ‘Everlasting state’ (7). She is ‘blest’ in the transition. So, why should the grandmother mourn this infant’s ‘fate’ (5)?
The words fate and nature are both used twice in the poem. In the first use of the word ‘fate’ (5), Anne Bradstreet refers to what happens to an individual in the world. In the second use (14), she uses the word to stand for the underlying, impersonal forces of time and change that apply to all of us in the world, even to the tiny grandchild, Elizabeth; at this point the word is close to the meaning of the other key word, ‘nature’ (8, 14). Both, the poet reminds us, are in God’s power (14) and the ways He makes these work in the natural world are illustrated through the images that crowd into the second verse: the trees, corn, grass, apples and plums, even the budding ‘flower’ that was the grandchild (3), just come to pass, to rot, to fall, to die. God’s seems to plan a general, permanent, revolution of death and new life, of new life and death. But for ‘plants new set’ (12) like the infant Elizabeth, death is untimely and so seems to be against nature. She has not passed through the natural life stages of the trees, the grass, the flowers and fruits of the earth. The reason for Elizabeth’s short life is hard to understand because, in the poet’s terms, her ‘fate’ is ‘unnatural’.
The last sentence (12-14) of the poem, in its awkward syntax, and in the broken metre of the final line, seems to express, by implicit means (and perhaps unconsciously), some uncertainty in Anne Bradstreet’s mind about the solution to the problem, at least in the possibility of solving it by reasoning. The poem’s solution, in the end, is faith. She expects that we draw comfort from the knowledge that fate and nature are both the work of God and that life, even if it does not always seem so to us, is not arbitrary and meaningless.
In a poem that was written very soon after the child’s death, that starts in despair and ends by thinking and feeling its way to some hope, this slightly uncertain faith and trust are, surely, an achievement, not a failure, of faith? We all know that state of mind in which we are trying to understand something dreadful that has just happened to us while still in the turmoil of responsive emotion.
By offering us, with complete honesty, her poetic account of a personal grief, Anne Bradstreet has transcended mere introspection and made clear the ideas and feelings that will always and inevitably constitute a Christian grief.
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Christian Poetry Considered 