Conflict between Nature and Puritan Ideology in Anne Bradstreets Poems - Essay Example

Conflict between Nature and Puritan Ideology in Anne Bradstreets poems Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612 –1672), the first prominent English-American poet to be published in Colonial America, has widely been known for her influence on the Puritan ideology of her contemporary period. A profound and close analysis of the poems by this inspirational poet of the seventeenth century American literature proves that she confronted an essential conflict between nature and puritan ideology in her poetic career. Anne Bradstreet has been noted as exposing the susceptibility of an ideology that separates the flesh from the spirit through her recurrent juxtaposition of images of earthly pleasure with the language of salvation. One recognizes, in a reflective understanding of the various poems by the poet, that a definite conflict was inherent in Bradstreet’s use of nature as evidence of a bountiful God while, at the same time, cautioning the reader not to enjoy nature’s beauty too much. This essential conflict in the poet between nature and puritan ideology becomes lucid and easily identifiable in a close reading of her famous poems such as “Contemplations”, “The Flesh and the Spirit”, and “The Prologue”. Significantly, Bradstreet’s love of the temporal and eternal life is best perceptible in the poem “Contemplations” and this lyrical and carefully crafted poem has essential force to express the conflict between nature and puritan ideology in the poet. “This poem follows the Puritan paradigm that viewed nature as a source of moral lessons and examples. Not only did God imbue nature with divine significance, but he expected his flock to enjoy earthly beauty as a harbinger of heavenly beauty... In “Contemplations” Bradstreet again acknowledges the vanity of life on earth; nevertheless, she immerses herself in sensory experience and celebrates the plenitude of nature and the generative power of the elements. Paradoxically, the more the poet feels drawn by natures power, the more she longs to transcend the world… “Contemplations” interweaves the celebration of nature with a desire for eternal life.” (Martin, 73) Therefore, the poems by Anne Bradstreet express the poet’s conflict between nature and puritan ideology and the best illustration of such conflict in the poet is the poem “Contemplations.” In an analysis of the various poems by Anne Bradstreet from a thematic point-of-view, it becomes evident that the poet was concerned greatly with the religious themes which conflicted with her love for nature. As mentioned before, the poem “Contemplations” is one of the most evident examples of the conflict in the poet between the forces of nature and puritan ideology. Anne Bradstreet’s poems, significantly, illustrate her Puritan culture and her religious sentiments. The poems also reveal the various elements that occurred concurrently in her life and influenced her cultural perspective. Her life was an amalgam of different roles such as woman, daughter, sister, wife, mother, Puritan, educated woman, and poet etc and her poems reflect the various aspects of these roles. As a poet of the Puritan culture who wanted to enjoy the beauty of the nature, as against the teachings of her religious sentiments, Anne Bradstreet underwent fundamental conflict within her mind. The meditative mind and spirit of Bradstreet is conspicuous in the poem “Contemplations” and the poet reflects on her personal experiences in New England in the thirty-three stanzas of the poem. In the poem, Bradstreet meditates about God’s Book of Nature and the state of her soul. ““Contemplations” is heavily layered with metaphors, memories, religious idealism, biblical imagery, and nature—all of which, together, created a pattern where Bradstreet could comfortably express her concerns. This structure and the interpretations of Bradstreet are more ways in which the Puritans imposed Anglicization—just by her acts of “reading” nature as influenced by her God… Bradstreet organized her world by how the Puritans saw God in all aspects of life—a viewpoint that produced a unity of all things.” (Morini, 61) In the poem “Contemplations”, one finds a person back and forth looking and sees so much beauty of God’s Majesty. However, the person has an essential struggle trying to find a balance to avoid distraction of his Puritan life. To a Puritan, the life in nature means a life away from his eternal life and the Puritans tried exceedingly hard to focus mainly on the promised afterlife. According to the Puritan ideology, if they get distracted in this life, it is impossible for them to make it into heaven and thus get to experience true happiness. The poet evidently represents the conflict between the forces of the Puritan ideology and the nature’s beauty in the poem. According to the Puritan ideology, life cannot be broken down into separate categories and there is the control of God behind everything in life. However, the patterns of Bradstreet’s poems suggested a new way of understanding life during her era and her use of seasonal metaphor in the poem points to this new way of looking at life. “Bradstreet clearly invited the reader to follow along with her observation of nature (how her eye moved from tree to sky, for example)… The story of Adam and Eve was poignant to the Puritans when understanding nature and also how nature communicated to God. This cyclical relationship—man, God, nature—was ever complex and a subject the Puritans constantly pondered or wrote about… A consequence of the Fall was that nature became a source of wonder for the study of God’s Word. Nature was able to communicate to God on its own, a concept Bradstreet was intrigued with as she sought after signs from God to aid her through her life.” (Morini, 62-3) Therefore, the poet has dealt with the elements of nature through a religious perspective in the poem, clearly suggesting her internal conflict between nature and Puritan ideology. The poet has been able to convey her ideas about the beauty of nature in spite of the influence of her Puritan ideology on her poems. One may realize this essential conflict in the poet between nature and Puritan ideology from the fact that, on the one hand, the poem deals in detail with nature’s beauty which makes the poem more of a proto-Romantic nature than Puritan, and, on the other, it never offers an eco-critical analysis. “To judge from “Contemplations,” she was more impressed by the lands beauty than its dangers. The speaker of her poem delights in sauntering through the autumnal splendors of forest and riverbank on the North Shore. At times, this pastoral enthusiasm can delude us into feeling that the poem’s voice sounds more proto-Romantic than Puritan. Still, “Contemplations” has never seemed to invite eco-critical analysis.” (Gatta, 40) Similarly, her poem “The Flesh and Spirit” as well as “The Prologue” illustrates this essential conflict between the Puritan ideology and nature. In the former poem, there is a reference to “St. Paul’s letter” which suggests the rivalry between flesh and spirit. Flesh is represented by the sister who is obsessed with earthly materials and wealth and she always tempts the Spirit to ‘have fun’. However, the Spirit is always vigilant and it focuses on the life after death like a ‘good puritan’. Therefore, the poet makes use of the dichotomy between the flesh and the spirit her poem “The Flesh and Spirit” in order to directly correlate to her beliefs and to her own internal struggle between the Puritan ideology and nature. Thus, the image of two sisters has helped the poet in illustrating the struggle between virtue and sin effectively. “Bradstreets poem expresses the tension, even enmity, of the body and the soul in the Christian ethos that is resolved only with the destruction of the body, "the unregenerate part," which liberates the spirit from the bodys cage so that it can wear royal robes, “More glorious than the glistr’ing sun” in a place where disease and death — the infirmities of the flesh — do not exist. In heaven, mortality is subdued, conquered, and finally transcended; in the meantime, the battle between body and soul rages as it has since Adam and Eves fall from grace. In writing about the theme of enmity between the body and the soul, Bradstreet addressed the subject central to much Christian poetry. The dialogue between flesh and spirit was especially popular in medieval literature as well as in Elizabethan and metaphysical poetry.” (Martin, 73) Through her use of images, the author distinguishes between Flesh and Spirit and the readers are, ultimately, able to recognize the conflict between the Puritan ideology and nature within the poet. In conclusion, Anne Bradstreet exposes the vulnerability of an ideology that separates the flesh from the spirit through her frequent combination of images of earthly pleasure with the language of salvation. It is evident to the readers of her important poems that there is a certain conflict inherent in her use of nature as evidence of a bountiful God while simultaneously cautioning the reader not to enjoy nature’s beauty too much. The careful readers of her poems identify this essential conflict between nature and puritan ideology in the poet and her famous poems such as “Contemplations”, “The Flesh and the Spirit”, and “The Prologue” illustrate this conflict. Works Cited Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press US. 2004. P 40. Martin, Wendy. An American triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. UNC Press. 1984. P 73. Morini, Carolle Robin. “Anne Bradstreet: Poet-historian, (1612-1672): The Anglicization of Puritan New England as Reflected in the Poems: “A Dialogue between Old England and New,” “The Four Seasons of the Year,” and “Contemplations”.” 2008. 22 April 2009. . Read More

Her life was an amalgam of different roles such as woman, daughter, sister, wife, mother, Puritan, educated woman, and poet etc and her poems reflect the various aspects of these roles. As a poet of the Puritan culture who wanted to enjoy the beauty of the nature, as against the teachings of her religious sentiments, Anne Bradstreet underwent fundamental conflict within her mind. The meditative mind and spirit of Bradstreet is conspicuous in the poem “Contemplations” and the poet reflects on her personal experiences in New England in the thirty-three stanzas of the poem.

In the poem, Bradstreet meditates about God’s Book of Nature and the state of her soul. ““Contemplations” is heavily layered with metaphors, memories, religious idealism, biblical imagery, and nature—all of which, together, created a pattern where Bradstreet could comfortably express her concerns. This structure and the interpretations of Bradstreet are more ways in which the Puritans imposed Anglicization—just by her acts of “reading” nature as influenced by her God… Bradstreet organized her world by how the Puritans saw God in all aspects of life—a viewpoint that produced a unity of all things.

” (Morini, 61) In the poem “Contemplations”, one finds a person back and forth looking and sees so much beauty of God’s Majesty. However, the person has an essential struggle trying to find a balance to avoid distraction of his Puritan life. To a Puritan, the life in nature means a life away from his eternal life and the Puritans tried exceedingly hard to focus mainly on the promised afterlife. According to the Puritan ideology, if they get distracted in this life, it is impossible for them to make it into heaven and thus get to experience true happiness.

The poet evidently represents the conflict between the forces of the Puritan ideology and the nature’s beauty in the poem. According to the Puritan ideology, life cannot be broken down into separate categories and there is the control of God behind everything in life. However, the patterns of Bradstreet’s poems suggested a new way of understanding life during her era and her use of seasonal metaphor in the poem points to this new way of looking at life. “Bradstreet clearly invited the reader to follow along with her observation of nature (how her eye moved from tree to sky, for example)… The story of Adam and Eve was poignant to the Puritans when understanding nature and also how nature communicated to God.

This cyclical relationship—man, God, nature—was ever complex and a subject the Puritans constantly pondered or wrote about… A consequence of the Fall was that nature became a source of wonder for the study of God’s Word. Nature was able to communicate to God on its own, a concept Bradstreet was intrigued with as she sought after signs from God to aid her through her life.” (Morini, 62-3) Therefore, the poet has dealt with the elements of nature through a religious perspective in the poem, clearly suggesting her internal conflict between nature and Puritan ideology.

The poet has been able to convey her ideas about the beauty of nature in spite of the influence of her Puritan ideology on her poems. One may realize this essential conflict in the poet between nature and Puritan ideology from the fact that, on the one hand, the poem deals in detail with nature’s beauty which makes the poem more of a proto-Romantic nature than Puritan, and, on the other, it never offers an eco-critical analysis. “To judge from “Contemplations,” she was more impressed by the lands beauty than its dangers.

The speaker of her poem delights in sauntering through the autumnal splendors of forest and riverbank on the North Shore. At times, this pastoral enthusiasm can delude us into feeling that the poem’s voice sounds more proto-Romantic than Puritan. Still, “Contemplations” has never seemed to invite eco-critical analysis.” (Gatta, 40) Similarly, her poem “The Flesh and Spirit” as well as “The Prologue” illustrates this essential conflict between the Puritan ideology and nature.

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