Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672)

In 1650, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America was published in London. If I remember correctly, it was the first book of poetry to come out of North America, certainly of that area which was to become the United States. And it was written by a woman! Bradstreet knew such a publication could be at the least a scandal. At worst, it could get her in real trouble. Anne lived in Puritan Massachusetts Bay, where women were expected to keep their decidedly secondary place. A decade earlier (1638), another Anne, Anne Hutchinson had been exiled from the colony for the heresy of daring to think for herself and teach religion. Penelope Scambly Schott has published an excellent biography in poetry of Anne Hutchinson, A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth.

In an attempt to forestall a similar fate for herself, Bradstreet included this apparently fawning prologue. Irony and satire are not 20^th century inventions. The poem is a rhetorical masterpiece.

You’ll find a nice hypertext gloss here to help in understanding Bradstreet’s complex word play. Obnoxious, for example, has several meanings more than the one most of us are currently familiar with, though I like it here in the modern sense.

The Prologue

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealth begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things:
Or how they all, or each their dates have run
Let poets and historians set these forth,
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

2
But when my wond’ring eyes and envious heart
Great Bartas sugared lines do but read o’er,
Fool I do grudge the Muses did not part
Twixt him and me that overfluent store;
A Bartas can do what a Bartas will
But simple I according to my skill.

3
From schoolboy’s tongue no rhetoric we expect,
Nor yet a sweet consort from broken strings,
Nor perfect beauty where’s a main defect;
My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings,
And this to mend, alas, no art is able,
“Cause nature made it so irreparable.

4
Nor can I, like that fluent sweet tongued Greek
Who lisped at first, in future times speak plain.
By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim’s most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.

5
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits;
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

6
But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild
Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine
And poesy made Calliope’s own child;
So ‘mongst the rest they placed the arts divine;
But this weak knot they will full soon untie,
The Greeks did nought, but play the fools and lie.

7
Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are
Men have precedency and still excel,
It is but vain unjustly to wage war;
Men can do best, and women know it well.
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

8
And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies,
And ever with your prey still catch your praise,
If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,
Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays;
This mean and unrefined ore of mine
Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

— Anne Bradstreet

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