Free Mistress Bradstreet by Charlotte Gordon

impossible not to feel some degree of loyalty on behalf of her mother, who had been so easily supplanted by another woman, and Anne’s next poem would express her anxiety over this idea. Also, Anne might well have been jealous of her father’s new children, although Dudley did his best to reach out to his daughters, writing Mercy that, now that her mother was gone, he would hire her a midwife for her upcoming labor and would also send her a “souce in a bag,” that is, a sausage. He added that he would try diligently to serve as a guide, urging her to let him have “thy letters as thy mother had and I will answeare them.” 5
    With Anne it was easier for Dudley to maintain his ties. Although no letters exist, Anne refers to their conversations in her poetry on several occasions, suggesting that they had remained in communication about their shared literary passion even after Dudley moved away from Ipswich. 6 Still, no amount of contact with her father could make up for the loss of her mother. Racked by grief, probably disturbed by her father’s remarriage, and always highly imaginative, Anne began to picture her own children bereft of a mother, and she realized that she did not want to fade away as her own mother had. She obsessed over her own demise, dwelling on the tears and sorrow of her husband, not to mention the looming threat of a “step-dame” for her “little babes.”
    Pregnant again in 1645, she penned a mournful dirge to Simon called “Before the Birth of One of Her Children.”
    How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
    How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    If any worth or virtue were in me,
    Let that live freshly in thy memory
    And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,
    Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.
    And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
    Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
    And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
    These O protect from step-dame’s injury.
7
    Although in this poem she vividly imagines the aftermath of her own death, Anne writes with the same passion that inspired her other love poems to her husband. She wants to make sure Simon will not behave like her father, hastily installing a new wife into their household. She tells Simon exactly how to remember her, begging him to go on loving her as though she were still alive. Through Simon’s continued attachment to her, she will be able to live on in spirit and still be the mother and wife of the house. It was hard, after all, to contemplate surrendering control of your affairs when you had single-handedly run your complicated household and raised five children from diapers to their first lisps of the Puritan-sanctioned catechism. Anne did not want some other woman to step into her shoes and take over her family.
    She also hoped that her children would honor her merits, not for her own sake, but for theirs and for the sake of the colony in general. The upcoming generation in New England needed the example of a pious mother to follow, just as she had needed Dorothy. In a later poem, Anne would return obsessively to this same theme and instruct her sons and daughters, now grown, to tell their own children about her and to pass on the lessons she taught. Conceiving of herself as a mother bird to baby birds now grown, she wrote:
    When each of you shall in your nest
    Among your young ones take your rest,
    In chirping language, oft them tell,
    You had a dam that loved you well,
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    Taught what was good, and what was ill,
    What would save life, and what would kill.
    Thus gone, amongst you I may live,
    And dead, yet speak, and counsel give . . .
8
    There was a lesson here. It was not enough to live a “worthy” life; it had to be remarked upon by others for its example to resonate in the future. This was not about fame or perennial recognition. Instead, it was the duty of the Puritan mother to pass on a spiritual