20 pages • 40 minutes read
Anne BradstreetVerses upon the Burning of our House
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1678A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Absolute Power of God
To say in the poem, as well as within the cultural mindset of the Puritan settlement, that God is important is to understate the Puritan faith in the absolute power of God.
For the Puritans, God is not just the creator-deity, nor some distant occasionally intervening divinity. God, within the Puritan mindset, is not just part of everything; God is everything. Every element of the material universe exists at the will of God and is in fact a manifestation of the spirit and generosity of God and does not require humanity’s assent to exist. Every turn of events reflects God’s will. Indeed, the word “God” is simply the word Puritans used for what surpasses the power of language to understand.
At the moment of critical awareness, knowing she is to lose everything to the fire, Bradstreet’s heart cries out to her God—not to curse God like some misguided Job but rather to thank God for reminding her in this dramatic fashion the promise of a home after death, a home that is permanent and true. The fire that destroys virtually all of the Bradstreet family’s belongings, secured across more than 20 years against the difficult conditions in wilderness Massachusetts, becomes an occasion for worshipful prayer as Bradstreet moves from selfish despair as she watches her home go up in flames, to her closing radiant vision of confident hope. She turns her eyes heavenward. “My hope and treasure lies above” (Line 54).
The Toxic Lure of Material Wealth
Nearing 60, Anne Bradstreet and her husband, a former governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was certainly not wealthy by contemporary standards. But nor were they destitute. The loss of her everything thus mattered. It is important that Bradstreet never elects to reveal the cause of the fire, allowing the housefire to be mysterious in its origins, as if sent by God to deliver a critical message designed for Bradstreet’s spiritual well-being.
When Bradstreet acknowledges in the poignant middle section (Lines 21-35) that the things of her home are lost forever, she expresses what from a Puritan mindset is a most grievous heresy. Her “sorrowing eyes” (Line 22) cast about the charred furniture and the blackened walls of what is left of her family’s home. She fondly recalls the happy rooms, the cozy corners in the home where she and her family would pray together or share dinner together or at times entertain their friends (ironically by the convivial and decidedly domesticated flame from candles). “My pleasant things in ashes lie” (Line 27). She actually addresses the house, elevates it, personifies to a degree that indicates the dimension of her sin: Possessions are momentarily recast as people, allowing objects the stature and dimension of God’s dearest creations. From a Puritan perspective, she suffers from severe attachment disorder.
It is only at the dramatic Line 36 that Bradstreet reminds her wavering heart that everything a person accumulates, all material wealth, is ultimately exactly what her things have become: pleasantly shaped piles of ashes, an echo of the Christian admonition that sets the stage for the sorrowful season of Lent: “Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust thou shall return.” All of it, Bradstreet tells herself, all of it is vanity, an allusion to the powerful prayer that opens the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of Vanities. All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” It is in that affirmation of the poison of things that Bradstreet views the loss of her material good as an unsuspected but deeply welcomed lesson in humility and God’s power.
The Uncertainty of the Pilgrim Life
Bradstreet does not give the housefire context—that is, she elects not to point to a cause: a malfunctioning stove, for instance, or a wayward bolt of lightning, or some carelessly banked fireplace (among the most frequent causes for the fires that so regularly devastated Puritan homes in New England, which was still more than a century away from organized fire departments). It is difficult for a contemporary reader to appreciate the hardships the first generation of Puritan Pilgrims faced in the daunting task of domesticating a wilderness into a settlement. Every moment could implode with misfortune, accidents, and the unexpected.
The poem mimics such a life. After all, without laying out some neat causality, Bradstreet begins the poem in medias res—she awakens to her house on fire. Aside from the obvious lesson about the need for Christians to remain ever-vigilant against the always-approaching apocalypse, the fire suggests the uncertainty of life, how moment to moment, day to day, a person is not given to know the sufferings or the agonies that may lie ahead, which may shatter the complacent and drive even the most devout to questionings and doubt. A fire in the middle of the night? Bradstreet goes to bed with a prayer on her lips and peace in her soul and plans for the next day. The next thing she knows, she is wakened “by a thund’ring noise” (Line 3) and the screams of neighbors yelling “fire!” (Line 5).
This night then embodies the theme of the difficult, treacherous pilgrim life of the Puritan, but really of any Christian. It is a life of blessings, certainly, but also an uncertain and confusing world of catastrophic surprises and the hammer-stroke intrusion of misfortune. The intervention of the unexpected—death, love, good fortune, failure—reflects the limited perception of humanity. There is no good fortune. There is no misfortune. There is only the unsearchable, inscrutable logic of God’s will.
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