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“Before the Birth of One of Her Children”
In the poem “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”, Anne Bradstreet speaks to her husband and pleads with him to continue love her after her death. Apparently she left this poem in a drawer to be found after her death should she not survive childbirth. She asks him to take good care of their children and to protect them from a stepmother’s potential cruelty towards them:
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 thy self, or love’st me
These O protect from step Dames injury. (19-24)
It seems that Bradstreet is begging her husband not to remarry as she fears that a stepmother may physically and mentally abuse her children. It is most every new mother’s fear that they will die before their children are old enough to take care of themselves. The thought of not being able to protect her children, if she did die, scared her terribly.
Bradstreet is a devout Christian and seems to “glorify” God in her writings. She takes her own personal experiences and relates them to God and her Puritan beliefs. Because the traditional Puritan believes that God has the last word, she truly believes that God is responsible for everything good and bad that happens to her and her family. For Bradstreet to write this poem, she must really have believed that she could die giving birth to the child she was expecting.
Bradstreet seems to uphold the Puritan definition of men and women’s roles in society; however, I see that in reading more of her poetry, she seems to be asking for more acceptances of women’s accomplishments. Bradstreet was an unusual woman of her time because she could both read and write. It is a known fact that Bradstreet was very happily married to her husband. I truly believe that Bradstreet wrote...