A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

L.M. (eds.) (1867). Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A. Simpson.

      2 Alter, R. (1989). The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster.

      3 Barrett, F. (2018). Great and noble lines: Dave the Potter, George Moses Horton, and the possibilities of poetry. In: Where Is All My Relation?: The Poetics of Dave the Potter (ed. M.A.Chaney). New York (NY): Oxford UP.

      4 Epstein, D.J. (1977). Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P.

      5 Johnson, J.W. (1922). The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Inc.

      6 Johnson, J.W. and Johnson, J.R. (eds.) (1925). The Book of American Negro Spirituals. New York: The Viking Press.

      7 Lovell, J., Jr. (1969). The social implications of the Negro spiritual. In: The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States, (ed. B. Katz), 130. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times.

      8 Lovell, J., Jr. (1972). Black Song: The Forge and the Flame—The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out. New York (NY): Macmillan.

      9 Ramey, L. (2008). Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

      10 Ramey, L. (2019). A History of African American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

      11 Rediker, M. (2007). The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Penguin Books.

      12 Southern, E. (1983). Readings in Black American Music, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton.

      13 Thompson, K.D. (2014). Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. Urbana: U of Illinois P.

SECTION 2 Poetry and The Transcendent

6 Death and Mourning in American Poetry from the Puritans to the Modernists

       Wendy Martin and Camille MederClaremont Graduate University

      Death and mourning have been thematic preoccupations of poetry through the ages; of course, the meaning of these universal human experiences is inflected by a particular historical period as well as the national and cultural context, including race, gender, and class, that frames a given poem. This essay will explore how death and dying are represented within larger historical and cultural contexts in a range of poems from the Puritans to the modernists.

      Puritans in the New World had very clear-cut ideas about what happened after death, which was viewed as a portal to Heaven and everlasting life for those who were among the predestined “elect,” or to Hell and eternal damnation. Although they believed in predestination, Puritans thought that struggling against sin and the ever-present lures of Satan was a sign, though not a guarantee, of salvation. They also struggled against a self-centered worldliness: Richard Baxter, for example, asserted, “Man’s fall was his turning from God to himself; and his regeneration consisteth in the turning of him from himself to God” (cited in Bercovitch 1975, p. 17). Puritan certainty in the afterlife and commitment to obeying God’s will produced a poetics of death that upheld notions of divinely sanctioned order and deemphasized human mourning in favor of finding solace in promises of salvation.

The poems of Edward Taylor (c.1642–1729) focus on original sin, saving grace, redemption through faith in Christ, the division of mankind into the damned and the elect, and the joys of eternal salvation. “Huswifery” (1685) creates an extended metaphor of the spinning wheel to describe the poet’s spiritual submission to an all-powerful savior, which includes the expectation of salvation and eternal life through God’s grace:

      Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,

      Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory;

      My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill

      My wayes with glory and thee glorify.

      Then mine apparell shall display before yee

      That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

      (lines 13–18)

      In his poem “Upon Wedlock, and the Death of Children” (written c. 1682), Taylor celebrates his joyful marriage and the birth of his children only to experience the death of some of his offspring. The poet is resolved to transcend grief and consecrate the lives of his dead children to God, and Taylor’s faith in God’s omnipotence enables him to endure his painful loss:

      But pausing on’t, this Sweet perfum’d my thought,

      Christ would in Glory have a Flowre, Choice, Prime.

      And having Choice, chose this my branch forth brought.

      Lord, take’t I thanke thee, thou takst ought of mine;

      It is my pledg in glory; part of mee

      Is now in it, Lord, glorifi’de with thee.

      (lines 25–30)

Taylor is comforted by his belief that his children have gone to Heaven where they will glorify God.¹

However, Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) struggles with the imperative to consecrate her life as well the lives of her progeny to God. Bradstreet became the first female Puritan to have her poems published in The Tenth Muse (1650). At times, Bradstreet’s poetry relies on God’s redemptive power to triumph over sickness and death. For example, she opens her meditation on “May 11, 1661” (1867b²) by noting that God “hath restored, redeemed, recured [her]/From sickness, death, and pain” (lines 3–4), and in “By Night When Others Soundly Slept” (1867a) she thanks her “Savior” (line 15) for banishing her “doubts and fears” (line 14). However, Bradstreet’s poems often focus on this life rather than the next. Unlike Taylor, who dedicates the lives of his dead children to God, Bradstreet is reluctant to relinquish her grandson’s life in “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet, Who Died on 16 November, 1669, Being but a Month, and One Day Old” (1867c). Her resignation about accepting what seems to her to be an arbitrary death seems forced, and it appears that she is compelling herself to accept it as part of God’s plan:

      Cropt by th’ Almighty’s hand; yet is He good.

      With dreadful awe before Him let’s be mute,

      Such was His will, but why, let’s not dispute,

      With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust,

      Let’s say He’s merciful as well as just.

      (lines 8–12)

      Unresolved juxtapositions—God has “Cropt” the infant, “yet is He good”—and the repetition of “let’s” question religious doctrine.

When she considers her own possible death in childbirth, Bradstreet foregrounds her love and concern for her children in her absence instead of anticipating Heaven: she pleads with her husband to protect her children from possible “injury” from an uncaring “step-dame” in “Before the Birth of One of Her Children” (1678a): “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” (lines 22–24). Bradstreet’s emphasis is not on her soul but on her earthly “remains,” her children.

      Similarly, in one of Bradstreet’s best-known poems, “Contemplations” (1678b), the joy of earthly existence seems to take precedence over eternal life as Bradstreet resigns herself to leaving the glory of this world for a heavenly destination:

      Then higher on the glistering Sun I gazed,

      Whose beams was shaded by the leavie Tree;

      The more I looked, the more I grew amazed,