The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 41Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,
Then ta’en away into eternity.
Blest babe, why should I bewail thy fate,
Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate,
Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state.The grieving repetitions of the first three lines here yield only slightly to the con-
solatory note of the last three: a note that is, in any event, muted by the continuing
emphasis on love (“Blest babe”) and lamentation (“sigh thy days”) and by being
sounded as a rhetorical question. “Time brings down what is both strong and tall, /”
Bradstreet declares at the end of the poem, “But plants new set to be eradicate, / And
buds new blown to have so short a date, / Is by His hand alone that guides nature and
fate.” The acquiescence in the workings of “His hand” is set, finally, against scarcely
suppressed astonishment at workings that, in this instance at least, seem so prema-
ture, even unnatural. Experiencing the pleasures and pains of this world, Bradstreet’s
heart rises up, as it does here. It may then try to submit to the will of man or God, in
the shape of convention or faith. But it never quite can or will do so. This is the
source of the drama and the intimacy of her best poems; and that is why they achieve
exactly what Bradstreet herself had hoped for them – the sense that we are listening
to a still living voice.
A similar sense of intimacy and engagement is one of the secrets of the work of
Edward Taylor, which was virtually unpublished during his lifetime – a collected
edition, The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, did not appear, in fact, until 1939.
Like Bradstreet, Taylor was born in England; he then left to join the Massachusetts
Bay Colony in 1668. After studying at Harvard, he settled into the profession of
minister for the rest of his life. Marrying twice, he fathered fourteen children, many
of whom died in infancy. He began writing poetry even before he joined his small,
frontier congregation in Westfield, but his earliest work tended toward the public
and conventional. It was not until 1674 that, experimenting with different forms
and styles, he started over the next eight or nine years to write in a more personal
and memorable vein: love poems to his wife-to-be (“Were but my Muse an Huswife
Good”), spiritual meditations on natural events or as Taylor called them “occurants”
(“The Ebb & Flow”; “Upon the Sweeping Flood”), and emblematic, allegorical
accounts of the smaller creatures of nature and domestic objects (“Upon a Spider
Catching a Fly”; “Huswifery”). These poems already manifest some of Taylor’s
characteristic poetic habits. “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly,” for instance, written
around 1680–1682, begins with the kind of minute particularization of nature
that was to become typical of later New England poets like Emily Dickinson and
Robert Frost:Thou Sorrow, venom elfe
Is this thy ploy,
To spin a web out of thyselfe
To catch a Fly?
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