Taylor and Bradstreet: Spiritual vs. Social Humility

 

In Albert Bierstadt’s painting “The Landing of Columbus,” one of the most striking juxtapositions is the contrast between the kneeling sailor and the kneeling natives. The sailor has the posture of a football player who has just scored a touchdown, clearly kneeling to give thanks to God for the safe passage over the sea. The natives, on the other hand, are bowing to Columbus and his little army. A similar juxtaposition occurs in the poetry of Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, suggesting that while both poets might be characterized as exceedingly humble in their verses, Taylor’s spiritual humility more closely resembles Bierstadt’s kneeling sailor, while Bradstreet’s self-effacement is much more akin to the kneeling natives, who are showing social humility.

To examine these contrasts more specifically, we might turn to Taylor’s “Prologue” from Preparatory Meditations and use it to make sense of Bradstreet’s “The Prologue,” which prefaced her collection The Tenth Muse. Taylor begins, as a good Calvinist should, by expressing his unworthiness as a vessel of divine sovereignty. “Lord,” he writes, “Can a Crumb of Dust the Earth outweigh, / Outmatch all mountains, nay the Chrystall Sky?” (lines 1-2). By the third stanza, we see that Taylor is speaking of himself, as he claims, “I am this Crumb of Dust which is design’d / To make my Pen unto thy Praise alone” (lines 13-14). Such spiritual humility springs from the Calvinist’s belief that after the fall from grace in Eden, human nature is completely and utterly corrupt without the intervention of irresistible grace. Taylor, as a poet, has thus been “design’d” by Providence, crafted by grace to be a vessel of praise.

Bradstreet seems to begin her prefatory poem similarly, since her emphasis is also on self-effacement. Epic struggles such as war and epic themes such as history, she claims, are “too superior things” for her “mean pen” (line 3). Thus, she resolves not to “dim their worth” with her “obscure lines” (line 6). The major difference here is that Bradstreet is not apologizing for her poetic defects to God, but (like the kneeling natives in Bierstadt’s painting) is instead apologizing to men, particularly male poets who might find her poetic vocation to threaten their own. “Men still have precedency and still excel,” she writes, as if consoling an irate male counterpart. “Men can do best, and women know it well… / Yet grant some small acknowledgment of ours” (lines 38, 40, 42). Conspicuously absent from Bradstreet’s “Prologue” is any mention of God, and while one could argue that within the patriarchal structure of Puritan society Bradstreet would be assumed to be worshiping God by honoring her husband (as the Church ought to honor Christ), her humility is obviously social rather than spiritual.

The parallels continue in each poet’s admission of unworthiness as a literary artist. Taylor apologizes for his “dull Phancy,” which he would “gladly grinde / Unto an Edge on Zions Pretious Stone” in order to sharpen his poetic consciousness (lines 15-16). Similarly, Bradstreet frets that her “foolish, broken, blemish’d Muse” constitutes a “main defect” in her art, which cannot be remedied, since “nature made it so irreparable” (lines 15-16, 18). However, the primary contrast here is the referent of each poem. Taylor’s poem is addressed to God and is designed to serve a meditative purpose, essentially functioning as a prayer, whereas Bradstreet’s poem addresses men, hence the distinction between spiritual and social humility. Perhaps more importantly, Bradstreet substitutes talk of Christian faith with allusions to Greek mythology. While she does not claim to oppose Christianity (a position that would have been socially devastating to her), she surprisingly appeals to Greek tradition as evidence that women have a place in the poetic tradition. The presence of the nine Muses in mythology, she argues, reflects the Greeks’ respect for women and suggests that the Puritan social order has not been the only model for gender relations in history.

One might think of other mythological figures, such as the Lakota deity Wohpe, as additional alternatives to the Puritan denigration of women. Wohpe brought the ceremony of the pipe to the Lakota, serving as an authoritative figure within their own mythical tradition, as Bradstreet now stands out in American history as a prophetic and progressive voice. A major irony in this comparison of Bradstreet’s humility and Taylor’s is that Taylor seems to believe that in order to assume the proper state of humility, he must adopt a groveling posture that would otherwise have been expected of women. His prayer concludes as follows:

Thy Crumb of Dust breaths two words from its breast,

That thou wilt guide its pen to write aright

To Prove thou art, and that thou art the best

And shew thy Properties to shine most bright.

And then thy Works will shine as flowers on Stems

Or as in Jewellary Shops, do jems. (lines 25-30)

As lyrical as these lines are, with the priceless puns (“write aright”) and alliteration, Taylor unwittingly reveals the dark side of Puritan spirituality. By abasing themselves thus before God, Puritan men constructed a model that they then imposed on their wives, their children, and their servants, who were expected to show appropriate honor to the patriarchal head of the household. John Winthrop sums up the expected social order in his sermon on Christian charity, where he claims that the “variety and differance” among various members of society (which I am here comparing to the two genders and children) exists so that God might give “his guifts [sic] to man by man” (309). In the same manner, the male patriarch was expected to represent Christ and to imitate the dispensation of grace and blessing that Christ was thought to shower upon the Church, which was metaphorically associated in the social sense with women, children, and servants. That is, before God, all were equal and all constituted the female Church, the Bride of Christ. In the home, however, or in the public square, the male figure then took on Christ’s role as spiritual leader.

What emerges from this contrast of spiritual humility and social humility, then, is not ultimately a contrast so much as a causal relationship. The spiritual humility that Taylor represents becomes the model for the social humility that we find in Bradstreet. By abasing themselves before God, Puritan men were ironically reinforcing an extremely hierarchical social order that helps explain Bradstreet’s genuflection toward male poets like Taylor.

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