Here in the USA, April is National Poetry Month. (Yes, among all the other months it is. See here for a bunch of others — scroll down the page a ways. Frog Month! Straw Hats Month! National DNA & Genomics & Stem Cell Education & Awareness Month! (The posters for that last one are about eight feet wide but only a foot high.)) Every day during this time, the normally weekly newsletter of the Poetry Daily site will feature a favorite poem selected and commented on by an active poet. Yesterday, Julie Sheehan chose the following, from Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672):
The Author to Her Book
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.
In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
I’m curious to hear from RAMH‘s regular crowd of intelligent readers (and from any newcomers, for that matter):
What does this poem say?
Reason I ask is, Ms. Sheehan interpreted it in way I never ever would have come up with on my own. An excerpt:
“The Author to her Book”… has the fresh, direct and tough qualities of private language among familiars. We don’t hear so much as overhear it. Unstintingly, unsentimentally she describes the child: “ill-formed,” “in rags, halting,” “rambling brat,” “unfit for light.” The language is brutal, a brutality necessary to control the anguish of the mother, who knows her darling goes into a world as harsh as the one it leaves. At the matter-of-fact acknowledgment, “Yet being mine own, at length affection would / Thy blemishes amend, if so I could,” the poem gets down to the business of mothering. The speaker administers a practiced, vigorous spit shine of the kind that only mothers can give and only their children can endure. But by the end, the mother’s fear for her child is palpable. She is piling on the advice. The final couplet turns its attention on the “poor” mother whose financial circumstances are so harsh they “caused her thus to send thee out of door.” It’s all the more tender for the absence of self-pity, except for that “alas” in the penultimate line.
…She is relinquishing her poems out of love for them, just as a parent relinquishes her child to “take thy way where yet thou art not known,” but she’s hardly romanticizing that process. So we start the poem thinking the poet is abject (“my feeble brain”), but we end with tremendous respect for her strength.
(I can’t find the full commentary online, but that’s pretty much the part which confused and/or sobered me.)
Since first reading this, I’ve wondered if I’d been wrong about it all along. (And yes, I’ll let you know what that interpretation is/was, once I’ve heard from somebody else on the subject.)
By the way, Julie Sheehan is the author of — among other collections — Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise. For a certain sort of reader, that table of contents must be among the most charming imaginable.
cynth says
Well, I’ll be the first so far to comment, I guess. When I first starting reading it I was thinking she was indeed talking about something she wrote–something like a poem–as she sorted through the words to find the friends of words that were more true than the ones she originally used. Then I got to thinking it was a metaphor for the story of the Prodigal Son, told from the father’s perspective, however, I re-thought that (although I still like it for that reason). And thought again how kids can be so embarrassed about their parents, how they dress, how they act, so she gives the child the “out” of saying it’s because she’s poor that they don’t have the latest and greatest of anything and, as is the wont of all children, they can just blame it on mom! Ta-da!
Froog says
The metaphor fits so well, and is so thoroughly developed, that it can be read both ways – are we comparing our book/poem to our child, or parenthood to literary/artistic creation?
I don’t have any problems with Julie Sheehan’s analysis, but I suppose it’s the “straightforward” one. There are many other ways you could go, I suppose.
There are dark brutalities in this: “I cast thee out as one unfit for light”, “‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam”
But the thing that really brings me up short – and makes it a definitively female perspective – is that If for thy father asked, say thou had’st none.” How does that fit in with the process of literary creation?
marta says
I don’t much care for writing-as-progeny metaphors and such. A writer is creating something, and so I see the temptation to describe a work as a child, and yes we send the work into the world–perhaps. But when I read something that starts to take me down into writing/birthing/writing raising/etc territory, I just can’t go anywhere with it.
Also, I’m in serious need of a nap and can’t think any deep thoughts at this time.
Nance says
Must be easier for me, the un-writer in the bunch. So, hmmm, Mom felt better about the kid before she had to look at it through someone else’s eyes, blah-blah. Then, the real and newly imagined flaws rendered it all but unlovable, but what kind of heartless mother sends such an ill-prepared baby against the lions? Still, off to the word mills it goes, recalcitrant little bastard, because child labor is a necessary evil…because a mom’s gotta do, etc.
Not a particularly attractive poem, really. It’s tempting to read more modern interpretations into all those flowery Restoration phrases, but I think Sheehan has it just right. Motherhood is so complicated.
John says
Whoa. You people are all way too smart.
Here’s the back story of the poem, as recounted by Sheehan:
I didn’t know that set of circumstances before (and maybe I should have included it in the post, so you didn’t start out likewise).
Here’s my reading: First, I think the title makes it explicit that the poem is not about child-rearing per se, except indirectly. It’s about writing.
Maybe I’m just too frivolously disposed, a possibility — or a likelihood — which no doubt has sometimes occurred to you, too. But I’ve always read this as a sort of wry (at least) or even a flippant response to a draft of the author’s work. Specifically, as Sheehan says, it’s a response of horror: she hates that anyone has read it in its present form.
(I can almost picture a scene in a 17th-century writers’ workshop, in which a well-meaning friend — having been impressed by something Anne wrote — takes it upon herself to photocopy and distribute it for others. Anne’s mouth drops. Out in the parking lot, afterward, she confronts this friend, perhaps grabbing her by the shoulders and screaming, “Argh! What the hell were you thinking?!?”)
And I know I’m doing a lot of subconscious projection from my own situation in almost laughing out loud at some of her responses. They all sound familiar to me (generally in the voice of the sh!tbird): You call this writing? What a crock. You call yourself a writer? You’re not a writer. You’re an ignoramus with a keyboard. Etc., ad nauseam.
What really flummoxed me about Sheehan’s commentary: she didn’t seem to find anything at all funny about the poem. Instead, I found myself knee-deep in all that about motherhood and unsentimentality and, confused, I turned to y’all. So thanks for helping me see how casually and incautiously I’d been interpreting it!
Froog says
That’s the problem with ‘wit’, isn’t it – particularly as practised in that distant era? They couldn’t say anything without using a striking phrase to encapsulate an apt metaphor – and we tend to regard that inventive verve, that apparent playfulness as inherently funny.
I’m not sure that it always was. I’d like to think that Anne Bradstreet had reached a point where she could laugh off the ‘betrayal’ of unauthorised publication, might even be secretly grateful that her hand had been forced, and that her work had started to find a receptive audience. But the imagery in this is so bleak, it doesn’t suggest a very sunny mood; it leads you to suspect that, even if she was putting a good front on it, there was still quite a lot of bitterness and resentment festering in her. As a faux-modest apology for a not-quite-as-finished-as-I-would-have-liked piece of work, it seems a bit over-the-top. My feeling is that the main emotion driving this outpouring is not bashfulness or thwarted perfectionism, but pique against the usurping publisher.
John says
Froog: One of the arguments trotted out by some disbelievers in evolution goes like this: “If dinosaurs ruled the earth, where are all the fossils? We should be tripping over their bones!” To which one counter-argument is: “How many birds have you seen in flight in your life so far? And how many dead birds have dropped on your head? How many bird skeletons have you found? So you’re saying birds must have appeared on the earth just in your lifetime?”
Looking back to the 17th and 18th centuries, it’s sometimes hard to remember that not everyone alive then was a Tyrannosaur like Shakespeare, Bradstreet, Johnson — forgetting all the tiny little creatures scurrying around at their feet… They’re just the ones who left their literary (in this case) femurs and skulls to us.
And, hefting those bones, it’s also hard to remember that irony might not have been quite the norm that it is now — that words haven’t always been spoken with ulterior meanings. Thanks for the reminder. I think you’re right.
Cedra says
I love this poem. I’m a sucker for (even painfully) extended metaphors anyway–and it’s such an elegant rendering of the pain of having created something with which one isn’t satisfied. I first read and fell for it when I started painting in my adolescence, making things that shouldn’t have (and thankfully didn’t) see the light of day. Not only because it so perfectly expressed the simultaneous feelings of obligation, pity, culpability, and shame that comes from having produced something monstrous or errant–that one feels is too clumsy and grubby to even bear one’s name, much less add anything to the discourse–or that I felt that way about everything I was making in those days; but also because I felt that way about myself (hooray, high school!). So I found a strange peace in her final resignation to the work’s many perceived shortcomings. (Yes, it is crap, but it is what it is, and I’ve fixed it as best I can.)
I think the reason Sheehan’s take doesn’t quite ring true for me (even the end, where she’s less focused on motherphor) is because I don’t get the sense that Bradstreet is letting the poems go because she loves them and knows that they will come into their own as they travel and mature; she’s letting them go because there’s no taking them back–and they’re as good as she can make them–and all that’s left to do is offer her condolences to them for having brought them into the world in the first place, and wash her hands of the whole messy ordeal. What has been seen cannot be unseen!
I do like the line about fatherlessness that Froog mentioned in his first comment. The ambiguity and the double-identity of the bastard to be pitied, and the sanctified, immaculately conceived, to be wondered over. And oh, my heart aches with sympathy at “friends less wise than true”–accepting the love inherent in the gesture even while resenting it–! The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and premature publishing.