The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America

Today is the day in 1672 when America’s first published poet died. That was Anne Bradstreet.

She married Simon Bradstreet when she was about 16 and left England with him two years later, in 1630, as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that eventually settled in Andover, Massachusetts.

Anne raised eight children. In her few free minutes each day, she wrote poetry for her family and close friends. 

It has been almost 400 years since she was writing but the idea of a mother writing in her precious free time is not an outdated story. We still fairly regularly hear of women who have written a novel or their poetry in those early morning, naptime, schooltime and late nigh quiet minutes.

Anne wrote about her husband, her children, and God. I like her later poems which were shorter and more about daily life. She wrote about how she feared childbirth, the fire that destroyed their home, her discontentment with a Puritan woman's life, and later, the death of her granddaughter. 

I wonder what she would have written if she felt free to write her innermost thoughts. I wonder if she did write those poems but that they were hidden away or destroyed by someone.

She didn't know it but her brother-in-law took her poems to England where they were published. The British publication was titled The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts (1650). The introduction notes that “These poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from sleep and other refreshments.” 

It was Anne's only poetry published in her lifetime and it was the first published work by a woman in America, and it was the only volume of her work published during her lifetime.

In Adrienne Rich’s foreword to an edition of Anne's poetry, Rich portrays Anne as a person and as a writer and as an early American feminists, as well as the first true poet in the American colonies.

I have written about Anne here before. It's not so much her poetry that interests me, but her life and the parts of it we will never know.

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Love and the Ink Dark Moon

Izumi Shikibu, a poet at Empress Teishi's court.
(Shown here in a c. 1765 Kusazōshi by Komatsuken)

When my desire
grows too fierce
I wear my bed clothes
inside out,
dark as the night's rough husk
    - Ono no Komachi



I was gifted with a copy of The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu which are translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani. Besides the poems, I found the story of these poets from over a millennium ago very interesting. It seems that in Japan's imperial Heian Court, female poets were well accepted. I would have assumed the opposite. They were given a voice and could have a place in literary circles.

In this particular time and culture, the arts were valued and women had a place. No other period in Japan’s literary history was as dominated by women as the Heian Period. Hirshfield writes that this court setting "proved to be a uniquely auspicious environment for women writers for several reasons, but foremost is the central role of the arts in the conduct of daily life."

This collection is subtitled as "love poems" and there are certainly many that concern matters of the heart, but there are also poems about the passage of time and other themes.


This body
grown fragile, floating,
a reed cut from its roots...
If a stream would ask me
to follow, I'd go, I think.

    - Ono no Komachi



Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu were important poets during Japan's Heian Age (795-1185). Their poems were generally waka (tanka) poems in form. Hirshfield says that "Komachi and Shikibu stand out as two of the greatest poets in an age of greatness not simply because they achieved technical virtuosity in their chosen form, the thirty-one syllable tanka verse, but because they used this form as a medium of reflection and introspection... each confronted her experience with a directness and honesty unusual in any age."

Izumi Shikibu was religious but also passionate - two qualities that are not always equally present. She did spend time in Buddhist monasteries and once contemplated becoming a nun. But she never denied her femininity, and her extramarital affairs made her the subject of ostracism by her family. While married, she fell in love with the Empress' son. After the death of the Prince she had an affair with the Prince's married brother.

the scandal caused the Prince's wife to leave him and Shikibu lived with him for five years. The Prince died during and during a period of intense mourning, she wrote more than 200 poems to her departed lover.

Remembering you...
The fireflies of this marsh
seem like sparks
that rise
from my body's longing.

    - Izumi Shikibu

Ono no Komachi as an old woman, a woodcut by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

A life in vain.
My looks, talents faded
like these cherry blossoms
paling in the endless rains
that I gaze out upon, alone
    - Ono no Komachi

Jane Hirshfield is a well known poet with many connections to Japanese forms and philosophy. With the help of Mariko Aratani, she translated into the English language these poems, many of which were not available in English.

If you are interested in the tanka genre, women poets, or this period  and gives us new insight into life as lived during the Heian Era, considered by many scholars as a golden age for Japanese poetry and literature.

If you have ever read classical Japanese literature by women, you probably are more likely to know Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book or Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji than these poets. (Shikibu is a title, not a name, so the two writers are not related except both were  part of the court of Empress Akiko. Komachi wrote 100 years earlier.)

All of these works deal with the Heian Period life and the sexual intrigue that was well known but usually happening under covers of silk and darkness. Court poets wrote about  almost anything happening around them from an affair, rain and snow storms, aging, or returning a fan. The poems are devoid of the politics of courtly life.

In this world
love has no color — 
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.

Besides the poems, the book has a fascinating introduction and information about the process of translation. The latter topic has interested me of late, as I may take on some translation myself.

Hirshfield writes about that process:
"Anyone who attempts that impossible task, the translation of poetry, must at some point wonder what exactly a poem might be, if not its own body of words. For surely, all can attest who have made the hard and joyous effort to write a poem of their own, poetry dwells in words: absolutely particular in meaning, irreplaceably individual in rhythm and sound... the act of translation constitutes a leap of faith, a belief that somehow this part of a poem that lives both through words and beyond words can be kept alive, can move from its life in one verbal body to another."

Look at their translation of one poem by Komachi, and then compare it to another translation.

I know it must be this way
in the waking world,
but how cruel ---
even in my dreams
we hide from others' eyes

Another translation of that poem by Edwin Cranston, a translator who makes no claim to being a poet himself, renders that poem in this way.

In the waking world
Such caution may be well advised,
But even in dreams
To see him watching others' eyes ---
This is wretchedness itself!

Which translation is "correct?" Or is no translation really correct? As a poet, I prefer the Hirshfield version which is probably less literal. But there have always been those purists who would claim that literature should only be read in its original language. Of course, that takes a great deal of literature away from us.

This pine tree by the rock
must have its memories too:
after a thousand years,
see how its branches
lean towards the ground
     - Izumi Shikibu


No way to see him
on this moonless night ---
I lie awake longing, burning,
breasts racing fire,
heart in flames.

    - Ono no Komachi

          

The Author to Her Book

Anne Bradstreet was the first published poet in America. A Puritan mother of eight children, her only poems published in her lifetime were in a collection published in England without her consent or knowledge.

She is now considered to be an early feminist. The title given to her poetry collecion was The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung up in America. The "Tenth Muse" can refer to the ancient Greek poet Sappho.

Her is a poem she wrote in response to the second edition of that unauthorized edition being printed.

The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet

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.

from  The Works of Anne Bradstreet

America's First Feminist Poet

Anne Bradstreet was America's first published poet. Anne was born in Northampton, England in 1612. She was the daughter of Thomas Dudley, a steward of the Earl of Lincoln, and was a well-educated woman for her time, being tutored in history, several languages and literature. 

At the age of sixteen, she married and both Anne's father and husband were later to serve as governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anne and her husband Simon, along with Anne's parents, immigrated to America along with Puritan emigrants in 1630.


Anne Bradstreet was the first poet in the British North American colonies to be published, although her collected poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts, were published in 1650 without her knowledge. The collection received a positive reception in both England and the New World.

Anne Bradstreet died on September 16, 1672 in North Andover, Massachusetts at the age of 60. A marker in the North Andover cemetery commemorates the 350th anniversary in 2000 of the publishing of The Tenth Muse in London in 1650. That site and the Bradstreet Gate at Harvard may be the only two places in America honoring her memory.

Her poetry is of a style that is not in fashion and if Anne is read today it is most likely to be something anthologized in an American literature textbook.

From her poem "Prologue", here is a witty and sarcastic stanza about how the Puritan men talk to and about her as obnoxious and that "[her] hand a [sewing[ needle better fits” than a pen. How could a woman produce a work of art that would be worthy of praise? It must be “stol’n” or just dumb luck.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better fits.

A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong,

For such despite they cast on female wits.

If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,

They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance. 

         from The Works of Anne Bradstreet

Do women write "female" poetry?

I didn't ask the question. It was posted by Jo Shapcott today on guardian.co.uk.

A related question has been knocking around in my head for the past few weeks: "Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the 'female' poem?" The occasion which prompted the question happened yesterday, when the Aldeburgh poetry festival and the Poetry Society combined to host an event called The Female Poem, which I chaired, and which boasted a distinguished panel of writers: Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud and Pascal Petit. It was so popular that it sold out in minutes and had to be moved to a larger hall, which suggests the subject is urgent – and not just to women; our audience was mixed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/09/do-women-write-female-poetry

What's your answer to that question?