Verses upon the Burning of our House

“Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House” balances despair with joy. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was one of the foremost poetic voices of the first-generation of English religious settlers in what is now New England.

Her Puritan upbringing informed much of her work, and “Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House” is a response to when the house she had lived in for 20 years burned to the ground, leaving her family bereft of all their worldly possessions. In the fire’s immediate aftermath, pondering the ashes of her home, Bradstreet struggled to understand God’s seemingly harsh logic.

The poem is part earnest prayer in supplication to an all-powerful God whose majesty and wisdom is reflected in every event, and part confession over clinging to the things of this world that only distract the pilgrim-soul from its journey Heavenward, the home that will abide forever. The conflict gives Bradstreet’s poem, so grounded in the rich and complex theology of Christian Puritanism, its all-too-human touch. The ending is preordained, with Bradstreet ultimately renouncing her material desires, but it is Bradstreet’s lengthy journey to this conclusion that makes “Some Verses” strikingly contemporary.

Poet Biography

Anne Dudley was born in 1612 in Northhamptonshire, in the East Midlands of England, about an hour north of London. She was the daughter of Thomas Dudley (1576-1653), one of the earliest and most vocal proponents of the Puritan movement that sought with uncompromising righteousness to rid the Anglican Church of England of the vice and corruption of its clergy and its liturgies. Under the guidance of her loving father, Anne grew up in a learned and cultured home. She was a voracious reader of not only dense theological works but also the epical works of Renaissance poetry.

Married at the age of 16 to Simon Bradstreet, a Puritan leading light who would later become one of the governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Bradstreet emigrated to the settlements in 1630. Farm life—first in her adopted Ipswich, Massachusetts, and then later in North Andover—was a hard and difficult struggle, and quite an adjustment for someone accustomed to the elegant life of English educated gentry. Her health was always frail, but she never perceived life in the new colony as anything but God’s mission.

This rugged life gave her the opportunity to explore in poetry her piety, her sense of God, and her faith in the Puritan colony’s place within God’s grand historic design. Her musings, written in carefully crafted forms that spoke to Bradstreet’s education in the rigorous discipline of Elizabethan English poetics, found an interested audience in her brother-in-law. He secretly sent some of Bradstreet’s writings back to London and had them published without Bradstreet’s knowledge or approval. These poems appeared in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, regarded now as the first book of American poetry.

But in addition to these public poems that carefully echoed the doctrines of her faith, Bradstreet produced more private poems, among them “Some Verses,” that examined her domestic life in the frontier (often with vivid recreations of the natural wildness around her). These poems explored Bradstreet’s joys and tragedies as a woman fiercely in love with her husband and as a devoted mother with eight children (several of whom died from the difficult conditions in Massachusetts). These more private poems would not be published until well after her death in September, 1672, from complications from tuberculosis. She was 60. To give some idea of her heroic resilience despite her frail health, average life expectancy at birth for the first-generation Puritans was just over 32 years.

Poem Text

“Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning

of Our house, July 10th. 1666. Copied Out of

a Loose Paper.”

In silent night when rest I took, 

For sorrow near I did not look,  

I wakened was with thund’ring noise 

And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice.  

That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,”  

Let no man know is my Desire.  

I, starting up, the light did spy,   

And to my God my heart did cry   

To straighten me in my Distress  

And not to leave me succourless.  

Then, coming out, behold a space 

The flame consume my dwelling place. 

And when I could no longer look, 

I blest His name that gave and took,  

That laid my goods now in the dust. 

Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just. 

It was his own, it was not mine, 

Far be it that I should repine;  

He might of all justly bereft  

But yet sufficient for us left.  

When by the ruins oft I past 

My sorrowing eyes aside did cast 

And here and there the places spy

Where oft I sate and long did lie. 

Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, 

There lay that store I counted best.  

My pleasant things in ashes lie 

And them behold no more shall I. 

Under thy roof no guest shall sit,  

Nor at thy Table eat a bit. 

No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told 

Nor things recounted done of old. 

No Candle e’er shall shine in Thee,  

Nor bridegroom’s voice e’er heard shall be. 

In silence ever shalt thou lie, 

Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity.  

Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide, 

And did thy wealth on earth abide?  

Didst fix thy hope on mould’ring dust?  

The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?  

Raise up thy thoughts above the sky  

That dunghill mists away may fly.  

Thou hast a house on high erect 

Frameed by that mighty Architect, 

With glory richly furnished, 

Stands permanent though this be fled. 

It’s purchased and paid for too 

By Him who hath enough to do.  

A price so vast as is unknown,  

Yet by His gift is made thine own; 

There’s wealth enough, I need no more, 

Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store. 

The world no longer let me love,  

My hope and treasure lies above.

Bradstreet, Anne. “Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House.” 1672. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Anne Bradstreet recounts the night she lost her home in a devastating fire. It is the middle of a “silent night” (Line 1) when Bradstreet, contentedly sleeping with no thought of problems or sorrow, is roused by a “thund’ring noise” (Line 3). She then hears shrieks of the one word no one wants to hear, a word that sends her into panic: “fire” (Line 5). Realizing it is her home on fire, Bradstreet’s immediate response, even as she runs from her house, is to cry out in her heart to God not to leave her in this distress, not to abandon her without hope, to leave her “succourless” (Line 10).

Even as she watches helpless and terrified as the relentless flames consume her home, Bradstreet blesses God’s name. God in His magnanimity had given her family much, and now to remind her that everything comes from Him and that nothing is hers, He has taken it away, quickly and absolutely reducing everything her family owned to “dust” (Line 15). Bradstreet reasons what her faith has long taught her: Everything on Earth belongs to God. Indeed, God could have taken so much more in the fire, yet in His wisdom and mercy, left the family enough to survive.

Over the next days, Bradstreet, now staying with friends, passes by the ruins of her family’s home. Her “sorrowing eyes” (Line 25) look about the blackened walls, and she cannot help but remember the corners where she would rest, the bedroom where she would lie, and even where her family kept the “trunk” and “chest,” the “store that [she] counted best” (Line 26), what she calls her “pleasant things” (Line 26). These would be the irreplaceable mementos of her family or perhaps, given her interest in poetry, that trunk and chest might have stored her books, most likely her Bible, or even her own writings and drafts of poems, gone now forever.

In her sorrow, she directly addresses the ruins of her home. No more, she laments, will “thou” house our guests, no more shall there be pleasant conversation long into the night among family and friends by “thy” candlelight. Now the house “in silence ever shalt lie” (Line 35).

The tone shifts and the poet then chides herself for lingering in such memories, for letting her heart confess its fondness for earthly things, saying, “Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity” (Line 36). She lectures her stricken heart to console it. To invest the objects of this world with emotional depth is to ignore the greater glory of a home promised to the saved. More to the point, for a Puritan certain of the reality of God’s abiding presence as Bradstreet was, such embrace of earthly stuff smacks of depravity, even sin. She asks her heart, “Didst fix thy hope on mould’ring dust?” (Line 39).

She tells her ravaged heart to lift itself above the blackened ruin, comparing it to little more than a dung heap and recalling the Old Testament story of Job, who loses everything and ends up on a dung heap where, desolate and angry, he curses God. She counsels her heart: Do not be like Job but lift your vision skyward and remember that Christ, the “mighty Architect” (Line 44), has earned for the Elect an eternal home that is indestructible and glorious. Invoking the crucifixion, Bradstreet reasons that this eternal home has been “purchased and paid for” (Line 47) by the blood and sacrifice of Christ. That love, she acknowledges, is a “price so vast as is unknown” (Line 49).

Reinvigorated by this vision and regretting even her temporary distraction by the loss of everything her family owned, Bradstreet closes the poem to consider her blackened home in ruins and confidently bid it farewell. She uses the term “pelf” (Line 52) to describe her home, which is a legal term for money or property usually acquired illegally, indicating she sees now that anything a person pretends to own is actually the property of God the Omnipotent. Bradstreet ends with a kind of prayer: Please, my soul, no longer love the things of this world and remember authentic “hope and treasure” (Line 54) is only in Heaven.