Anne Bradstreet - The Four Elements

Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World Poet. Her volume of poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America ... received considerable favorable attention when it was first published in London in 1650. Eight years after it appeared it was listed by William London in his Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England, and George III is reported to have had the volume in his library. Bradstreet's work has endured, and she is still considered to be one of the most important early American poets.

 

The first section of The Tenth Muse ... includes four long poems, known as the quaternions:

 

"The Four Elements,"

"The Four Humors of Man,"

"The Four Ages of Man,"

"The Four Seasons"

 

Each poem consists of a series of orations; the first by earth, air, fire, and water; the second by choler, blood, melancholy, and flegme; the third by childhood, youth, middle age, and old age; the fourth by spring, summer, fall, and winter. In these quaternions Bradstreet demonstrates a mastery of physiology, anatomy, astronomy, Greek metaphysics, and the concepts of medieval and Renaissance cosmology. Although she draws heavily on Sylvester's translation of du Bartas and Helkiah Crooke's anatomical treatise Microcosmographia (1615), Bradstreet's interpretation of their images is often strikingly dramatic. Sometimes she uses material from her own life in these historical and philosophical discourses.

 

- The Poetry Foundation



The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America,
printed at London, 1650

The Four Elements

by Anne Bradstreet, c.1612-1672

The Fire, Air, Earth and water did contest
Which was the strongest, noblest and the best,
Who was of greatest use and might'est force;
In placide Terms they thought now to discourse,
That in due order each her turn should speak;
But enmity this amity did break
All would be chief, and all scorn'd to be under
Whence issu'd winds & rains, lightning & thunder
The quaking earth did groan, the Sky lookt black
The Fire, the forced Air, in sunder crack;
The sea did threat the heav'ns, the heavn's the earth,
All looked like a Chaos or new birth:
Fire broyled Earth, & scorched Earth it choaked
Both by their darings, water so provoked
That roaring in it came, and with its source
Soon made the Combatants abate their force
The rumbling hissing, puffing was so great
The worlds confusion, it did seem to threat
Till gentle Air, Contention so abated
That betwixt hot and cold, she arbitrated
The others difference, being less did cease
All storms now laid, and they in perfect peace
That Fire should first begin, the rest consent,
The noblest and most active Element.