Anne Bradstreet wrote “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet.” Edward Taylor wrote “Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children.” Both Bradstreet and Taylor attempt, in their respective poems, to reconcile their faith in God with the unthinkable tragedy of a child’s death. In many surface ways, their poems seem quite similar, both in tone and content. However, they differ significantly on a few key points. Bradstreet is unique in her veiled expression of blame towards God, while Taylor expresses the conventional Puritan response to tragedy in a way that convinces the reader of his authenticity—both as a loving father and as a man who found his greatest joy in surrendering to God’s “unnatural” will.

Both poets resort to a relatively simple metaphor—that of flowers. Neither of them attempts to elevate the tragedy by using cryptic references to Greek mythology or the Bible. Bradstreet’s poem in particular is remarkable for its simplicity of language and feeling. The first stanza uses the repetition of the word “farewell” and “babe” as well as an alternating rhyme scheme in the first four lines. The straightforward use of language makes the poem feel very real, very genuine, and lacking in literary pretension. Far from over-spiritualizing death, Bradstreet succeeds in the genuine expression of grief.

In the first stanza, Bradstreet compares her grandchild to a “fair flower that for a space was lent” (275). Like Taylor, she recognizes that her grandchild belonged to God, not to her earthly family. Elizabeth is referred to as “dear,” “sweet,” “the pleasure of mine eye,” and as “blest” (Bradstreet 276-277). The author addresses her dead grandchild with great affection and honesty, and rhetorically asks her granddaughter if there is any point in her expression of mourning. In these last three lines of the first stanza, all of the lines have the same end rhyme, indicating a unity of thought within those lines.

Bradstreet’s second stanza switches gears completely in terms of tone, giving evidence that “plants new set to be eradicate” and “buds new blown to have so short a date” could be nothing less than contrary to nature (276). It follows the same rhyme scheme as the first stanza, with the first four lines possessing alternating rhyme and the last three lines—the point and summation of the poem—all having the same end rhyme. She ends with the sentiment that it must be God’s special action for something so abnormal to happen. But that leaves the question, why would God want to take her?

Bradstreet’s tone here could be taken as accusatory: she is blaming God for taking her grandchild away. The lines could also be read as a mixture of resignation to God’s will and hope that she is residing in heaven. Without that hope, it’s doubtful that Bradstreet could have lost a grandchild and still keep her faith in God. Even not read as veiled accusation towards God for his unnatural act, Bradstreet’s poem does not come even close to approaching Taylor’s level of resignation over the death of his children.

Taylor also compares his children to flowers sprouting from a “True-Love Knot” (346). He first establishes, in the first two stanzas, the beauty of the flowers that grow in his garden. Compared to Bradstreet, Taylor’s language is more complex and his words more archaic. While Bradstreet’s poem could have been written by a modern writer, Taylor’s language places him squarely in the seventeenth century. For Taylor, a direct consequence of a heaven-matched marriage was children, and by extension the death of some of his children in infancy. In his poem, he celebrates both marriage and the birth of children as a welcomed and joyful occasion.

Taylor’s attitude towards life after death permeates his poem about dead children. To both Taylor and Bradstreet, heaven was not a distant and undefined place that people went to after they died; heaven was a very near and very concrete reality. God created the “Knot” in “Paradise,” or heaven, and it is to heaven that the flowers go, whether soon after sprouting or long after (Taylor 346). Only by his strong belief in a very real afterlife can Taylor reconcile his own personal tragedy with what he perceives to be God’s will.

On the occasion of the first death, Taylor envisions a “glorious hand from glory” and “Guarded with Angels” possessing the flower. Thus, he describes his daughter’s death as an act of God personally reaching down from heaven and interacting with human affairs. In his view, her death was not only “Dolesome” and “darksome,” it was also “perfumed” and “bright” (Taylor 346). He “sees” his daughter escorted to heaven by angels, focusing not on the physical signs of her death, but on a greater spiritual reality. In his eyes, his daughter’s death is nothing less than a tangible expression of God’s divine providence in his life.

Although Taylor does not focus on the suffering caused by the death of his children—he focuses on their position in heaven— neither does he deny the sheer brutality of the experience. The “hour” of his first daughter’s death was “unlooked for” and the “cropp[ing]” of her flower almost causes the uprooting of himself and his marriage (Taylor 346). Taylor uses the words “crop” and “tore” to describe God’s action in taking his daughter, words that imply at the very least a callous unfeeling attitude towards human suffering (346).

While what Taylor describes as the uprooting of his stem obviously means great personal suffering, it could also imply a crisis of faith. His daughter’s death was both unexpected and unwanted. It may have shaken the very foundations of his faith. Taylor goes into more detail to describe the death of his second daughter, an extremely painful one, with “tortures,” “Vomit,” “screechings,” and “groans” (347). At the sight of his suffering child, Taylor suffered greatly as well. Although he uses the euphemism “got away” instead of “crop[ped]” this time, Taylor does not downplay the role of suffering in the death of his two children— neither his suffering nor theirs.

Of course, being a Puritan who believed strongly in the providence and love of God and in an afterlife far more important than earthly life, Taylor cannot leave the reader with a picture of human tragedy. He must end up at the end, like David in the Psalms of the Bible, praising God for his goodness. Bradstreet defies this convention in her poem but Taylor rigidly adheres to it in his.

Bradstreet takes great care and six lines to highlight the unnaturalness of the death of children. To her, it defies both human logic and the laws of nature itself and though she concludes her poem on the note that it has to be God who “guides nature and fate,” her account does not come close to Taylor’s journey of grief and doubt to ultimate surrender (Bradstreet 276).

Taylor, on the other hand, takes care of his own doubts and objections to God with a single phrase: “and nature fault would find” (347). He acknowledges that the natural, human thing to do would be to blame God for an act that nature itself vili- fies and deems illogical. His joyful acceptance of his children’s death and his willing surrender to God can only be explained by his belief in heaven as the ultimate pinnacle of man’s whole existence. If life on earth is only a passing shadow compared to heaven, then Taylor can embrace fully the idea that his children are far better off with God “in Glory” than with him down on earth (346).

Taylor also sees the death of his children as furthering his own ultimate goal: to be in heaven with God. His dead children become his “pledge in glory”—his stake in a divine future (346). In the last stanza they become a passageway of sorts to heaven, as he “piecemeal pass[es] to Glory bright in them” (Taylor 347). Although the idea of seeing dead offspring as a way to get to heaven faster seems macabre, this was the accepted if not expected response for the Puritans of that time period. Taylor manages to turn painful personal experience into one more reason to praise God as the creator and ruler of all things.

How disturbing can you get—writing a celebratory poem about the death of two of your children? However, this view does not take into account that the puritans saw everything through the lens of God’s divine hand at work in the world. In their attempt to reconcile God’s seeming cruelty with what they knew and believed to be his awesome love, Puritans like Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet struggled out their faith in great poetry.

Bradstreet, Anne. “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 5th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1998. 277.

Taylor, Edward. “Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 5th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1998. 346.