Anne Bradstreet’s Poetic Message of Hope Anonymous College

Hope in the face of death seems to be an impossible concept to adequately convey to a reader. After all, death itself seems to be the epitome of hopelessness and despair. However, Anne Bradstreet conveys in her poetry this very idea. Bradstreet lived in a Puritan community in America where people lived very hard lives and struggled greatly. In such conditions, death was a possibility that loomed over people on a daily basis. As such, it is a topic that Bradstreet chose for many of her poems. She endeavors to bring hope to her fellow settlers, even in the face of death, by widening their field of vision to include eternity that is promised to them by God. In her poems “Contemplations,” “Before the Birth of One of her Children,” and “As Weary Pilgrim,” Bradstreet uses nature to illustrate where to keep one’s focus in life and shows how to remain hopeful when death is an inevitable and ever-present fact of life.

While Bradstreet praises nature in her poetry, she acknowledges its insufficiency while using it for a higher purpose. In her poem “Contemplations,” she speaks highly of nature and the beauty it possesses. She praises nature’s ability for rejuvenation in the eighteenth stanza by saying, “If winter come and greenness then...