The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is out!
It came out in 2006, but it came out again this week. It’s remastered and pretty and still has the Patrick Stewart voiceover. This was it for a lot of us – the video game that fulfilled the dream of a pixilated Dungeons and Dragons. The guild quests and coliseum fights are still there while the infuriating leveling system that trapped you into confidence and forced a restart because of misallocated experience perks is gone. And it looks great, on par now with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Not everyone cares. I understand. But please be courteous to those of us who do. We’ll be taking a POETS Day to defeat monstrous deadra and save the land of Cyridil. There’s a power vacuum in the wake of Emperor Uriel Septim VII’s assassination (AP, Chicago, and MLA all tell me the “’s” comes after the numerical in a possessive with a numerical name but it only looks mildly worse than “Septim’s VII.” There is no satisfaction.) so we gotta get on that. For the rest of you, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday for whatever reason draws you. You have my permission as soon to be head of the Assassin’s Guild.
First, a little verse.
***
from The Prologue
Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672)I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who sayes my hand a needle better fits,
A Poets Pen all scorne I should thus wrong;
For such despight they cast on female wits:
If what I doe prove well, it wo’nt advance,
They’l say its stolne, or else, it was by chance.
That’s the fifth stanza of the first published work of poetry from the English colonies in the New World. Defiant from the start.
What it’s prologuing is Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, 1650. Richard Ellmann, in his introduction to The New Oxford Book of American Verse, leans in, “Nine European incumbents were displaced.” Ellman’s introduction is a good read; informative and peppered with wry comments, even snide swipes. As a quick aside, here’s an unrelated one aimed at Herman Mellville:
“Mellville kept to meters, but handled them with studied clumsiness, evidently convinced that a tortured idiom, an ill-tuned instrument, might better suit the mind in its processive unfolding of itself and its world than would more decorous methods.
The Tenth Muse opens with a series of poetic testimonials variously written by N.H., C.B., “knowne friend,” and I.W. The last is identified by “To my deare Sifter, Author of these Poems,” as John Woodbridge, Broadstreet’s brother in-law and party most responsible for the book’s publishing, but more on that in a moment.
The bulk of the book is made up of Bradstreet’s Quaternions, sets of four poems each on the elements, humors, ages of man, seasons, and then the four great monarchies of Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome. They’re all longer poems in the style of – I’ve read, so I’m not sure how closely – a hero of hers, a French Protestant named Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas whose poems she adored. After, there are elegies and epitaphs honoring select eminent folks. It’s wide ranging, demonstrating an impressive breadth of knowledge and interests.
Her father was Thomas Dudley, steward to the funkonymed Theophilus Clinton, 4th Earl of Lincoln (a member of Parliament.) That position afforded Anne an impressive education. She was taught languages, history, and literature by her father (a “devourer of books,” according to Poetry Foundation) and tutors and had the run of the Earl’s well-stocked library. Again, according to Poetry Foundation:
“There the young Anne Dudley read Virgil, Plutarch, Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Seneca, and Thucydides as well as Spenser, Siddney, Milton, Raleigh, Hobbes, Joshua Sylvester’s 1605 translation of Guillaume du Bartas’s Divine Weeks and Workes, and the Geneva version of the Bible. In general, she benefited from the Elizabethan tradition that valued female education.”
Anne Dudley married one of her father’s assistants, a man named Simon Bradstreet, at age sixteen or so; neither the year of her birth or marriage are known for certain. With Simon, in 1630 she followed her father, under direction of Lord Lincoln, to lend their talents towards the colonization project underway in Massachusetts.
The family did very well eventually. Both men went on to serve terms as Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, dad was among the founders of Harvard, husband a Harvard overseer, whatever that means. They had an awful time in the beginning. The three-month voyage was rough (I don’t know by whose account. If it was a sailor’s, fine. But few who weren’t in the business made that journey more than once and I assume everyone with a one way ticket and nothing to compare thought it was pretty rough) and they arrived to find a colony hit hard by sickness and woe. Some eighty had died since the last winter, little food was available, and a great deal were not well. Anne wasn’t happy. Dudleys and Bradstreets shared a small house with a single fireplace. That meant they all slept together in the winter. I’ll bet Simon was thrilled to share a bedroom with his in-laws. Colonial life was hard.
One of the remarkable facts of Bradstreet’s life is that she bore eight children when and where she did and all of them lived to adulthood. Childbirth related death, of both mother and child, was a considerable risk in the best of circumstances afforded by her time. The following is a poem written after publication of the first edition of The Tenth Muse but included, along with several other additions, in the posthumous 1678 second edition.
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,
We are both ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that’s due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interr’d in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These o protect from step Dames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;
And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.
Two thirds through I had to reassess. The line “That when that knot’s untied that made us one,” made me think of an umbilical cord, and I assumed the poem addressed her unborn child rather than her husband. “These o protect from step Dames injury,” set me right. I’m not sure if this qualifies as escapism. I’m certainly transported to another time and triggered empathetically despite existing cultural guardrails with an established record of walling off and preserving masculinity.
This was a private poem, at least in fact. She may have planned on sharing it with the world, but she lived to sixty and without knowing her ailments, I’ve read multiple accounts mentioning frailty and poor health. If she meant for them to reach an audience, she had time and, after Tenth Muse, reputation to do so plus impetus to act sooner rather than later. That she didn’t lends authenticity to her words in my eyes. Maybe wrongly, but it does.
Another posthumously printed poem:
To my Dear and Loving Husband
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
Though passed by the time of its release, she had input anticipating the second edition. The poems from the original are cleaned up. I can’t cite before and after examples. I’m told she fixed lazy rhymes, though there are still some that seem beyond vowel shift explanation in the New Oxford, and tightened meter where needed. It bears the introduction, “The second Edition, Corrected by the Author, and enlarged by an Addition of several other Poems found amongst her Papers after her Death.” There’s debate about her input on the first edition.
She wrote for friends and possibly acquaintances in a closed community. The Bradstreets’ success moved them from house to house, each larger and grander, after the crowded shelter they shared with her parents. Her three story home in the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, a town which her family founded and is now North Andover, boasted a library holding an estimated eight hundred books. They were not cut off from the world, but theater troupes were local, musical recitals performed by locals. Special reading by acclaimed Continental so and so weren’t going to find out if crossing the Atlantic was rough or not, so you played with neighborhood kids. Those who entertained had the immediate in mind.
The story casts I.W., John Woodbridge, her brother in-law of the introductory “Sifter” tribute, as contriver and corrupter of dear and near. I suppose he could have been an agent of a devious wife or one of Anne’s friends. Whatever his rank, he snuck copies of her work, in conspiracy with her father and friends, and all the written tributes and well wishes off to London, and while there on colonial business met with a publisher. All of this is, per the legend, without her knowledge and, as it was cloak and dagger, assumed to be against her wants. She became the first published poet from the British colonies, and she wasn’t terribly thrilled about it.
Woodbridge, maybe trying to save his domestic hide via flattery, wrote as preface to the work,
“It is the Work of a Woman, honoured, and esteemed where she lives for her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her curteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her Family occasions, and more then so, these Poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments…. I fear the displeasure of no person in the publishing of these Poems but the Author, without whose knowledg, and contrary to her expectation, I have presumed to bring to publick view, what she resolved in such a manner should never see the Sun; but I found that diverse had gotten some scattered Papers, affected them well, were likely to have sent forth broken pieces, to the Author’s prejudice, which I thought to prevent, as well as to pleasure those that earnestly desired the view of the whole.”
I wonder how in the dark she was. Was she in on it? Playing at self-deprecating after the fact? That she corrected the work after initial release shows she may have considered her poetry prepped and ready for a backwater colony, but not to her satisfaction for a London showing. At the same time, she was very teasing in some of her compositions. The woman was funny. A coquettish act about sharing is playful. She challenges the idea that a woman can’t publish with the big boys, falls back on a little ole me, all knowing a strain of respect for female intellect lingers in the post Elizabethan air. It’s not a bad PR move.
Stealth publishing seems like a big operation. There is all manner of moving parts in the plot and popular imagination insists the colonies were rife with quilting bees. Getting a lot of people to quietly do anything isn’t easy. Who knows?
The effect of her book’s success seems to have emboldened her. Bradstreet shifted to lyrical poetry where once she wrote long form in Du Bartas imitation. She was a poet in her own right, confident in her decisions.
I choose to believe she knew all about Woodbridge’s mission. The following is funny either way, but as a pot stirrer – as water muddying – it’s brilliant. It makes me want to hang out with her.
The Author to Her Book
Thou ill-form’d 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, expos’d to publick view,
Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).
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,
Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joynts to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobling then is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ’mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam.
In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come;
And take thy way where yet thou art not known,
If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none:
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.
