Contemplations

Quiz — Contemplations by Anne Bradstreet

1. Recall – Form & Context: In what season does Contemplations begin, and what significance does this seasonal choice hold in relation to the poem's central themes?

1. Recall – Speaker & Setting: Where is the speaker physically located at the poem's start, and in what historical/geographical context was this poem composed by Bradstreet?

1. Recall – Key Image: What is the first major symbol the speaker encounters, and what does it signify within the poem's symbolic framework?

1. Recall – Key Image: Describe the symbolic importance of the river in Contemplations. What two larger concepts does it represent simultaneously?

1. Comprehension – The Sun Passage: When the speaker reflects on the sun, she briefly considers an idea that would have been seen as heretical in her Puritan community. What is that idea, and how does she resolve the tension it creates?

1. Comprehension – Tone Shift: How does the tone of Contemplations shift from the beginning to the conclusion? Identify at least two distinct emotional stages the speaker experiences.

1. Comprehension – Human Mortality vs. Nature: In the sections about time and human achievement, what conclusion does Bradstreet draw regarding the tools people use — such as wealth, monuments, and written records — in their efforts to avoid being forgotten?

1. *Analysis – The Ubi Sunt Tradition: How does Bradstreet utilize the classical ubi sunt* ("where have they gone?") device, and what uniquely Puritan perspective does she incorporate?

1. Analysis – Envy of the Natural World: At one point, the speaker expresses fleeting envy toward rivers, fish, and birds. What is the basis of that envy, and how does it ultimately underscore the burden that makes humans unique in the poem?

1. Analysis – The Sea Voyage Symbol: Explain how the image of the mariner navigating open water serves both as a personal biographical reference for Bradstreet and as a theological symbol within the poem's closing movement.

Answer Key

1. The poem opens in autumn, a season traditionally linked with decline, endings, and the approach of death. This setting establishes the poem's focus on mortality, the passage of time, and the contrast between nature's cycles of renewal and the single, irreversible arc of human life.

1. The speaker is walking through a New England landscape, observing trees, rivers, and the sky. Bradstreet wrote the poem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (likely the 1660s), a Puritan settlement where the natural world was seen as a divine text, with caution against excessive attachment to creation over the Creator.

1. The first major symbol is the ancient oak tree, representing the seeming permanence and near-immortality of nature, having outlasted countless generations of humans, which provokes the speaker's sense of her own smallness and mortality.

1. The river symbolizes time — always moving forward and never returning, yet remaining as an unbroken entity — and the soul's journey through life, flowing through the world without permanent anchorage.

1. The speaker briefly entertains the idea that the sun's overwhelming power and beauty could be worthy of worship, reminiscent of ancient sun-worshipping cultures. However, she redirects her awe toward the Creator behind creation, reaffirming Puritan doctrine that nature should lead to God rather than replace Him.

1. The tone begins with wonder and genuine awe at nature's beauty, shifts into melancholy and existential anxiety as the speaker confronts human insignificance and the destructive force of time. By the poem's end, the tone settles into quiet acceptance and tempered hope, based on the belief that the soul has a destiny beyond the physical world.

1. Bradstreet concludes that strategies such as wealth, grand buildings, and written records are ineffective against time. Empires and celebrated individuals are eventually forgotten, reinforcing the poem's argument that earthly striving cannot secure immortality.

1. Bradstreet employs the ubi sunt device by asking where the great figures and civilizations of the past have gone, emphasizing how completely time erases human achievement. Her Puritan perspective transforms this classical lament into a theological argument: the only true escape from time's erasure is the immortality of the soul through God.

1. The speaker envies creatures like fish, birds, and rivers for their lack of self-awareness, thus having no consciousness of mortality. The source of human suffering is this self-consciousness — the awareness of impending death — which, while a burden, also defines the spiritual dimension that separates humans and gives meaning to the soul's yearning for eternity.

1. Biographically, the sea voyage recalls Bradstreet's crossing from England to Massachusetts as a teenager — a formative experience that shaped her understanding of vulnerability and faith. Theologically, the mariner navigating calm and stormy seas symbolizes the soul's passage through life's uncertainties toward death and, Bradstreet hopes, toward God, representing the entire spiritual journey traced in the poem.