Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, October 14, 2007

The Library of America has published an inclusive anthology of American poetry from the 17th and 18th centuries -- poetry written by English colonists before there was a United States, and by citizens of the new republic shortly after its founding. Fascinating for historical perspective, some of the poems are also admirable works of art. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), the best-known and probably the best poet of the earlier period, achieves emotional force with the simple means of parallelism:

TO MY DEAR AND LOVING HUSBAND

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were lov'd 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 then 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 recompence.

Thy love is such I can no way repay,

The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.

Then while we live, in love lets so persever,

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Without spectacular language, the poem attains the conviction of a polished, heartfelt plainness. In a later generation, Philip Freneau (1752-1832) of New Jersey writes a delicate lyric about an American flower. The splendid last lines seem to foreshadow the resourceful, attentive intelligence of Robert Frost:

THE WILD HONEY SUCKLE

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,

Hid in this silent dull retreat,

Untouch'd thy honey'd blossoms blow,

Unseen thy little branches greet:

No roving foot shall find thee here,

No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature's self in white array'd,

She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,

And planted here the guardian shade,

And sent soft waters murmuring by;

Thus quietly thy summer goes,

Thy days declining to repose.

Smit with these charms, that must decay,

I grieve to see thy future doom;

They died -- nor were those flowers less gay,

(The flowers that did in Eden bloom)

Unpitying frosts, and Autumn's power

Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

From morning suns and evening dews

At first, thy little being came:

If nothing once, you nothing lose,

For when you die you are the same;

The space between is but an hour,

The mere idea of a flower.

Freneau, a contemporary and colleague of John Madison and Thomas Jefferson, is, like Bradstreet, a poetic ancestor whose work remains alive and vivid.

(Anne Bradstreet's and Philip Freneau's poems can be found in "American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." Penguin Putnam ¿ 2007 by Literary Classics of the United States.)