Part 16 (1/2)
Th' Ostrich with her plule with her eyn The Phoenix too (if any be) are , and the phesant The Thrush, the wren, the lark a prey to th' pesant, With thousands more which now I may omit Without impeachment to s in life, So when corrupt, mortality is rife;
Then Fevers, Pmples, Pox and Pestilence, With divers more, work deadly consequence: Whereof suchscarce had power to bury the dead; Yea so contagious countryes have we known That birds have not 'Scapt death as they have flown Of murrain, cattle numberless did fall, Men feared destruction epidemical
Then of my tempests felt at sea and land, Which neither shi+ps nor houses could withstand, What wofull wracks I've ere, Where fa hot hich Millain gain'd Again what furious storms and Hurricanoes Knoestern Isles, as Christophers Barbadoes; Where neither houses, trees nor plants I spare, But some fall down, and some fly up with air
Earthquakes so hurtfull, and so fear'd of all, Ihts I sometimes show, As battles pitcht in th' air, as countryes know, Their joyning fighting, forcing and retreat, That earth appears in heaven, O wonder great!
Sons of faues and wars, Which reat mutation of their States
I have said less than did my Sisters three, But what's their wrath or force, the fame's in me
To adde to all I've said was o beyond h the second edition held slight alterations here and there, no further attempt was made to add to or take away from the verses, which are as a whole the best exa land ”The four Hues of any distinctive character, the poe only a paraphrase of her reading In ”The Four Seasons,” there was room for picturesque treatment of the new conditions that surrounded her, but she seems to have been content, merely to touch the conventional side of nature, and to leave her own is quite out of the question The verses should have held New England as it showed itself to the colonists, with all the capricious charges that , it would have seemed, to excite such poetical power as she possessed, to the utmost, for even the prose ofthat stirred within thee conditions of the new hoether, the silent spaces of the great wilderness shut the them, and the deep woods with their unfamiliar trees, the dark pines on the hill-side, all held the sense of banishhts or feelings, in any lines of hers, till late in life, when she dropped once for all the methods that pleased her early years, and in both prose and poetry spoke her real ret at the waste of power in the dreary pages of the ”Four Monarchies” That she had keen susceptibility to natural beauty this later poem abundantly proves, but in most of them there is hardly a hint of what h probably it was the more valued by her readers, for this very reason
CHAPTER XII
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS
Though the series of quaternions which form the major part of the poems, have separate titles and ritten at various ti sixteen personified characters, all of the their vieith dreary facility and all of them to the Puritan mind, eminently correct and respectable personalities The ”Four Seasons” won especial commendations from her most critical readers, but for all of thehted acceptance of every word this phenoo, a woman's work, whether prose or verse, which came before the public, was hailed with an enthusiastic appreciation, it is difficult to-day to coraph on Hannah More, who held land that Anne Bradstreet did to the New ”In this age, when female talent is so rife--when, indeed, it is not too ht to equality with men in reference to all the productions of the mind--it is difficult to co to adoration, hich a woo Mediocrity was enius, and to have printed a book, or to have written even a tolerable poehest society”
Even greater veneration was felt in days when ood birth, could barely write their own na but the quaternions, she would long have ranked as a poet deserving of all the elegies and anagrammatic tributes the Puritan divine loved to ht have been written in Lincolnshi+re and holds not one suggestion of the new life and , may have been enjoyed because of its reale and thrush” did not sing under Cae s, nor did the ”primrose pale,” fill the hands of the children who ran over the New England meadows It seems to have been her theory that certain well established forms must be preserved, and so she wrote the conventional phrases of the poet of the seventeenth century, only a line or two indicating the real power of observation she failed to exercise
THE FOUR SEASONS OF THE YEAR
_SPRING_
Another four I've left yet to bring on, Of four times four the last Quarternion, The Winter, Su, In season all these Seasons I shall bring; Sweet Spring like man in his Minority, At present claiarreen, She trim'd her locks, which late had frosted been, Nor hot nor cold, she spake, but with a breath, Fit to revive, the nummed earth from death
Three months (quoth she) are 'lotted to my share March, April, May of all the rest most fair
Tenth of the first, Sol into Aries enters, And bids defiance to all tedious winters, Crosseth the Line, and equals night and day, (Stil adds to th' last til after pleasant May) And now hts Who for sooes the Plow-ht unloose his winter locked soyle; The Seeds-rain, In hope the ain; The Gardener now superfluous branches lops, And poles erect for his young clas then sowes his herbs, his flowers & roots And carefully manures his trees of fruits
The Pleiades their influence now give, And all that sees, who winter kil'd Like birds now chirp, and hop about the field, The Nightingale, the black-bird and the Thrush Now tune their layes, on sprayes of every bush
The wanton frisking Kid, and soft fleec'd La Darass they crop, They joy in what they have, butpower, Yet ht eye,North-ind of cold Deceer dayes, and a more temperate Air: The Sun in Taurus keeps his residence, And with his warlareeth from thence This is the month whose fruitful showers produces All set and sown for all delights and uses: The Pear, the Plury beast to nourish The Prirass hath nature set, That when the Sun on's Love (the earth) doth shi+ne These arments fine
The fearfull bird his little house now builds In trees and walls, in Cities and in fields
The outside strong, the inside war hen her chirping chickins leads With wings & beak defends theleads My next and last is fruitfull pleasant May, Wherein the earth is clad in rich aray, The Sun now enters loving Gelances of his eye, Our thicker rayment makes us lay aside Lest by his fervor we be torrified
All flowers the Sun noith his beams discloses, Except the double pinks and matchless Roses
Noare from more than me The cleanly Huswife's Dary's now in th' prime, Her shelves and firkins fill'd for winter tiht, One hangs his head, the other stands upright: But both rejoice at th' heaven's clear s face, More at her showers, which water them apace
For fruits my Season yields the early Cherry, The hasty Peas, and wholsoer time, Each Season hath its fruit, so hath each Clime: Each man his own peculiar excellence, But none in all that hath prehe, with thy short pittance fly Let some describe thee better than can I
Yet above all this priviledg is thine, Thy dayes still lengthen without least decline:
_SUMMER_
When Spring had done, the Suar did Air, Blood, Youth in 's equipage
Wiping the sweat fro thus began; Bright June, July and August hot are mine, In th' first Sol doth in crabbed Cancer shi+ne
His progress to the North now's fully done, Then retrogradeSun, Who to his Southward Tropick still is bent, Yet doth his parching heat but h he decline, because his flahly dry'd the earth, and heat the air
Like as an Oven that long tireat, That if you do withdraw her burning store, 'Tis for a tio those foolick Swains, the Shepherd Lads To wash the thick cloth'd flocks with pipes full glad In the cool strea their dirty coats till they look white; Whose fleece when finely spun and deeply dy'd With Robes thereof Kings have been dignified, Blest rustick Swains, your pleasant quiet life, Hath envy bred in Kings that were at strife, Careless of worldly wealth you sing and pipe, Whilst they'r ireat Bajazet cry out in 's woes, Oh happy shepherd which hath not to lose