Verses upon the Burning of our House

Bradstreet begins in shock, startled from sleep to the reality that her home is on fire. The otherwise silent night is broken by the shouts of neighbors to alert her that her house is imperiled. For a devout Christian, this burning house is a sort of playing-out-in-miniature of the shock and awe promised in the final coming of God, when His wrath will be visited on the unsuspecting Earth on a schedule only God knows. That apocalyptic moment will be a prelude to the glories of the new Heaven and New Earth. Bradstreet uses that Biblical movement from shock and sorrow to happiness and joy to frame her own emotional reaction to the loss of her home.

As she watches her house burn, Bradstreet turns to God—“to my God my heart did cry” (Line 8). As the fire burns on, and even when she can no longer bring herself to watch, she blesses God’s name. She reasons that all her things were never actually hers, that only her vanity had allowed her to take pleasure in her modest accumulation of stuff. God provided her with these things and by rights has taken them back. These furnishings—the table, the chairs, the bed, the trunks full of books and papers—all if it was “his own, it was not mine” (Line 17). In this careful logic, Bradstreet finds the loss of her home just and fitting. The catastrophic housefire becomes an occasion for moral instruction.

Yet—and Bradstreet’s all-too-human heart cannot entirely resist the heresy of the word “yet”—as she inspects the rubble and ashes of her once comfortable home, she cannot help but remember the good times with her family, the convivial meals, the prayers. This was, after all, her home for more than 20 years. “Here and there” in the blackened rubble, her “sorrowing eyes” take in the corners where for so long she would sit or rest, the remarkably unremarkable things people do in their homes until the house burns to the ground.

Her attention dwells lovingly, too lovingly from a Puritan perspective, on the furnishings. She remembers the trunk and chest that most likely contained her spare library of books, or more likely, drafts of her own poetic compositions in progress—or what she terms in modest understatement “my pleasant things” (Line 27). Those poems are gone in an absolute way that a contemporary audience accustomed to backing work up or printing out copies of valuable papers might struggle to understand. Gone for Bradstreet means gone. In her emotional upheaval, she addresses the house now gone and fixates on all the important and rewarding experiences “thy” will never again host. She spirals into a depression as the repeated “No” and “Nor” (Lines 31-34) accumulate the negativity and reveal her mounting panic, the swelling emotion of her humanity.

Line 36 provides the poem’s tipping point, the moment when Bradstreet rights her own wrongs and reminds herself of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: All is vanity. Did you, she chides herself, fix your affections on “mould’ring dust” (Line 39)? In doing so, she understands she has allowed herself to forget her true home, the home secured through the Passion of Christ. Maudlin self-pity and lingering regret now give way to the grand ascendant vision of her Puritan Christianity. Only through the justice and mercy of God’s intervention through the agency of the purifying fire can Bradstreet now see clearly the moral danger of things, of taking too closely to heart the things of this life.

In the closing 10 lines, Bradstreet addresses her own wayward heart and reminds it to use this cleansing experience to keep its focus on the eternal home promised by the risen Christ. By Christ’s sacrifice, that home is hers. There in Heaven is more than enough wealth for Bradstreet; this wealth is not measured by an accumulation of objects that can be destroyed so easily and so absolutely. Farewell, she says now to her things. She closes with a quiet prayer: Please God, never let me get so tangled in the things of this world, and never let me forget my real treasure is not in the ash fields of Earth but in heaven.