Puritans, a group of people devoted to religious worship, escaped the Church of England in the 16th Century to achieve religious freedom in the New World. They wrote a great deal of poetry and gave birth to many famous poets such as Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. Poems such as Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666 reflects the thoughts and actions of Puritanism during the 16th Century. They believe that sinners who do not ask for God’s forgiveness are banished to an eternity in hell. However they also believe that anyone who accepted God’s will shall be granted access to heaven. The most important aspect of a Puritan’s life though is the presence of grace, plainness, and a divine mission. These three things are essential to receiving acceptance into heaven. Poems written during the beginning of Puritanism in North America express all of these qualities through the writer’s, such as Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor’s, beliefs.
Anne Bradstreet was born in Northampton, England in 1612 in a Puritan nobleman’s house and died in 1672. Anne Dudley, her maiden name, and her father, Thomas Dudley, was a worker for the nobleman. She married a graduate of Cambridge University named Simon Bradstreet and in 1630 sailed with both her father and her husband to Boston, Massachusetts. Her father and husband became governors of Massachusetts and after ten years moved to Andover where Anne spent the rest of her life raising her eight children. Her poems expressed the Puritan belief that one must not become too attached to things in this world. This is evident in the poem, Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666, which is about the burning down of the speaker’s house in the middle of the night. The speaker breaks the poem into three separate parts. In the first part she wakes up to find her house on fire. During this section she says, “I, starting up, the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry” (Bradstreet 35). Since her house is on fire, she is calls...