The Puritan Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672), whose father served as steward to the Earl of Lincoln, spent her girlhood among the books of the Earl’s library, reading Homer, Virgil, Thucydides, and Livy, as well as the poetry of Wyatt, Sidney, and Spenser. With the tutoring of her well-read father, this extensive self-directed reading comprised her education. Married at sixteen, Bradstreet emigrated with her parents and her husband to the wilderness of New England, where she would spend the rest of her life, bearing eight children as the family roved from one Massachusetts settlement to another. Her book of poems, “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America,” which appeared in 1650, marked her as the first English woman poet to be published on either side of the Atlantic. Today’s poem, “Upon my Son Samuel,” written in tetrameter couplets, imagines its speaker as a sort of latter-day Hannah, the Old Testament mother who, after praying for a child, relinquishes her son, this Samuel’s namesake, to service in the temple. Here the mother releases her son to God’s mercy, as he embarks on a perilous sea crossing at the edge of winter.  

Upon my Son Samuel his Going for England, November 6, 1657 
by Anne Bradstreet 

Thou mighty God of Sea and Land, 
I here resign into thy hand 
The Son of Prayers, of vows, of tears, 
The child I stay’d for many years. 
Thou heard’st me then, and gav’st him me; 
Hear me again, I give him Thee. 
He’s mine, but more, O Lord, thine own, 
For sure thy Grace on him is shown. 
No friend I have like Thee to trust, 
For mortal helps are brittle Dust. 
Preserve, O Lord, from storms and wrack, 
Protect him there, and bring him back; 
And if thou shalt spare me a space, 
That I again may see his face, 
Then shall I celebrate thy Praise, 
And Bless thee for’t even all my Days. 
If otherwise I go to Rest, 
Thy Will be done, for that is best; 
Persuade my heart I shall him see 
Forever happefied with Thee. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.