A reading by Lindsay Kennedy for Early American Literature (Spring 2006). This is number 7 in the series. This post contains the full text of this edition, which is also available in an elegant PDF format.
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ANN ELIZA BLEECKER, TWO POEMS (1793)
Lindsay Kennedy, Early American Literature, Dr. Jon Miller, Spring 2006
Introduction
Much is known about the life of Ann Eliza Bleecker (1752-1783) due to her abundant work and prominent social position in revolutionary New York. Born Anna Elizabeth Schuyler around October 1752, she was the sixth and last child of Brandt Schuyler, a prosperous merchant, and Margareta Van Wyck. Both the Schuylers and the Van Wycks had direct familial connections with the first Dutch settlers in New Netherlands in the 1620s. Shortly before Anna Elizabeth’s birth, her father died and her mother remarried Anthony Ten Eyck and gave birth to another daughter, Susanna, in 1762. She and Susanna were very close, and she appears in many of Anna Elizabeth’s later letters (Harris 81).
According to Sharon Harris, scholar of American women writers, “Ann Eliza, as she identified herself in her writings, began her interest in reading and writing at an early age” (82). Perhaps her changed name indicated her need to strike out as an individual in her writing. She was encouraged in her writing by her husband, John James Bleecker, whom she married on March 21, 1769. Bleecker’s passion for reading and writing eventually extended into the publication of a serial she titled the Albany Gazette, which she shared only with family and friends. In 1771, the Bleeckers settled in Tomhanick, “a fertile estate eighteen miles north of Albany in the Old Schaghticoke region where John devoted himself to agriculture” (Harris 82). Tomhanick became Bleecker’s Eden, referenced with reverence and devotion in her poetry. Much of her pastoral poetry was penned during the first five years of her residence at Tomhanick. It was here where Bleecker established a nurturing environment of female support from which to write.
At Tomhanick, Bleecker gave birth to two daughters, Margaretta, who later became a published author and published a posthumous book of Bleecker’s entitled The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker, in Prose and Verse, in which she included some of her own essays, and Abella, who became the subject of much of Bleecker’s mournful writing. Bleecker’s mother and half-sister Susanna also lived for some time at Tomhanick with Bleecker, creating a tightly woven supportive circle in which Bleecker thrived (Harris 83). This idyll was not to last, however.
The British army’s approach, under the command of General Burgoyne in August of 1977, provoked John Bleecker to leave Tomhanick to make arrangements to remove his family to Albany. According to antebellum literary anthologist Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Bleecker, left alone during her husband’s absence and hearing that the enemy was only two miles away, started for the city with her children and a domestic servant (28). Margaretta was four years old, and Abella was still an infant. Her mother and half-sister had taken refuge at Red Hook shortly after John’s departure. Biographer Maureen Goldman notes that Bleecker’s daughter Margaretta remembers the trip as traumatic, with Bleecker carrying one child and holding the other by the hand: “The Roads were crowded with carriages loaded with women and children, but one could afford her assistance . . . and no sound but the dismal creaking of burdened wheels and the trampling of horses interrupted the mournful silence” (Goldman). Both the Bleecker and the Schuyler families were known for their support of the American Revolution, which was a key reason for the refusal of space in a home or wagon from her neighbors along a route guarded by Tories. The majority of the Dutch aristocratic families sided with the British during the early years of the war, which explained the reluctance of her neighbors to allow any space to Bleecker (Harris 85).
As the family met up with John Bleecker outside of Albany, rumors came that the city would be attacked. The family changed their route and went down the Hudson River toward Red Hook, where they intended to meet up with Bleecker’s mother and half-sister. Bleecker’s youngest daughter Abella died of dysentery on the trip, however, and they buried her on the bank of the river (Goldman). This loss was especially difficult for Bleecker, and she often put the blame for her death at the hands of the British. Bleecker then “arrived at Red Hook just in time have her mother die in her arms” (Goldman). After Burgoyne’s surrender a few days later, the Bleeckers returned to Tomhanick only to witness the death of Bleecker’s last remaining full sister, Catharine Schuyler Swits (Harris 85).
Much of Bleecker’s poetry after this time reflects her extraordinary grief and loss over her child, mother, and sister and provides passionate records of her stages of mourning. In 1781, John Bleecker was taken captive by the British, which caused a mental and physical breakdown for Bleecker. She gave birth to a stillborn infant. Her husband was recaptured and returned within six days. The remainder of her life until her death in 1783 was spent in ravaging despair and attempts to remain mentally stable. This is reflected in the despairing “A Prospect of Death,” in which Bleecker’s desperation indicates her thoughts of suicide, but also her hope for a virtuous death. Her later poetry also exhibits this pattern of despair followed by “a return to stability” (Harris 86). During this mournful time, many of her letters to her half-sister plead for Susan’s company in an attempt to regain the “tranquil, pre-war ‘Eden’ in which she had a supportive female circle to sustain her vision of right and privilege” (Harris 87). Susan, however, did not want to return to this life, opting for an urban, cosmopolitan setting. Although the date of composition is unnamed, “Of the Fair Susan” could reflect Bleecker’s desire for the camaraderie of her sister, or her desire to return to the idyllic days in which she was surrounded by a community of women. The remaining two years of Bleecker’s life were spent in active travel for political purposes with her husband and desperate letters to her half-sister Susan. Evidences by her final letter to Susan, Bleecker never quite forgave Susan’s desertion of her.
Bleecker strived for the restoration of her life and Eden through her poetry, which has provoked many scholars to examine the pastoral tendencies in addition to her elegiac verse. Her daughter’s Posthumous Works also include twenty-three letters, thirty-six poems, an unfinished novel entitled The History of Henry and Ann and her renowned captivity narrative, The History of Maria Kittle, which was republished less than a decade later due to its popularity. The captivity narrative also highlights the need for the restoration of captives to their former lands and homes, so Bleecker’s subsequent writings remained consistent in emphasis and theme.
Although the writers of her time were negligible in their critical attention to Bleecker’s work, more recently scholars have noticed her contributions to early women’s writing and to the national identity of a developing nation, as well as the significance of her resistance to the consolation of her grief (Gentilcore 86, Giffen 222). Allison Giffen asserts the importance of Bleecker’s life and work as “illustrat[ing] the necessary acts of negotiation that late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century American women poets underwent when they turned to themes of loss and grief” (222). Giffen also allows that Bleecker’s melancholia is “not a form of escape; rather, it is an enabling stance from which she can express herself with fewer impediments than a woman writer of her time and place might ordinarily encounter” (238). It is for this reason that Bleecker fleshes out and explores new avenues provided by the elegiac form of writing.
Roxanne Gentilcore views Bleecker’s focus on pastoral writing as representative of new American poetry in responding to the political crisis and ceasing to imitate English literary expression. She highlights Bleecker’s writing of topics typically viewed as male: war and politics. The use of pastoral form, however, allowed her freedom to express her love for the republic and the land.
Most critics have accepted Margaretta Faugeres’s “construction of her mother’s life during and after the events of 1777 as one of catastrophe and mental collapse” (Harris 87). However, some critics view Bleecker’s use of her talents as a way to expose cultural construction of personal loss. Bleecker places her loved ones’ deaths in historical, political, and cultural perspective. Rather than feeling restrained by accepted forms of writing, she strikes out, forming an identity for herself within her own grief, and an identity for her struggling nation.
The selections of Ann Eliza Bleecker’s work presented here come from A Library of American Literature: From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, compiled and edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson in the third of eleven volumes. Published by Charles L. Webster and Company in New York, these works appear on pages 483 and 484. Both poems were first published in the 1793 publication of Margaretta Faugeres’s The Posthumous Words of Ann Eliza Bleecker, in Prose and Verse. To which is added, a collection of essays, prose and poetical, and their exact dates of composition are unknown.
A PROSPECT OF DEATH
DEATH! thou real friend of innocence,
Though dreadful unto shivering sense,
I feel my nature tottering o’er
Thy gloomy waves, which loudly roar:
Immense the scene, yet dark the view,
Nor Reason darts her vision through.
Virtue! supreme of earthly good,
O let thy rays illume the road;
And when dashed from the precipice,
Keep me from sinking in the seas;
Thy radiant wings then wide expand,
And bear me to celestial land.
OF THE FAIR SUSAN
‘Tis she, upon the sapphire flood,
Whose charms the world surprise,
Whose praises chanted in the wood,
Are wafted to the skies.
To view the heaven of her eyes,
Where’er the light barque moves,
The green-haired sisters, smiling, rise
From out their sea-girt groves.
E’en Neptune quits his glassy caves,
And calls out from afar,
“So Venus looked, when o’er the waves
She drove her pearly car.”
He bids the winds to caves retreat,
And there confined to roar;
“But here,” said he, “forbear to breathe,
Till Susan comes on shore.”
Bibliography
Gentilcore, Roxanne M. “Ann Eliza Bleecker’s Wilderness Pastoral: Reading Vergil in Colonial America.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 1.4 (Spring 1995): 86-99. [Gentilcore describes Bleecker’s poetry in the pastoral tradition and examines how events in Bleecker’s life caused her to respond closely to Vergil’s poetry as she found a way to express herself in light of political and personal turmoil. The focus of the article is Bleecker’s poem “On Reading Dryden’s Vergil” and Bleecker’s comparison of the loss of her daughter to the events of the Aeneid.]
Giffin, Allison. “’Till Grief Melodious Grow’: The Poems and Letters of Ann Eliza Bleecker.” Early American Literature 28 (1993): 222-40. [Focused on Bleecker’s use of melancholy and elegy, Giffen reveals the importance of Bleecker’s work as representing the American woman poet through her affective and powerful voice. The poet’s retelling of the death of her daughter, Abella, enables her to create a poetic identity for herself.]
Goldman, Maureen. “Bleecker, Ann Eliza.” Feb. 2000. American National Biography Online. American Council of Learned Societies. University of Akron Bierce Library. 3 April 2006 <http://www.anb.org/>. [Goldman details Ann Eliza Bleecker’s personal and literary history and the effects of the death of Bleecker’s two children, her mother, her sister, and the brief captivity of her husband. Her writing is “about her life in Tomhanick and tells of the country’s extraordinary natural beauty and equally extraordinary loneliness,” which reflects the mourning in her poetry and the pleasure in the rural environment of her life (2). Goldman also briefly addresses the toll that Bleecker’s frontier life took on her mental health.]
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. The Female Poets of America. New York: James Miller, 1873. 28-29. [Griswold traces the stages of Bleecker’s poetry from playful, in early marriage, to peaceful, despite her husband’s work-related absence, to anxious, for her husband’s captivity, to mourning, for the deaths of her loved ones, to her eventual return home to Tomhanick. He punctuates each personal stage with poetic representatives of her changing style and moods.]
Harris, Sharon M. Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005. 80-130. [Thoroughly detailing the lives and works of Ann Eliza Bleecker and her daughter Margaretta Bleecker Faugeres, as well as other early American women writers, Harris illustrates the impact of the Revolutionary war upon women of the time and explores the subjects of cultural unraveling, race relations, and the development and breakdown of the law through the writings of early American women.]
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“Ann Eliza Bleecker, Two Poems (1793).” Copyright 2006 Lindsay Kennedy. This text was prepared to fulfill a critical edition assignment offered in “Early American Literature,” a graduate-level seminar taught by Jon Miller at The University of Akron in the Spring of 2006. Please note, this is not peer-reviewed work. License: You are free and encouraged to copy and distribute this work under the following conditions: 1. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 2. Any reuse or distribution must preserve this copyright, license, version, and citation information. 3. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Version: First edition (May 2006). This document is, was created with, or contains the full text of a PDF file published by a website, The Akron Heron: Materials of American Literature. Please visit akronheron.com for possible corrections or improvements, which may appear in later editions of this file. Suggested citation: Ann Eliza Bleecker, “Two Poems (1793).” Ed. Lindsay Kennedy. The Akron Heron: Materials of American Literature from Jon Miller at The University of Akron no. 7 (May 2006): 3p. [Add date accessed and URL accessed].
