Mother Nature VS God

If I'm going to be honest, Anne Bradstreet is the most interesting writer that I have come upon so far. When she and her family traveled across the Atlantic to make a new life in America, as a Protestant, her life was filled with enormous changes and transitions that many people did not usually experience in the 1600's. It then makes sense for this well-educated woman to record all of the tumbling feelings inside her in a form that she found comforting. Trying to make a new life in a new land, with their ostracized religion, result in her poems and writing to be centered around religion (mainly sin and salvation) and nature.

I was incredibly entranced by her 33 verse "Contemplations" where she struggles with the competing ideas and rules for eternal life and the natural world which she adores so much. She found herself very commonly immersing herself into nature and the earth, but then feeling as though heaven should not be another sphere while she was so happy down below. Material things, in regards to nature and not man-made things, left her amazed and in love with a world when her religion constantly sought to take those joys away. Salvation then became incredibly important to her. "Contemplations" goes from talking of the sun, to the trees, to the rivers, to the fish and oceans, to the birds and their endless skies. Life for men is so fleeting while the life for the hundred year old Elm tree is stoic and renewed each spring. There were some parts where she spoke of the unfairness attached to men not being able to renew themselves, but being forced to move on into God's grace...but then she back-tracks her thoughts. No part of nature, plants or creatures alike, have the chance to have immortal souls. She loves God, and believes in an afterlife, and after contemplating all the different dynamics in a life she does once again pronounce herself faithful to her religious ideals. I have read many other authors, and have written a sonnet myself, on the topic of God versus Mother Nature so this poem really stood to me in a great way.