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).