Anne Bradstreet: Flesh and Spirit

Bradstreet uses the image of two sisters to illustrate the stuggle between virture and sin, “Of flesh was call’d who had her eye/on worldly wealth and vanity/the other spirit who did rear/her thoughts unto a hi

Spirit knows that to indulge in these pleasures is to accept sin, which is nearly fatal to her spiritual aims to one day be with God. Spirit responds to her sister, “Disturb no more my settled heart,/For I have vow’d (and so will do)/Thee as a foe still to pursue,/And combat with thee will and must/Until I see the laid in th’ dust.” Spirit sees this struggle as one that can only end with one of them “laid in th’ dust,” and she is determined with her “settled heart” not to concede to her sin. This is a fatal struggle, “Sister we are, yea twins we be,/Yet deadly feud twixt thee and me.” The allusion to the struggle being one that is fatal, coincides with the idea that all humans are fatally flawed. In this poem, Flesh is the representation of this fatal flaw found in all people.

Bradstreet further supported the idea of total depravity indicating that although the spirit is supposed to represent virtue, she herself had at one time fallen victim to the manipulations of the flesh. In her rebuttal to flesh, spirit says “How oft thy slave hast thou made me/when I believed whatever thou hast said/and never had more cause of woe/than when I did what thou bads’t do.” She remembers that the only thing she obtained by following the advice of the flesh was pain and woe. She has realized that she only has sin to gain from having faith in the flesh and not in God. She has essentially learned her lesson and has realized the righteous path. She says “I’ll stop mine ears at these thy charms/and count them for my deadly harms.” She knows that the flesh is that fatal flaw and sin she needs to avoid and that her “ambition lies above.” She has come to realize that the pleasures of the world and meaningless in comparison to the joy of the divine, she does not desire these pleasures, “nor fancy vain at which I snatch/but reach at things that are so high/beyond thy dull capacity.” She reaches beyond the common understanding of human sin.

Bradstreet successfully uses these two opposing entities, these sisters, to illustrate the idea of total depravity, to touch upon the idea of regeneration and the puritan hope to one day dwell with God. The drastic seperation between the good sister, the spirit, representing the virtue and soul of a person and the bad sister, the flesh, representing the body and hum

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