Verses upon the Burning of our House

It is a matter of historic record (and the first-generation Puritans, aware of the cosmic import of their mission, were meticulous record-keepers) that the home of Simon and Anne Bradstreet was, in fact, destroyed by a fire on July 10, 1666. That reality makes it precarious to appropriate fire as a symbol. After all, the narrative of the house reduced to ashes was not some decision made by an architect-poet to create a poem. The fire was real. Its destruction was real.

But within the Puritan vision nothing is simply real, and fire carries for Bradstreet the weight of Christian symbolism. From the Old Testament narratives of Exodus—when God appeared to Moses as a burning bush and as a pillar of fire to light the way of the Jewish faithful out of Egypt—to the account of the first Pentecost in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles—when the Holy Spirit manifested itself in the form of tongues of fire that descended onto the heads of the apostles—fire had signaled God’s presence. The heat symbolizes the physical presence of God, while the radiant light signals the illumination of God’s wisdom.

Similarly, Bradstreet translates her harrowing and traumatic experience into a manifestation of God’s presence, even as she watches the fire consume her house and feels the waves of heat. The housefire, in destroying all the distractions of her material goods, purifies her life and focuses her attention where it should have been all along. In this emotional evolution, fire in Christian wisdom literature also can represent the dramatic intervention of God’s wrath, a sign of displeasure over the apostasy of His people, most notably the firestorm he sends down on the sinful towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. That is the lesson Bradstreet takes to heart: The loving and merciful God sends down fire to purify Bradstreet herself.