Ann Eliza Bleecker

Ann Eliza Bleecker Poems

Ann Eliza Bleecker Biography

Bleecker was born in October 1752 in New York City to Margarette van Wyck and Brandt Schuyler, a prosperous merchant, and at a young age she acquired a local reputation for her precocious poetic talent. She often composed “extempore” in the midst of company and at the request of friends. Her poetry ranged from the sophisticated and witty to the satirical and sentimental, as illustrated by the samples in the Heath Anthology. . At seventeen she married John J. Bleecker, and the couple settled on a bucolic estate in Tomhanick, a town eighteen miles north of Albany where John Bleecker had inherited land. Geographically isolated and far from the familiar urban context of her family and friends, Bleecker addressed all her work to friends to alleviate her loneliness. The move to Tomhanick represented the first in a series of losses that seemed to Bleecker to characterize her life. Her involvement in her grief suggests that she was self-consciously fashioning a poetic identity that drew heavily on the era’s “sentimental” virtues. The central event that provoked Bleecker’s melancholia occurred early in the American Revolution, in the summer of 1777. Threatened by the approaching British troops of General John Burgoyne, who led an expedition from Canada against the colonies, the Bleecker family was forced to flee on foot to Albany with their two daughters, six-year-old Margaretta and the infant Abella. In the course of their journey, Abella died of dysentery. They continued on and were joined by Bleecker’s mother in Red Hook, who also died on the journey. This death was followed by that of Bleecker’s sister, Caty Swits, who had joined them for their return trip to Tomhanick. Every generation in Bleecker’s supportive circle of women had been devastated. Four years later, in 1781, John Bleecker was kidnapped by a band of wandering British soldiers. Though he was soon returned to his family, the trauma of the event led Bleecker to miscarry. From that summer in 1777 until her death in 1783, Bleecker suffered from intense bouts of depression, and maternal loss figures prominently in much of her writing. Maria Kittle contains many typical features of the Indian captivity narrative: it presents graphic scenes of violence, depicts Native Americans as treacherous savages who mercilessly slay infants and women, and recounts the hardships of Maria’s journey as a captive. Yet in the last third of the narrative, Maria Kittle diverges from the genre by representing Maria’s experiences in Canada after she has been redeemed. Indeed, the story of her captivity carries less emotional weight than this final section in which three colonial women tearfully recount their tales of maternal loss to a sympathetic group of British and French women. Significantly, these stories bear a number of similarities to Bleecker’s experience of losing her own daughter as a result of the invasion of anti-insurrectionary British troops. In transposing her tale of maternal loss onto the Indian captivity narrative, Bleecker expresses the desire for a redemptive community of women who achieve a degree of agency through the acts of telling, hearing, and responding “appropriately” to stories. Yet this agency relies on the racist conventions of Indian captivity narratives that demonize Native Americans, and Bleecker deploys the powerful rhetorical strategies of sentimentalism in the construction of a national identity. After her death in 1783, her daughter, Margarette Faugères, also a poet (see her poetry in this anthology), published a significant portion of Bleecker’s work, which included twenty-three letters, thirty-six poems, an unfinished short historical novel, The History of Henry and Ann, and The History of Maria Kittle. This material first appeared in The New-York Magazine in 1790 and 1791 and then in a collection entitled The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker in 1793. That Maria Kittle was republished separately in 1797 attests to its popularity.)

The Best Poem Of Ann Eliza Bleecker

Hymn

JESUS CHRIST! regard my anguish,
Oh! commiserate my pain;
Bid my soul no longer languish,
Bid my spirit not complain.
'T is my comfort thou'rt omniscient,
All my griefs are known to thee,
Saviour! thou art all sufficient,
To relieve a wretch like me.
Now thy clemency discover,
Give my wounded soul repose,
E'er my transient life is over,
E'er my sorrowing eyelids close.
By thy passion I conjure thee,
By thy painful sweat of blood,
Let my sighing come before thee,
Seal my pardon now with God.

Ann Eliza Bleecker Comments