Remember how last year when I went to Nauvoo I was a model for a painter? He was painting the eminent men and women who appeared to President Woodruff in the St. George Temple. I became incredibly interested in this event, and although I haven’t thought of it every day, the event is something I have recalled a few times in the past months.

This week I was reading the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. I wrote about Anne Bradstreet today on my reading blog. Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan, a dedicated wife, and a free-thinker, as she balanced being a mother to eight with being a pioneer in a 1630s New England settlement and a talented poet in her own right.

“I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits.” (“The Prologue” stanza 5)

Yet, given the fact that she was a woman of faith, a Puritan woman at that, she also has numerous poems about faith. Just like you and me, she struggled to come to peace with her life struggles and her faith in the beyond. Take this sample from a poem she wrote just after her house burned down.

There’s wealth enough; I need no more.
Farewell, my pelf; farewell, my store.
The world no longer let me love;
My hope and Treasure lies above. (“Verses on the Burning of My House”)

Or maybe these thoughts of faith as she suffered from insomnia one night:

By night when others soundly slept
And hath at once both ease and Rest,
My waking eyes were open kept
And so to lie I found it best.

I sought him whom my Soul did Love,
With tears I sought him earnestly.
He bow’d his ear down from Above.
In vain I did not seek or cry.

My hungry Soul he fill’d with Good;
He in his Bottle put my tears,
My smarting wounds washt in his blood,
And banisht thence my Doubts and fears.

What to my Saviour shall I give
Who freely hath done this for me?
I’ll serve him here whilst I shall live
And Loue him to Eternity. (“By Night While Other’s Slept”)

At any rate, as I read her struggles of faith, I felt the same things I felt when I have been doing family history. I felt she was right next to me as I read her poems of faith. I felt that the veil was incredibly thin. And I had a distinct impression that she was one of those eminent women who appeared to Wilford Woodruff.

I looked on all the sites I looked on last time. I could not find Anne Dudley or Anne Bradstreet on any of the lists. So I looked her up in New Family Search. I found that her baptisms were done in September 1879 in the St. George Temple. It was two years and a half after the eminent men and women appeared to Wilford Woodruff. Maybe she was not one of those who appeared on that day in 1877, but somehow her name got put in the system at the same time. (Those were the first baptisms for the dead performed in a temple, as the St. George Temple was the first operating temple.)

Bradstreet’s poems show that she already believed the gospel two hundred years before it was restored. Such good poetry. Read it at Anne Bradstreet.com.

What are you reading for National Poetry Month?

By the way, can you tell which face is based on mine in Bedard’s image? I don’t know for sure, of course, but there’s one that I think looks rather like me. The painting is almost done and so beautiful! See here.