Has it really been almost 400 years?

Reading Anne Bradstreet this week in light of Sarah Palin's nomination gave me an interesting context from which to experience our country's first poet of either gender. Writing during the 1600s in the Puritan colony of Boston, Bradstreet was disparaged for publishing her work, told that in her hand "a needle better fits" than a pen. Her critics had to be assured that she was fulfilling her duties as a wife and mother to eight children. In fact, she was incredibly devoted to her family, as "To My Dear and Loving Husband" attests.

I was particularly struck by a passage in "The Flesh and the Spirit," her allegorical conversation between the two as sisters. Flesh cannot understand how Spirit lives, and so the latter tries to explain:

How I do live, thou need’st not scoff,
For I have meat thou know’st not of.
The hidden Manna I do eat;
The word of life, it is my meat.
My thoughts do yield me more content
Than can thy hours in pleasure spent.
Nor are they shadows which I catch,
Nor fancies vain at which I snatch
But reach at things that are so high,
Beyond thy dull Capacity.
Eternal substance I do see
With which enriched I would be.
Mine eye doth pierce the heavens and see
What is Invisible to thee.

Spirit continues her indictment, ending with a superb couplet:

If I of heaven have my fill,
Take thou the world and all that will.