For the late Julie Harris —
By slow and carefully modulated steps Bradford's narrative
has brought his community of separatists to the place he
calls Cape Harbor… where, face-to-face with the bleak
and wintry reduction that is his image for American space,
he finds himself stopped, able to do nothing but come to
an astonished pause. The final step, that of imaginative
crossing into the land that lies before them, remains
beyond the power of narrative to take. Narrative falters, and
finding his journey advanced to an "odd Fork in Being's Road"
and himself nothing so much as an "empty spirit / In vacant
space" (to adopt apt phrases from Dickinson and Stevens…),
Bradford requires the sublime if he is to continue moving
forward: separation becomes exaltation as it becomes
manifest that only an influx of "the Spirit of God and His
grace" can have permitted the community to survive its
passage to the limit depicted.
— David Laurence, "William Bradford's American Sublime,"
PMLA , Vol. 102, No. 1, 1987, pp. 55-65