READING POETRY

Begin by reading the poem aloud. Poetry is rhythmic; your enjoyment of

the poem and your understanding of its meaning is enhanced when you

read it aloud.

• Pay attention to punctuation. Pause where there are commas or

periods or semi-colons, etc. The end of a line is not necessarily the

end of a sentence or thought.

• Pay attention to who or what pronouns within the poem refer to.

When the pronoun “thee” is used throughout Bradstreet’s “The

Author to Her Book,” to what is she referring?

ANNE BRADSTREET

Read carefully the brief and very informative biographical introduction on Anne

Bradstreet. From a well-educated family, she was significantly better educated

than most women of the 1600s. Over the course of her life, Bradstreet produced

“the first sustained body of poetry in British North America” (217). Typically,

women writers of that time faced formidable obstacles. Some questioned whether

women had the intellectual capacity to be writers. In the colonies, writing was not

considered appropriate for women. Both family woman and ambitious poet,

Bradstreet was a striking exception to the norm. The introduction concludes by

noting that Bradstreet’s early work contained many philosophical poems and many

public occasion poems. By contrast, her later poetry was more intimate,

highlighting her love for children and grandchildren, revealing a passionate love

for her husband, and providing a glimpse into particular challenges she faced as a

woman poet.

One of Bradstreet’s favorite poetic devices is the controlling metaphor. A

metaphor is a comparison in which something is described as being something

else, rather than being “like” something else. The purpose of metaphors is usually

to help the reader better understand something abstract or unfamiliar through

comparison/analogy to something more concrete or familiar. An extended

metaphor is a metaphor that’s extended past a single phrase/sentence. An entire

work can be premised on stretching out a metaphor, such that the metaphor

dominates or “controls” the poem, making it a controlling metaphor. We’ll see

examples of this in a few of Bradstreet’s poems; “The Author to Her Book” is the

best example.

What extended metaphor does Bradstreet use in “The Author to her Book”

(236)? Note that throughout the poem, she describes her book, published without

her knowledge before she thought it was ready, as a poor, disabled child — “ill-

fated offspring of my feeble brain” (l.1) – “ that she has tried to make ready for

public scrutiny. See especially ll. 8-14 where Bradstreet begins to detail

metaphorically her efforts to fix the book she calls “My rambling brat” (l. 8): “Thy

blemishes to amend, if so I could” (l. 12).

What extended metaphor does Bradstreet use in “In Reference to Her

Children, 23 June 1659”?

“To My Dear and Loving Husband” (237) is a sonnet that may have been

written to her husband during one of his frequent absences on colony business. A

sonnet is a very formally structured poem of usually 14 lines with iambic

pentameter or 10 syllables in each line. Sonnets have precise rhyme schemes. The

rhyme scheme for this sonnet is AA BB CC DD EE FF. Pause and consider the

challenge of expressing yourself this eloquently and clearly in such a highly

structured form.

The number of poems that Bradstreet has dedicated to grandchildren who

have died in infancy or when very young is testimony to the grim reality of infant

mortality in 17th century colony.

The prose letter “To My Dear Children” is striking for its candor and for the

types of questions she asks. The letter is the type of meditation described in the

Introduction: “Like any good Puritan, Bradstreet routinely examined her

conscience and wrestled to make sense of events in relation to a divine plan” (218).

What did Bradstreet want her children to know about her? She presents her life as

a spiritual journey, but also as a battle to hold on to her faith in God in the midst of

trails and tribulations. She hopes that the wisdom she has gained will be of some

help to her children.

Bradstreet tells her children of her periods of doubt with striking honesty:

Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures

many times by atheism how I could know whether there was a God. I never

saw any miracles to confirm me, and those which I read of, how did I know

but they were feigned? (248)

The following statement is particularly striking when you recall that Bradstreet was

part of a religious group that had moved to a distant and uncharted land because of

their adamant disapproval of Catholicism:

admit this be the true God whom we worship, and that be his word, yet why

may not the Popish religion be the right? They have the same God, the same

Christ, the same word. They only interpret it one way, we another. (248)