Anne Bradstreet's Poem 'The Prologue'

The first passage I chose was the fifth stanza of Bradstreet’s poem, “The Prologue”. I thought she portrayed a powerful image of how she felt about women’s accomplishments and achievements being overlooked, undermined, and not appreciated by a patriarchal society. The first two lines, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue, who says my hand a needle better fits” paints her reality that many people deeply believed that women belonged with either a needle or a spoon in one hand and a baby in the other. The lines “If what I do prove well, it won’t advance; They’ll say it stol’n, or else it was by chance” wrap up the stanza. This stanza truly brought the subject of women’s oppression alive to me and personalized it for this one woman. It’s amazing that she dealt with these realities in the 1600s, and yet there are still millions of women today whose realities have not changed, more than 400 years later. …show more content…
In it, she talks about the critics of her poems when they were released to the public without her knowledge. She writes, “They blemishes amend, if so I could: I washed they face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw”. This moved me because no matter what she did or wrote, there were always people who disagreed and criticized her work and her ideas. I relate to this feeling because sometimes I feel like no matter what I do, someone will always disagree or be unhappy with me. I’ve had to learn to not care what others think of me or my actions, because trying to please the world will ruin my own sense of self. I can imagine it’d be exceptionally hard for Bradstreet to live in this time period, have her personal works roaming the world “’mongst vulgars” without her consent, and deal with criticism and blatant dislike for her