In Anne Bradstreet’s poem, “The Author To Her Book”, she compares the poems in her book of poetry The Tenth Muse to awkward, disheveled children, through an extended metaphor. She uses personification and the extended metaphor to express her feelings of betrayal after discovering the publication of her poems without her consent or knowledge. Throughout the poem, the speaker chides her unkempt children and even attempts to fix them up, before sending them out into the world. Bradstreet and her poems are much like the mother and her children, which is supported by the text. She writes, “Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain/ Who after birth dids’t by my side remain/ Till snatched from thence by my friends…/ Who thee abroad exposed to public view”. (1-4)
By personifying her poems as “ill-formed offspring” she reference her Puritan upbringing. Puritan culture is notorious for being extremely anti-art and anti-woman. Bradstreet’s status as both a poet and a woman make it necessary to hide her work, or “offspring”, from the public eye. Line three and the title alludes to the …show more content…
Her conflicted feelings are a direct result from her Puritan background; she is happy to see her work out in the public, yet feels ashamed of her errors and for having produced them in the first place. In lines seven and nine, “At thy return my blushing was not small/ I cast thee unfit for light/” (7,9), the speaker expresses great shame towards her children. Bradstreet’s poems were not intended for the public. She eventually gets over herself, evident in lines nine and ten, “Yet being my own, at length affection would/ They blemishes amend if so I could” (9-10). She changes the meter (Line 15) and dresses up her prose (line 17) to make her work match other poems from her time period. Even with all of her corrections, Lines 22-24 reveal that she is still ashamed of her
By personifying her poems as “ill-formed offspring” she reference her Puritan upbringing. Puritan culture is notorious for being extremely anti-art and anti-woman. Bradstreet’s status as both a poet and a woman make it necessary to hide her work, or “offspring”, from the public eye. Line three and the title alludes to the …show more content…
Her conflicted feelings are a direct result from her Puritan background; she is happy to see her work out in the public, yet feels ashamed of her errors and for having produced them in the first place. In lines seven and nine, “At thy return my blushing was not small/ I cast thee unfit for light/” (7,9), the speaker expresses great shame towards her children. Bradstreet’s poems were not intended for the public. She eventually gets over herself, evident in lines nine and ten, “Yet being my own, at length affection would/ They blemishes amend if so I could” (9-10). She changes the meter (Line 15) and dresses up her prose (line 17) to make her work match other poems from her time period. Even with all of her corrections, Lines 22-24 reveal that she is still ashamed of her