The Author To Her Book Ap Prompt

Writers devote all their sweat, tears and blood into books, as they aspire for it to be the best thing they have written. In Anne Bradstreet’s poem, “The Author to Her Book”, she discusses the complex processes of creating a book and compares its difficulty to raising an actual child. The speaker is at battle with herself, as she constantly struggles to appreciate and love her book, but is ashamed of its imperfections. Bradstreet utilizes an image of raising a baby to highlight her dissatisfaction with the publishing of her writings. The parallels of “book and baby” Bradstreet creates conveys the embarrassment she feels because of what she has “raised”. Thus, through the use of a controlling metaphor the speaker successfully expresses her internal …show more content…
Bradstreet has completely contrasting and conflicting emotions throughout the entire poem; as she criticizes on one hand, and sympathizes on the other. Right from the beginning of the sonnet, Bradstreet criticizes her writings and deems it as an “ill-formed offspring.” Bradstreet starts her sonnet by calling the book an “offspring”, which gives it a sense of life and complexity that readers would not otherwise get from a plain book. The fact that she views it as "ill-formed" could denote how she is embarrassed, or even ashamed of her own creation. However, on the following line she displays an emotion of love when she exclaims, “Who after birth didst by my side remain”, which highlights the motherly love she has towards her writing. Her linkage between a book and a child successfully portrays the intimate yet complex emotions that come out of writing a book. …show more content…
She once again compares her book to a child as a “rambling brat”, and is embarrassed because its “rags” and trudging bothered her. The book is portrayed to be like a child who wears rags, and it symbolizes how the book is unpolished and dirty. She continually “washed thy face” in an attempt to refine her book and did not abandon it because it was her own. A mother may try her best to deal with her child's imperfections, much like how the speaker shows resentment yet loyalty towards her book’s imperfections. The speaker was unsatisfied with the published work and deemed it unfinished, so she cared for it in acts of washing, rubbing and stretching. The speaker’s feelings of annoyance contrast her feelings of affection, much like a mother would have more than one feeling for raising her child. But, the speaker shows love towards the book because no matter how ugly it is, she is still its “mother”. This ultimately shows that she considers her book and her feelings are very similar to what a mother may feel for their child, as many mothers develop complex emotions for their child. Thus, the use of metaphor allows readers to truly understand her complex range of emotions for creating a book by relating it to a