Analysis Of Anne Bradstreet’S Poem The Author To Her Book
In this great work of art, Anne Bradstreet refers to a lot of things, to describe how she feels about her writing. In the poem “The Author to Her Book”, she talks about how beautifully she feels when she writes, but also how she feels when she is going over the words she has written. Although, she was well-known, she still felt uncomfortable in her own works. Bradstreet uses a multitude of metaphors to express the ways other felt about her work, versus how she felt about it. The contradiction in her own thoughts makes it harder for Bradstreet to appreciate what she writes. The poem goes into detail about the ideas she had, and how they changed her mentality about what she writes.
Anne Bradstreet was an English writer who gained the attention due to the amount of money her family had, also because of her husband,Simon Bradstreet. Most people were also stunned by her ability to birth eight children. Born Anne Dudley, she always had a passion to write. She lived to write, only condition was that she did not want for others to see it. Bradstreet would often find herself throwing away everything she wrote because she was very discontent with what she wrote. One of her most famous works was “The Author to Her Book” , in this poem she uses a series of metaphors and similes to efficiently show how she truly feels about her writing. This is important because, this poem was her response to her writing being published without her consent. Although she established a better social status because of it, she still did not approve of it.
In the poem, “The Author to Her Book”, she refers to her ideas as “ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain”, this implies that when she writes, her ideas come to life. She then says that her dreams are snatched by friends. Bradstreet says “Who thee abroad, exposed to public view” , this is where she talks about her poem being published without her consent. She was more upset because she was insecure about her writing and didn’t want it to be seen by outsiders. This is important because the action of her brother in law publishing without her permission lead up to the making of one of her greatest and most famous works.
Although this is the case, Bradstreet still was very not pleased with her writings. Bradstreet says “I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet. . ”. She says this because when she was writing she would modify and edit just for it ro sound like it made sense. She says “ I washed thy face ,but more defects I saw. . ”. She says this because she felt as if even though she was fixing one thing, something else would pop up. This made it challenging for her to accept anything she wrote. The fact that she was not satisfied with what she was writing was a very hinduring situation.
Bradstreet allowed her own inner negative thoughts to stop her from sharing her gift and her passion with the people around her, and even the world. She tends to refer to her thoughts as her children almost as if she is mothering and taking care of them. She says that what she had in mind was not at all what came onto the paper. This gave her a very gloomy mindset. She felt as though people would look at her writing the same way she died.
