Anne Bradstreet is known as the first puritan woman to write english verse in the American colonies. Bradstreet’s poems were inspired by Puritan women like herself, and about her life. In one of her most popular poems The Author to Her Book, which is written in a narrative style, she tells about the time when she was betrayed by her friends, by publishing her work to the public. The poem talks about how her published work made her feel insecure about what she wrote.
In this poem Bradstreet seems to have a series of mixed emotions towards her life and the things she has done. By writing about her emotions she channels them by illustrating her fears through a series of metaphors. The controlling metaphor of the poem contributes most to her attitude about the betrayal. Anne uses a lot of very strong and powerful metaphors to express how she truly feels towards her friends and the situation that they put her through. The most important one in the essay is the comparison of her to a mother and the poetry as her child.
She described her writings as her child and how the criticism hurts so much as if the poem would have grown inside of her and as if she had raised it to be perfect but it was still being judged because of its flaws. When reading it is also noticeable that she isn’t fond of her self. It’s easy to hide her flaws, but not as easy with the child because everyone would see it and ask about it because it came from her. That is why the metaphor that she uses gives her a negative and angry attitude.
To illustrate the comparison that she uses, she used birth-related wording such as ‘Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain’ to show the relationship between writers and their books and poetry. Bradstreet’s attitude towards her writing is similar to the attitude she has toward herself in her mind. In the second line of the poem, Bradstreet continues to say, ‘who after birth didst by my side remain,’ that reveals another connection to this poem’s controlling metaphor of birth and the close, yet difficult relationship between an author and her work.
In lines four through fourteen, Bradstreet exposes her feelings about her piece through the metaphorical child. This is yet another example of how the metaphor exposes her attitude towards her works and the betrayal that she experienced when her friends exposed her writing. Anne Bradstreet felt lots of betrayal when her friends decided to share her poetry with the public. She used her following poetry to explain her feelings and discuss how the betrayal impacted her. She used a metaphor to compare her to a mother and her works to a child to show its flaws. This contributed to her disgusted attitude and made it one of her most popular poems.
