Review Of Anne Bradstreet's 'Author To Her Book'

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Recommended: Anne Bradstreet in memory of my grandchildren

Author to Her Book Writing poetry can be a deeply personal process. Through hard work, a poem is born, and for better or for worse the author is responsible for it. Author to Her Book is a poem by Anne Bradstreet. This poem is about her book Tenth Muse: lately sprung up in America that was published without her approval. (Academy of American Poets). Anne Bradstreet beautifully demonstrates the relationship that exists between an artist and her work in the poem. In the poem she refers to the book as her child, kidnapped and exploring in a world. In the first line Bradstreet refers to the book as an “ill formed offspring of feeble brain” (Bradstreet. Line 1.) She has no confident in her work and apologies to anyone who might have read her work …show more content…

Line 3) away by friends “less wise than true,” (Bradstreet. Line 3) and then “exposed to public view” (Bradstreet. Line 4) before it had a chance to mature in her care. Bradstreet’s feels betrayed. Lines five and six illustrate her published poem as dressed in “rags” (Bradstreet. Line 5). She knows that the “errors were not lessened” (Bradstreet. Line 6), and feels frustration at her lack of control over the situation. This could be compared to the embarrassment a mother might feel if her child were taken to a fashion show in dirty rags before she had a chance to properly groom and dress …show more content…

As in the lines: “And for thy mother, she alas, is poor, which caused her thus to send thee out of door” (Academy of American Poets. Lines 23-24). She is clutching to a child that had to leave before she was set to let go. Bradstreet writes that she "washed" (Bradstreet. Line 13) the face of the book, meaning she made attempts at improving its appearance and content, but in "rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw," (Bradstreet. Line 15). The use of these metaphors describing her actions upon the book certainly personify the work as a child with an "irksome" (Bradstreet. Line 10) face and "hobbling" (Bradstreet. Line 16) legs that are metaphors also for the sequence of plot events. The last line contains both personification and metaphor as the child/book is sent out of the door, meaning it is put out for

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