Puritan Poetry

Anne Bradstreet

Essential Questions

What is inversion? How does Bradstreet use inversion to

achieve meter and rhyme?

Anne Bradstreet

First American writer, an English womanWhile we have writings before

Bradstreet, she is the first producer of what we call literature.

In 1630, Anne journeyed across the Atlantic aboard the Arbella to the part of New England around Salem that would become known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Style

Unlike the ornate “high style” popular in England at the time, the Puritan plain style used simple sentences and common words from everyday speech.

The plain style contained few or no classical allusions, Latin quotations, or elaborate figures of speech.

Plain Style

The plain style, Puritans felt, was much more effective in revealing God’s truth than the ornate style.

Despite the fact that the style used by Puritan writers now seems hard to read, it was once considered simple and direct in the 1600s.

Bradstreet’s Use of Plain Style

Although Anne Bradstreet’s “Upon the Burning of Our House” contains some figurative language, it is a good example of the plain style.

Plain Style vs. Ornate Style

Ornate Style Plain Style

Shabby but beloved, my shoes house my feet as they carry me from place to place.

My shoes are old, brown, kind of worn-out, but comfortable for walking around in.

The pen spills ink-blood as it brings words to life.

The pen is a blue ballpoint with a leaky tip.

Inversion

Bradstreet also used inversion.Inversion is the reversal of the normal

word order in a sentence or phrase.Write this in – it is not in your notes.

Inversion

For example, Bradstreet writes “I wakened was with thund’ring noise” instead of “I was wakened with thund’ring noise.”

Inversion is often used to make a poem’s rhyme scheme work out or to maintain a fixed meter.

Rhyme

Rhyme is the repetition of vowel sounds in accented syllables and succeeding syllables. Types of rhyme include end rhyme internal rhyme approximate, or slant, rhyme

Rhyme Scheme

End rhyme refers to rhyming words at the end of lines.End rhymes usually follow a regular pattern

within a poem, called its rhyme scheme.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink ANor slumber nor a roof against the rain; B Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink AAnd rise and sink and rise and sink again . .B

Rhythm and Meter

Rhythm is the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in language. Rhythm occurs naturally in all forms of spoken and written language.

Meter is the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.

One meter commonly used in poetry is iambic meter—an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.