Bradstreet’s ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666’’ swings like a pendulum between Bradstreet’s Puritan beliefs and her deep emotional turmoil regarding the loss of her home. While it is tempting to try to assess whether or not Bradstreet’s sorrow is successfully mitigated or addressed by her faith, such an exercise would not…
Tag: Anne Bradstreet
Upon the Burning of Our House – Tone – Rhyme Scheme – Literary Devices
Lyric Poetry ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House’’ is considered a lyric poem. A lyric poem is one in which the poet explores personal feelings and thoughts rather than telling a story. Typically short in length, lyric poems do not necessarily adhere to any formal structure. Modern lyric poems may be written in unmetered, unrhymed…
Upon the Burning of Our House: Themes
Loss Bradstreet’s ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House’’ is concerned primarily with the poet’s great sense of loss, along with her attempt to mediate this pain through her faith in God. Throughout the middle third of the poem, Bradstreet offers an emotional itemization of her material losses and suggests the psychological toll such losses have…
Upon the Burning of Our House: Summary
Lines 1–6 Bradstreet’s ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666’’ is not formally broken into stanzas. (A stanza is a unit of poetry, or a grouping of lines that divides the poem in the same way that a paragraph divides prose. Bradstreet’s poem appears on the page as a fifty-four-line poem without any…
Love in Human Relationships: A Survey of three Literary Works
The three literary pieces being referred for this essay all deal with human emotions, especially that of love (or lack thereof). But their portrayal is far from homogeneous. In the poem To My Dear And Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet, there is little doubt as to the total and unconditional love displayed by the lady…