Puritan Poetry

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Puritan Poetry

• Anne Bradstreet

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Essential Questions

• What is inversion?
• How does Bradstreet use inversion to achieve
  meter and rhyme?

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Anne Bradstreet

• First American writer, an English woman
• While 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.

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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.

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Plain Style

• The plain style, Puritans felt, was much more
  effective in revealing Gods 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.

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Bradstreets Use of Plain Style

• Although Anne Bradstreets Upon the Burning of
  Our House contains some figurative language, it
  is a good example of the plain style.

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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.
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Inversion

• Bradstreet also used inversion.
• Inversion is the reversal of the normal word
  order in a sentence or phrase.

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Inversion

• For example, Bradstreet writes I wakened was
  with thundring noise instead of I was wakened
  with thundring noise.
• Inversion is often used to make a poems rhyme
  scheme work out or to maintain a fixed meter.

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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

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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
A Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain B
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
A And rise and sink and rise and sink again . .B
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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
  meteran unstressed syllable followed by a
  stressed syllable.