and re-summarize what I said. I hope to add some additional information so
it's not entirely repeated information. The quote I chose for Anne
Bradstreet is a quote that she devotes to her husband. If ever two were
one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. This shows
a very, very personal and intimate point in Anne Bradstreet's life. And
what we're going to see in Anne Bradstreet, Anne Bradstreet is the first
female poet in America. When I published the notes, I wrote in brackets the
first poet published in America because actually there weren't that many
things going on in America in terms of literature. Most of the writings
were the type of writings that we've seen from William Bradford in this
case. He's in the Massachusetts colony. In the Massachusetts colony, Anne
Bradstreet's father is going to be one of the governors and Bradstreet's
husband is going to be another one of the governors. So last week we were
talking about the connection of Puritans with power. And this is a perfect
example of how directly connected Puritans are going to be to the centers
of power. They're going to be the preachers. They're going to control the
churches. They're going to control, from that point of controlling the
churches, they're going to control the universities. And they're going to
control the centers of power. They're going to be the governors. They're
going to be the people in charge of managing these colonies that are highly
driven by religion in these first hundred years or so of the existence of
the colonies. Especially the colonies that were overloaded with Puritans
coming, from England in droves to avoid the religious persecution that we
were talking about during the first units. In the case of Anne Bradstreet,
we have a daughter that is brought aboard a boat called the Arbella to
America. And therefore she is an English citizen that is a settler in the
newfound land. She abides to the Puritan principles. And one of the
paradoxes, that we're going to have at the beginning of the course, and
we're going to have to look for an explanation is, if everything was so
centered about in religion, why from the first three authors that we see
that have to do with Puritanism, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, and
Mary Rawlinson, why are two of them women? The role that was limited to
women was very, very specific. Women were expected in Puritan culture to
be, to not have any, to not grant any importance to education and to grant
importance to bringing up a family and marrying well. That idea of marrying
well was key and center to Puritan culture because either you married well
or you ran out of opportunities. This is not something that is only from
this century. Whoever's read Jane Austen, for example, knows that that is
exactly the problem that English society had. There were a ton of
possibilities allotted to men, and there was only one possibility allotted
to women, which was to marry well or to suffer the consequences. In the
cases that we're going to see in this course, we're going to see the
importance of marriage as a deciding factor only in the case of women, in
the case of men, it's never going to be a factor. It's a non-factor. We're
never going to talk about the marriage of our male authors, except in terms
to compare the importance of their wives in their work to maybe talk about
some anecdote that is connected to how they started to write, things like
that. But in the case of female writers, their marital status is paramount.
It's fundamental for understanding the author. In this case, Anne
Bradstreet was married to a powerful man, proceeded from a powerful family.
Her father was governor of the Massachusetts colony. Her husband succeeded
her father as governor of the Massachusetts colony, and she had eight
children. The oddity in the case of Anne Bradstreet was that she wrote
poems for the delight of her family, something that there's always going to
be. If we have to use one word to define Anne Bradstreet, it's that of
paradox. It's the conflict between what is the expectations of a Puritan
wife and a Puritan mother, and what is the reality of her life. It was not
well seen for a woman to write, and it was less well seen for a woman to
publish. So, how did her work see the light? Her work was published
ultimately because according to the common understanding, her
brother-in-law took the poems from her and published them without her
consent, without her explicit permission in London. And she was celebrated
as a poet that had, in the title of the book it says, that had sprung up in
America. And that is the title of her book of poems. At first there was a
collection of poems that was published without her consent, and afterwards
that set of poems was reviewed and extended, and her work was, the core of
her work that has reached our time, is the revised edition of her work. Her
poetry is very important because it follows all the standard, all the
classical standards, all the neoclassical standards of the time. She relies
heavily on her readings of Sidney and Spencer. She relies heavily on how
well she understood and read the classics, and therefore we have an
evolution of the poetry of the time, but from the perspective of a woman,
which is very important because it defined her choice of topic, her
perspective, the way that she confronted problems, and all of this with a
massive Puritan overtone to her poetry. So we're going to have to match
these two realities of how can this Puritan society that is so conservative
and has such a limited role for women accept that one of their own is
publishing and is writing with metaphors that sound so distant from the
didactic purpose and from the Puritan plain style, which are the two key
elements of Puritan writing. How can we connect that to the idea that her
poems were fairly successful, and she had the opportunity of even revising
and extending them. We're going to see how she tries to confront that
dilemma and whether she's successful or not is something that you'll have
to evaluate on your own. I was telling the students before we started
recording, and maybe some of you have come to the class afterwards or
you're watching this as a recording that Anne Bradstreet is the perfect
author to learn about poetry. If poetry is something that has always been a
problem, that has been intimidating, that instills fear when you have to
confront it, Anne Bradstreet is sufficiently her poetry is sufficiently
simple and well-structured and abiding to classical standards that it is
perfect training ground for learning the theory that you should know for
sure, not only for this poet but for all the poets that you have to
analyze. I know that in ECHES or whatever the name of the subject is of
English literature, it was called different when I was a student, you have
to read a lot of poetry and you're already expected to know or you have the
feeling that you're expected to know how to analyze that poetry. So, these
poems are very interesting because nothing is taken for granted and there
is a very solid reference in the study guide, especially in the study guide
but also in the course book that can help you understand the poems and
that's what we're going to do because this is a problem that I face every
year. I face students that are basically a bit scared of talking about
poetry because they want to sound as prepared as when they talk about prose
and that seems to be, their comfort zone seems to be prose but not seems to
be poetry in the majority of the cases. But before we continue, I'm going
to read from this book that I normally bring to class, Puritanism to
Postmodernism, a very brief introduction of the importance of Anne
Bradstreet in the global scheme of things and this information that is
partially collected in the textbook but I think it helps you to have like a
better global view and that's why I normally read from this book a few
paragraphs every day. An author that is the first major woman poet in
English language is Anne Bradstreet. Born in England, she sailed in 1630 on
the Arbella. Both her father and her husband by chance by whom she had
eight children were governors of Massachusetts Bay. But it is partly
because the poetry she produced between domestic duties and recurring bouts
of illness is not about great political, historical or theological matters
that she interests us. She didn't talk about the times that she lived. It's
a bit like when you read Jane Austen. There's a certain timelessness to her
work because she never deals with current affairs. She just leaves that in
the background and maybe there's a war, maybe there's some soldiers going
to war. You don't even know what war it is. You're just focused on the
events from the poet's point of view. All of her poetry is about her inner
world, this family world, this community world. And that's a bit what
Puritans were. They were their community. They were only worried, they were
pretty self-centered in their community, in their reality, in their
lifestyle. So the other factor that is surprising about Anne Bradstreet is
that she reached a very significant age for the time, something that was
out of the ordinary. She lived to the age of 60. That means that she
outlived several of her children and several of her grandchildren. You can
understand how painful it is for a mother to lose a son or a daughter. You
can even imagine how painful it is for a grandmother to lose a grandson or
a granddaughter. So part of her work is going to be about how she deals
with that pain and how she finds explanations to the death of innocent
children, which is a very, very important element. We're going to analyze
four poems. The author to her book, which is a famous extremely clear case
of apostrophe. What is apostrophe? Let me read from the study guide what
apostrophe is. In the study guide, you have an excellent glossary at the
end that means it's a list of terminology. Apostrophe in the A says a
figure of speech in which an animal, a thing, a place, an abstract quality,
an idea or a dead or absent person is addressed as if present or capable of
understanding. So what does she do in these poems? She writes to her poems.
She writes a poem about the poems. So this is like the mother of all of all
apostrophes. She's writing to her book of poems and she's writing it from a
mockingly apologetic tone. There's always going to be in female writing
during these first centuries a sense of apologetic writing like looking for
a good explanation for writing being a woman which is something that a man
would never do. A man would never do. Men felt empowered to write but women
far from being empowered had to sort of apologize or look for a good
explanation of why they were writing in the first place. So the author to
her book is a poem from the revised edition that was published I don't know
if I have the the exact dates of the revised version. Yes 1678 so her first
her first collection of poems was published in 1650. You see how we've
progressed in time over the first three units. 1608 is the first writing by
John Smith after which he wrote in 1616 1624 he published three works of
importance in 1630 we read about we learned about William Bradford's of
Plymouth Plantation and we moved forward 20 years all the way to 1650 for
the work that her brother-in-law decided to call the 10th Mews lately
sprung up in America and there is a there are some other adjectives added
later to the title that we'll talk about. In 1678 she wrote a revised
edition from that revised edition the first poem that we're going to read
is from that revised edition so take into consideration that there is no
chronological order in this set of poems the selection of poems is based on
the importance they have in order to understand poetry in the first case
and Anne Bradstreet's poetry in the second case so that's why these poems
are selected in particular. The author took her book which is example of
apostrophe to my dear and loving husband which is a sort of love letter
slash love poem to her husband which is very very unusual upon the burning
of our house on my dear grandchild Simon Bradstreet's okay so those are
those four poems are the poems that we're going to analyze we're going to
counter oppose neoclassical poetry with Puritan aesthetics how they match
or how they collide and how she managed to fit her this ornamented English
Renaissance style that is rich with metaphors and symbols into the Puritan
plain style framework how does that work so the next point that we're going
to talk about and it's another objective of this of this unit is to examine
these tensions between Bradstreet's public and private voice her public
voice is very clear the the poems for private voice what you read in
between the lines and poems and for this unit it's very important to know
how to read between the lines but in the case of the next poem that we're
going to analyze Phyllis Wheatley it's absolutely fundamental to analyze
that private voice that subversive tone that she has underlying the plain
text so you have the plain text on one hand and then you have this extra
reading this close analysis that leads you to a different conclusion that
there's a certain subversive tone every time we we write or we read about
women we're going to come to that conclusion that they're pioneers or
trailblazers but at the same time they're subversive because they're
breaking the rules women are not supposed to write it's not well seen for
women to write in the slides you posted it says she was a non-separatist
Puritan what does that mean non-separatist Puritans were the Puritans that
did not want to break with the Church of England but they wanted to reform
it that's what the non-separate Puritan means it's just a specific part of
Puritanism remember that anyway Julio that we're having we're having a huge
amount of people traveling year after year to the English colonies they're
becoming more prosperous they're becoming more of a reality and therefore
we're going to get all kinds of religions mixed and mingled but remember
what I said in the last class what is considered the official seed of the
American sentiment of the American dream of the manifest destiny I've seen
very interesting conversations in the forums I don't know if you read the
forums but it is completely my recommendation to read them to actively
participate if the general forums seem too big or too complicated or maybe
you feel a bit intimidated write in ours just write your answer to any
exploratory question go to one that you find easy to tackle and try to
provide your answer and let's see if we start a discussion I'll be that's a
delight when some of these classes when you get together and you have a
conversation that's I think that's when you really learn because you start
to ask yourself different questions going back to Julio's question the
amount of religious people that are going to go to America are not only
going to be Puritans in this case non-separatist Puritans which were
probably the less threatening for the English crown and probably the less
persecuted but other kinds of religion separatist Puritans that wanted to
break away with everything and other religions that were not purely
Calvinist like for example Quakers or other religions right now it's
probably one of the only places in the world the east coast of America some
areas of Pennsylvania some areas of Virginia some areas of Massachusetts
where you can still see people that live in a very very similar way to how
their great grandparents lived the Quakers are the most common case and
what that represents is the same type of religious life and life that had
to do with hard work and with having God at the center of all of their
activities that we see in Puritan culture everything revolves around the
idea of religion okay so everything that she writes has to have that point
of religion at the forefront because everything for God they don't do for
themselves they don't do for their family they don't do for anyone so from
a point of view of our current perspective our current mentality that kind
of life can seem sad or can seem unfulfilling because people were not
living to make one another happy they were living to be worthy of God's
grant of reaching of reaching heaven I don't know if I addressed your
question if you have any other further questions just let it rip in the
chat it's great to have your interaction that way I know there's not a
technical problem okay well the other thing that we're going to do and
we're probably going to do this before we get into detail with poems is
learn about the basics about English metrical pattern generally used in
early American poetry something that you have to take into consideration is
that American poetry tends to be simplistic at first everything that comes
from America is a repetition of patterns that come from England there is a
sense of replicating another literature and that is something that happens
in all foreign literatures before they find their own identity it is not
until the turn of the 18th century to the 19th century that we're going to
see something that is authentically American after the over the course of
the American Revolution and the years that lead up to the 19th century to
the beginning of the 19th century is when America starts to have its own
not only independent country but independent voice and that independent
voice comes with a unique choice of topics a unique way of expressing ideas
and that is going to come over time so it's an element that takes time to
develop and therefore it was either unsurprising or it was okay for being
married now that was the general sentiment of superiority complex that is
going to last until the mid 19th century push of American literature is so
strong that it becomes one of the most important topics in the history of
American history and I a very important topic for these initial Puritans
they couldn't care less because they were only worried about their Puritan
world moving on to the next slide just a summary of her biography well this
is a bit slow now we're going to focus on some specifics that I would like
you to walk away understanding what they mean my aspiration is for you to
learn all of them but at least I would love you to walk away with a solid
idea of most of them extended metaphor pun tone verbal irony anaphora
illusion imagery paradox elegy apostrophe ambiguity ambivalence pathos
theme atmosphere and the story of the itself the foot what is a sussura if
it rhymes or doesn't rhyme and what is the importance of rhyme free verse I
rhyme stanza She acquired a contemporary reputation as the first author of
a volume of American poems. Her brother-in-law published her work in London
in 1650, apparently without her knowledge as a tenth muse lately sprung up
in America. Compiled and added the title with great variety of wit and
learning, full of delight. You know that Puritan messages, I mean Puritan
titles, seem to not be able to condense the idea. They just go on and on
for two or three lines and they don't have any problems with writing long
titles. These high claims were doubtless not her own, for her own note is
essentially more restrained. The Puritan woman is going to be a restrained
woman that is not willing to err herself. And is normally going to be very
private. It's not well seen to be openly enthusiastic about being a poet.
And she's always going to confront the problems of being a poet. I could
continue reading because there's a lot of interesting nuance in this book,
but I think that with that initial introduction, there would be enough for
the moment. Her poems receive recognition both back in England and in the
New World. So, she is immediately celebrated as a poet of a certain talent,
okay? Move on to the next slide. Regarding her biography very quickly, she
was born and educated in London. Her father was a steward of the Earl of
Lincoln and that is a key point that explains her education. She received a
considerable education. There's a typo there, obviously it's a considerable
education. Far beyond the average of the women of her time. She benefited
from the huge libraries and tutors of the Earl. She lived to the age of 60,
seeing all her eight children grow to adult age. She married in 1630 and
she moved to Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was a non-separate Puritan.
That's what Julio Neda was asking about. She suffered from ill health most
of her life. She often felt the threat of death, especially when she was
close to childbirth. So there is an idea of imminent death whenever she had
to give birth, which is something that we can relate to knowing how
difficult delivering was at the time and how... and how much medicine has
advanced from then. It was not uncommon for women to die during childbirth,
and she had eight children. So that increased her possibilities of dying
even further. She's currently considered the grandmother of American
poetry. Hers was the first published book of poems by an inhabitant of
America. Hers was probably also the first book in American literature to be
published by a woman. Her book was published without her knowing, we
already talked about it. She afterwards revised it, adding a considerable
number of new poems. So the revised edition, the 1678 edition, has... so
many new poems that it can be considered a completely different book
because of all of the work that is included. She wrote the preface poem,
the author to her book. We've heard about it, we're going to read it. And
it was published, unfortunately, six years after her death, which might
sound outrageous, but it's going to be very common in this course. You
should get used to this post-human... post-humanist... publishing because
it happens all the time. The complete name of the 1678 revised version is
called Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning. And
that's where there is a certain point of... First of all, she eludes
referring to herself. So she's eluding the fact that she's a woman, or
she's at least concealing it as much as possible. For over two centuries,
she was not considered a major author. She was eliminated from any canon
status because her poems were considered simplistic, copies of poems that
were already being published in England. And it was only in the 20th
century, only with the rise, for example, of feminism, that she became well
known again. This is going to happen... recurrently with female writers.
And it is thanks to the revisionism of the second half of the 20th century
that her work has reached us with this canonical status where she is
considered one of the great authors of early American literature. Her
independence and integrity that she clearly has in her poems collide in a
difficult way to match her religious principles of duty and inner feeling.
There are times where you can see cracks or crevices or wrinkles in her
faith. And you can see how at the end of every poem, there is an
undeterring return to her Puritan faith. There is like a happy Puritan
ending. She returns to faith in every poem. There is not a single tragedy
in her life or circumstance that makes her lose her faith completely. She
may have moments of despair. She finds her way inside the poem of returning
to the gratefulness for the divine providence and the... and... her image
of a God that is more knowledgeable than she is. So we are going to have to
analyze this conflict between her public voice that tends to imitation the
apparent structure of the poem and the private voice that is more original,
more unique. And in every poem that we analyze we are going to see elements
that make her poetry more unique. Her poetical style has to do with Puritan
aesthetics no matter what. Even though it seems it seems unrepairable
paradigm to write poetry and be a Puritan, she manages to follow Puritan
principles and Puritan aesthetics in her poetry. She does feel that she
follows a Puritan plain style and that's why her poems are considered
simplistic by... by critics of the time. And she is at the same time
influenced by the ornamental style of the time in poets, I talked about
that before, I don't know if I was recording, Spencer, Sidney, Sir Walter
Raleigh and the French Calvinist poem Guillaume de Barthea. Which she
considered considers her literary godfather, the person that gives her a
bigger influence or provides a bigger influence because thanks to being
able to experience a Calvinist poet of her time provides her with
sufficient moral background to say if Guillaume de Barthea can write so can
I. Even though I'm a Puritan because remember that Puritanism is a sort of
Calvinism. It's not a separate it's not a separate movement. Puritanism is
considered to be a subtype of Calvinism. Calvinism being more general and
Puritanism being more specific. Okay? We talked about the Puritan
principles in William Bradford have a look at the how they followed
specifically a close reading of a certain passage of the Bible. She was
also inspired by the English metaphysical poets not post. We're going to
see that this happens also in the case of Emily Dickinson so it brings us a
connection there and her writing and literary style seems to be or is
contradictory to theoretical Puritan condemnation of figurative language
and that's a contradiction that she's going to have to face during her
lifetime. Yes with the ornamental style of the Renaissance tradition she
follows the style of verse for example the length of the quatrains the
choice of words that was popular in the Renaissance but at the same time
she tries to have an underlying Puritan framework. So she's trying to do
something very difficult. She's trying to write in a Puritan plain style
with a didactic purpose and at the same time try to do the same poetry that
other authors were doing with a completely different mindset. Sorry. Okay.
Okay great. . No I mean the didactic purpose is much clearer in William
Bradford. What is the didactic purpose of a poem? What are you going to
teach further generations? Well . Yes and that's where thanks to the French
Calvinist poet Barta she finds a crack in the system or a way of expressing
herself through poetry that still follows Puritan principles. If Barta can
do it so can she. That's her mindset. But as I said completely different to
the mindset that other authors of the time had. On page 26 of the study
guide you have a point where it's going to say study unit three studying
unit three is certainly the most challenging in American literature to the
1900 for several reasons. It is the first one to deal with poetry, a
literary genre which is open to a wide range of appreciations because its
essence remains elusive its nature mysterious and its substance
unfathomable. Reading good poetry is gratifying but it may also be more
demanding than prose especially in the case of 17th century poetry.
Moreover the 17th century poems you will find in this unit have been kept
in their original form without modernizing their spelling and punctuation.
Unlike the prose text of the same period which you have examined so far. As
a result you should reasonably expect to devote to this particular unit
more time and energy than to any other one in the textbook. Perhaps as much
as you have already spent on the two previous units together. So it's
really scaring you. Due to the specific difficulties which might rise you
will receive plenty of practical assistance and that's where we are going
for. So in the next paragraph it gives the key to understanding poetry in
English. In order to understand halfway through the paragraph in order to
understand the fundamentals of verse form you need to work out stress
patterns for yourself. Stress is an additional loudness or length or voice
intensity. The syllables which carry stress are called stress and those
which do not carry stress are called unstressed. To get practice there you
have some ideas of where the stress is. So you would get locking first
syllable syllable forgetting second syllable. That would give you a pattern
of how things are words are divided into stressed or unstressed syllables.
When we read Spanish poetry we normally analyze the amount of syllables. In
English poetry however, especially in classic English poetry what we do is
we take syllables two by two and those two by two we see how they are
stressed. So the stress is as important as a rhyme. The stress is going to
give us one type of stress pattern, an iam which is the most common form of
stress pattern or the troic. You can see in point number three it says that
the iam is one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. For example,
a way is going to be the most common pattern in English literature
especially in this classical English literature sorry, poetry. The troic is
the opposite. It's one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one.
Lovely. Okay? The anapest is two unstressed syllables followed by a
stressed one. This is common in Spanish literature but however the iam and
the troic are not as common in Spanish poetry or in Spanish literature
remember that when we speak in Spanish words tend to be longer and
stressing syllables beyond the two last syllables is much more common in
Spanish than it is in English. So it does make sense that the iam and the
troic are the dominant figure in poetry for a very long time. So what we're
going to have are iambic meters. What type of iambic meters? The syllables
are connected by two or three syllables into what is called the foot. You
have the foot on page 28. So a tetrameter are four feet. That means it has
eight syllables. Okay? If it's an iam or a trocay. A pentameter has five
feet. An iambic pentameter which is the most classical renaissance pattern
is five feet of iambs. All of them are iambs so it's So you have the
feeling of experiencing something that has like a certain musicality in it.
Okay? So that's one of the elements that you have to take into
consideration. Some of the students are coming and going I don't know if
you have any connection problems. I thought that the audio is fine. Maybe
you can write down if the audio experience and the video experience are
working so far. Something that we have to take into consideration is the
caesura. I'm going to go back to the list where I was talking about this.
So you can cross that off in your in the amount of things that you have
information about. So far we've talked about stress, we've talked about the
syllables, we've talked about the feet, the foot of the poem and we've
talked about the type of feet that we're going to recognize. Basically in
this unit iambs or trochees and the natural length or the most popular
length of verses. Tetrameters pentameters, heptameters, octameters.
Remember that for Spanish poetry standards you would have to multiply all
of that by two. Tetrameter would be octasyllable pentameter would be
decasyllable so if you remember studying Renaissance poetry in Spanish you
might remember that decasyllables were probably the most popular in Spanish
and French and Italian poetry but in English poetry the pentameter is the
standard. The pentameter is the golden standard that everybody is following
at the time. Oh I thought I had a list there. Let's see if the slide wants
to change okay yes. Foot, caesura, rhyme, free verse, I rhyme stanza.
Caesura would be a pause inserted anywhere inside a metrical line. So it
would be like an artificial pause inside a poem. For example in Anne
Broadstreet's poem about her house burning she says farewell my pelf,
farewell my sore. So there is a comma there and there is an implicit
caesura. In another one in the other one where she talks about one of her
deceased relatives she says go pretty babe, go rest with sisters twain. So
that means that other children have also died in childbirth before her.
There is a caesura there. The caesura can divide the poem into two equal
parts or it can divide the poem into one part that is bigger than the other
or more significantly bigger than the other. Not all poets choose to use
fixed pattern, it's fixed meter pattern. In free verse that we're going to
study in the second semester free verse departs from this idea of being
constrained by meter and by rhyme. Meter and rhyme is going to be something
that is dated and it's very relevant at the beginning of American
literature but it's going to lose its favor in favor of a non-rhyming
scheme in free verse. So rhyming and meter are both going to be
consecutively discarded over time. We'll get there, we'll get there. For
the moment everything rhymes very well. Sometimes you have exact rhymes. We
have perfect rhymes or full rhymes where we say for example cat, bat, hat,
fat something like that and sometimes we have para rhymes or partial rhymes
or imperfect rhymes or half rhymes or slant rhymes like room and storm.
Sometimes it depends on how we pronounce words now and how they were
pronounced in the 17th century. Maybe storm was pronounced turm or maybe
room was pronounced rom so rom and storm they have a higher degree of
rhyming that they have nowadays. The difficulty of this unit is that all
the poems are in their original form so you'll read you'll start reading
one of these poems and the poem is rhyming perfectly and all of a sudden
the rhyming breaks down and you really don't understand what's going on
probably it has to do with this with a pronunciation that has shifted over
time. Very very common in American English by the way. So it should be
unsurprising. The stanzas which are a group of lines of verses the stanzas
are normally divided into classified according to the number of lines that
they have A couplet is a stanza formed by two lines that generally rhyme
and have the same length so we would have a couplet of iambic pentameter
two lines that are pentameters and they rhyme A tercet would be three
together. A quatrain four. In English Renaissance poetry, couplets and
quatrains are the overall standard. They are much more frequent than the
rest. Okay so when we read the introduction to the poem we're going to say
this poem is an iambic pentameter and the lines are divided into couplets
so you know immediately that every two verses you're going to have a rhyme.
That is the first analysis that you should have if you had to analyze Anne
Bradstreet in a peck or in an exam. The sextet would be a six line stanza.
An octave or an octet would be an eight line stanza. Okay and to understand
all of these ideas like the extended metaphor the tone, the verbal irony
we'll get to it little by little as we read the poems and if you have any
doubts on any of them for example extended metaphor is a metaphor that
occupies the entire poem. You can read about all of these in the glossary
that's why I say that the study guide is not an optional book. I think it's
a book that you really need to have and if you don't have one and you can't
find it because it's not available in the store or wherever pick one up at
the library because there's a ton of them so don't let them go to waste.
I'm going to place on this screen I think it's slide number seven or slide
number eight the first poem that we read no it's number eight or even
number nine the author to her book and I'm going to read it from the book
so I can give you oh it's over nine my god so many so much information in
these slides I have to simplify them a bit I'm going to read from the book
I see that some of you are having problems in the chat nobody's written a
message in a very long time that normally means that you can hear me but
you can't see me or you have some connection problems if somebody can write
the message that would be really cool but if I have a connection problem
you're probably not going to be able I'm not going to be able to read it
I'll just wait to see if anybody writes anything in the, our connection is
fine great so I guess it's just a case of whoever's having a problem it's
their particular internet connection thank you Julio, Patricio another
Patricio no? my god it's not such a common name sorry this is a Patrick
class I'm expecting an invitation to beer on St. Patrick's I don't know if
I'm asking for too much I don't know how that works in quarantine okay so
we're going to read the author to her book great thank you very much for
the feedback it's very very useful so regarding the author to her book on
page 45 of the textbook you have a very interesting presentation that I'm
going to mainly skip for the sake of brevity and to be able to read all of
the poems and give you some thoughts on them I'm going to only read from
Professor Dieberg's great analysis the last paragraph of her analysis
before the poem because it gives you a lot of information the poem is
written in heroic couplets remember they're also called rhyming couplets
that means they receive that name of heroic or rhyming means two by two
because they rhyme on consecutive lines and pair a a b b c c d d the meter
the fixed arrangement of accented and unaccented syllables may seem
irrelevant to many modern readers but it was extremely important for many
centuries and any appreciation of poetry should consider at least the basic
principles of meter and its relationship to rhythm the sense of movement
communicated by a metrical pattern nowadays one of our poetic geniuses of
the world of universal literature is Emily Dickinson in her time however
Emily Dickinson was considered to be a flawed poet she never published in
her lifetime one of the reasons she never published in her lifetime is that
she abandoned intentionally rhyme and meter and that was so badly
considered in her time that they just thought that she wasn't talented
enough to be able to abide to rhyme and to meter so that just goes to show
how important the public perception of your work is as much as the overall
quality because many works don't receive the appreciation of their time
just because the audience is not prepared for the type of work that you're
writing obviously if Emily Dickinson is still so relevant it's because she
was way ahead of her time so there is a mixed pattern of meter a unit
called a foot which in the case of the following poem is formed by an
unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable defeat this is a metric
pattern known as iambic which is the most common pattern in English poetry
since each metrical line of this poem has ten syllables and each foot has
two syllables each line has five feet a line in verse consisting of five
feet is called a pentameter therefore regarding the form the following
lines are rhymed iambic pentameters balance and control are the main
characteristic of the pharoic couplets below let me let me check very
quickly if I have recordings of the poems because I think that a nicer
voice than mine can illustrate better the poems oh I don't have an internet
connection and that would take me a bit of time to set it up so I'll do
that for the next poem that we have for Phyllis Wheatley or whatever and
I'll just read these poems sorry about that because I don't have such a
good voice and these readers are very interesting to hear um the first poem
is called the author to her book um let me start though ill formed
offspring of my feeble brain who after birth didst by my side remain till
stats from thence by friends less wise than true who thee abroad exposed to
public view made thee in rags halting to the press to trudge where errors
were not lessened all may judge at my return my blushing was not small my
rambling brat in print should mother call I cast thee by as one unfit for
light thy visage was so irksome in my sight yet being my own at length
affection would thy blemishes amend if so I could I wash thy face but more
defects I saw and coming off a spot still made a flaw I stretched thy
joints to make thee even feet yet still thou runnest more hobbling than is
meets in better dress to trim thee was my mind but not save home spun cloth
in the house I find in this array monks vulgar may though roam in critics
hand beware though dost not come and take thy way yet thou art not known if
for thy father asks say thou hadst none and for thy mother she alas is poor
which cause her thus to send thee out of door so as you can see there is a
sort of a tongue in cheek sort of poem where she's talking about the
defects of her poems but at the same time how she affectionately has a very
close regard for her poems how foolish her brother-in-law had been for
publishing them initially even though she extends the version and adds more
it's all a fake front she's trying to deprecate intentionally and that is
another element that is very common in female writers self-deprecation they
reduce the importance of their work because they are afraid of offending
men of offending other periods but basically offending other men of
surpassing the expectations that women should have in her time so those are
the ideas that you should take into consideration when for example in line
15 I stretch thy joints to make thee even feet the joints of a person are
the knees, the elbows the shoulders, the thigh the joints of a poem are the
verses so stretch the joints means like lengthening them to make them even,
to make them rhyme and to make them have the same amount of feet that's why
she says to make thee even feet so there's a pun there's a very very
intentional pun there I think that's one of the those are some of the
details that you should walk away with from this poem if you take into
consideration the exploratory questions you can see that an extended
metaphor is a metaphor that goes over the entire poem in this poem we have
an apostrophe I told you about that how the apostrophe is treating
something that is not human as if it were human she's treating the poems as
if they were the book entirely and the verses as if they were her children
and in the same way she uses an extended metaphor to refer to the book as a
flawed, imperfect thing that is as much as she could come together with and
she's sort of apologetic but at the same time the book is called with a
certain amount of wit so there is a huge paradox between what's written on
the cover and the poem that introduces the rest of the book so that's
intentional but at the same time it's interesting another way of calling a
pun is paranomasia a pun is just a play of words you have that in
exploratory question number two interesting poem to my dear and loving
husband the next one oh so exhausting to speak under a face mask all the
time to my dear and loving husband is written to Simon Bradstreet as an
account and a witness of their happy marriage and how much she loves her
husband so openly that she celebrates it in a poem that is intended to be
read by her family but that ends up being a worldwide phenomena of the time
and is open to everybody Puritan or not that has access to the poem there
is an unusual sense of desire and even of carnal passion in this poem
implicitly that is very very far from following Puritan principles but at
the same time loving the family is the purpose of women inside a Puritan
family so she can at the same time say that it is her moral duty as a
Puritan to be loving and to be prepared to be the best wife possible for
her children so being affectionate and even passionate about her love is at
the same time non-Puritan and Puritan in equal ways so it's one of these
paradoxes that are sort of impossible to come to terms with so she has an
excuse at the same time as she can be criticized for that fact I think this
poem is very very short it's a 12 line poem the meter is rhymed iambic
pentameters I already told you you're going to get used to this terminology
because it's very repetitive and the 12 lines rhyme in pairs so they are
couplets heroic couplets or rhyme couplets the poem is formed by six rhyme
couplets to my dear and loving husband that I chose as a quote for the
beginning of the presentation if ever two were one then surely we if ever
man were loved by wife then thee if ever wife was happy in a man compare
with me your woman if you can it's a challenging verse very strange for a
Puritan wife like saying I'm the envy of all of you and at the same time
every wife has the same feeling as her husband that would make a perfect
Puritan community I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold or all the
riches that the east does hold my love is such that rivers cannot quench
nor ought but love from thee give recompense there's a para rhyme there
it's not an exact rhyme thy love is such I can no way repay the heavens
reward thee manifold and love let so persevere that when we live no more we
may live ever so my opinion is probably in that there's a change in the
pronunciation of either one of the words or both so probably it's persever
and ever that would make it a more sound rhyme but since we don't have very
good recordings of the 17th century it's very difficult to know exactly the
way it was pronounced we can just come to conclusions it's very interesting
the metaphor that she uses it says my love is such that rivers cannot
quench quench is to satiate thirst so she compares love to a flow of a
river and she says it's impossible to quench so her love is infinite it's
everlasting and she says that she feels that she cannot recompense him for
how much love she gives and receives and she just prays to the heaven that
he receives the rewards in heaven of all the love that she feels so it's a
very nice and endearing poem and at the same time it's contradicting and
abiding to puritan principles at the same time which is what makes it so
difficult by no means she's very puritan she's a very puritan woman and
it's just that she's probably being more honest in this poem because this
is one of the poems that she was not expecting to be published this is one
of her initial poems it was published and then she had to if you compare
this to the previous poem the previous poem is much more apologetic
restrained it has a different tone so there's a big difference between when
she speaks her mind like in these three poems that we're going to read in
places two, three and four and when she openly knows that the poems are
being read by everybody and she has to give an explanation so there's a
very big difference between what I was saying before her public voice and
her private voice what she really feels and what she wants everybody to
think so the author to her book can also be a way of apologizing if she
crossed any red lines and also trying to say I am an abiding puritan person
and I do understand and in this poem it's going to be very clear how she
has this internal conflict of finding something terrible and having like a
moment of doubt to a moment of absolute faith this poem provides a clear
example of the tension the poet experiences between her domestic concerns
and her spiritual aspirations the speaker who is once more the poet herself
sadly recalls in detail the prized material possessions she lost in the
fire which destroyed her house Bradstreet dwells on misfortune for the
first 35 lines so she remains borderline not puritan for 35 verses of the
total amount of 40 something for almost 3 quarters of the poem she has a
non-puritan point of view or at least non-puritan thoughts and a way of
showing herself as also human and also fallible and also full of sin and
therefore still unprepared for going to heaven and still in the need of
purification which was one of the obsessions of puritans puritans were on
the world to pay for their sins and to perfect themselves to the point
where they were worthy of going to heaven that was their only mission they
had no free will everything was previously pre-thought and predestined by
God and therefore she had no way of being a good puritan rather than
accepting her sins and trying to improve herself over the course of her
life that would be the path of a puritan with all the puritans just wait
and see this only gets worse so puritan doubts whether their being worthy
of the covenant the covenant is their agreement with God is going to be the
eternal conflict that puritans have the puritans that arrive to America
have the feeling that they are not being puritans enough imagine when they
have children that are already born on American soil and they have no
understanding of what is that church of England or what is England for any
matter I don't care, I live here I have no interest in that place I might
not have so much interest as you have in religion and all of that building
of perfection that they strive to build they see how it collapses and in
the 17th century we are going to go over the great awakening an attempt to
re-spiritualize puritan America terribly unsuccessful but very important in
American literature and in American history so it is something that we are
going to definitely see when we reach units 5 and 6 Jonathan Edwards so,
going back in this poem rhyming couplets are also formed by iambs but each
line has 8 syllables instead of 10 syllables so we have tetrameters rhymed
iambic tetrameters let me read because this one is long it is 54 verses as
you can see there is a significant effort to make everything rhyme in
silent night when rest I took for sorrow near I did not look as you can see
the rhythm is completely different it sounds like children's poetry if you
have ever read children's poetry it sounds very similar so the tetrameter
has a different ring when you read it it sounds more direct and it sounds
like something that even a child would understand I awakened was with
thundering ring noise and pitchy shriek of dreadful voice that fearful
sound of fire and fire let no man know is my desire I starting up the light
this by and to my God my heart did cry and to strengthen me in my distress
and not to leave me suckerless then coming out beheld the space the flame
consume my dwelling place and when I could no longer look I blessed his
name that gave and took that lay my goods now in the dust yeah so it was
and so it was just it was his own it was not mine far be it that I should
repine it was a moment of weakness where she's worried about everything
that is being destroyed and then she goes back to God and says it's God's
will to give and take so I cannot say anything about it he might have all
justly bereft but yet sufficient for us left when by ruins oft I passed my
sorrowing eyes aside did cast then there the places spy where oft I sat and
long did lie here stood that trunk and there that chest as you can see
there's a sasura in the middle of that of that line there lay that store I
counted best my pleasant things in ashes lie and then behold no more shall
I under thy roof no guest shall sit nor at thy table eat a bit no pleasant
tale shall e'er be told nor things recounted done of old no candle e'er
shall shine in thee nor bridegroom's voice e'er heard shall be in silence
ever shalt thou lie adieu adieu all's vanity so from that moment on up to
35 it's an account of the tragedy from that moment on she looks to the
future and she looks towards her role as a Puritan follower a Puritan woman
and how she has to accept that her heaven is a paradise that is much more
important than anything on earth there is an incredible shift she suddenly
waves everything goodbye adieu adieu all's vanity then straight I gin my
heart to chide and did thy wealth on earth abide did fix thy hope on
moldering dust the arm of flesh did make thy trust raise up thy thoughts
above the sky that downhill mist away may fly thou hast an house on high
erect framed by that mighty architect saying God has a better house for you
in heaven than the one you're crying about here on earth with glory richly
furnished stands permanent though this too be fled so you can imagine that
45 is probably furnished it's purchased and paid for too by him who has
enough to do a price so vast as is unknown yet by his gift is made thine
own there's wealth enough I need no more farewell my pal farewell my store
the world no longer let me love my hope and treasure lies above so she's
telling herself stop crying about a stupid house everything that is
important for you awaits in heaven no matter how much you've lost
everything that is still to come is more important I'm going to read the
last poem I hope I don't get expelled by your net for doing that I'm going
to it's a 12 verse poem I'm not going to be able to go very much into
detail and the poem reads as follows on my dear grandchild Simon
Broadstreet page 56 who died on 16th of November 1669 being but a month and
one day old you can imagine how cruel that that passage of her life was no
sooner came but gone and fallen asleep so in one line she narrates the
birth and the death of her grandchild acquaintance short yet parting causes
weak three flowers two scarcely blown and last in thy bud it's like
explaining how brief his life had been cropped by the almighty hand yet is
he good he says it's God will I cannot question him with dreadful awe
before him let's be mute such was his will but why let's not dispute with
humble hearts and mouth put in the dust let's say he's merciful as well as
just he will return and make up all our losses and smile again after our
bitter crosses go pretty babe go rest with sisters twain among the blessed
and endless joys remain okay so that's the end of the last lines it's
probably because of your screen I don't know how to fix that Jose Antonio
afterwards in the recording it should be available okay I can only tell you
that you have it on page 56 of the textbook in any case thank you very much
I'm running out of battery here have a great week next week we'll talk
about Mary and the first unique American genre captivity narrative okay so
have a fantastic week thanks a lot see you Veronica bye Julio