Posted: June 6th, 2022

Anne Bradstreet exhibits the Puritan “plain style” in her poetry

Anne Bradstreet exhibits the Puritan “plain style” in her poetry

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Anne Bradstreet Exhibit of the Puritan “Plain Style” in her Poetry
Introduction
As Anne Bradstreet started her journey in writing poems, she was faced with two distinct influences, precisely the Renaissance literary style and the Puritan doctrine (Shannon 1). Since she grew up in a strict Puritan environment, her poetry already started to reflect puritanism’s format and subjects. The puritan plain style is a style of writing characterized by being plain, driven by purposes, and extensively religious. The puritans held onto the belief of absolute elation, a restricted atonement, a desirable grace, and the saints’ tenacity. The Puritan plain style is described as having short words, direct statements, and will refer to ordinary, everyday objects. The puritans had a belief in their poetry serving God through an expression of valuable and religious ideas. Anne Bradstreet emerged as a great poet at the time for her contemporary style, exhibited through the Puritan plain style.
Anne Bradstreet’s Poem Analysis
In the poem, “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” she exhibits the Puritan Plain Style via her syntax’s inversion and the expression of the bond between life on earth and in heaven. In the particular selection, the author reflected her life as a puritan as she described both the hardships and joy experienced (“Puritan Plain Style – Literary Devices & Terms.”). Through the use of short words and direct lines in the poem, the author can describe the passionate love between the speaker and her husband, which is both pure and redemptive. It consisted of the language of the Bible, such as asking God himself to reward her husband for his love as it would be blasphemous to ask the stars or clouds for the reward. The heavens represented God himself as in Christianity; God is known to reside in heaven and judge human life. The inversion featured in the syntax made the normality in words to be reversed. In the line “If ever two were one, then surely we” (1), its normal arrangement would have been “If there were ever two that were one, it would be us.” Nonetheless, the inversion does emphasize a partnership between the Puritan marriage. The inversion in the line “Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere” (11) also points out the fact that the two will need to love each other strongly so that they live forever in heaven. It is evident that the Puritan writing style influenced the author as the author writes about God, the afterlife in heaven, and the inversion within the syntax.
In the poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” Bradstreet demonstrates how she was less traditional when it came to her poetry. Anaphora is presented in the first three lines, “If ever two were one, then surely we; If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; and If ever wife was happy in a man” (1,2,3). Anaphora is generally the figure of speech where words are repetitively used at the start of successive phrases or sentences, which is “if ever” (Glenn). In the poem, the speaker does not speak about only God but also her husband, which was something familiar in other Puritan poets; she balanced the heavenly and earthly love in all her writings which are demonstrated when she speaks of her love of her husband through spiritual imagery. The author says, “I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold” (5) and “my love is such that rivers cannot quench” (7). Nonetheless,m while she does have the contemporary writing style, she brings in the central puritan beliefs, including that hard work leads to virtue and that love needs to be preserved that even in the afterlife, they get to live forever, in the poem, the author says that God and her husband can be loved forever which includes even in heaven (Glenn). It is evident that the author’s poem was about her faith as a puritan woman in the colonial duration and also showing her love to her dear husband.
One of the last poetic compositions was the ‘Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666’ comprising inspirational material. The author describes the actual burning of her home at Andover, Massachusetts, in 1666. The author lost all her furniture and library of over 800 books through the fire (Ruiz et al. 97). The poem has been structured in stanzas with six lines, each following the Puritan “plain style.” Puritans generally favored everything being plain, whether dressing architecture and church designs, forms of worship, And language. Therefore, this style used simple sentences and common words incorporated in daily speech. This is illustrated seamlessly throughout the poem in lines such as ‘In silent night when rest I took, For sorrow near I did not look, I wakened was with thundering noise, And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice” (1,2,3,4). These understandable phrases are present throughout the poem that every reader can comprehend their meanings.
Notably, the author wrote this poem with nine stanzas to explain her personal understanding and the capacity to live and learn from sins so that God’s will could prevail. It starts by remembering how her home was caught in the fire in the middle of the night and her leaving it to watch burn down. In the following four stanzas, she expressed mixed feelings illustrated effectively in the lines, “I blest His name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust» or «It was His own; it was not mine.” There is a melancholic nostalgia for the numerous valuable material possessions that were burnt down by the fire. Notably, the speaker does realize that some implicit rebellious thoughts are creeping in as exuded in the line “take her in an unacceptable direction; that is toward anger at God for her loss.” Therefore she chose to incorporate several self-addressed questions in the seventh stanza to dispel the sense of anger on the earthly losses. In the final two stanzas, she demonstrated that she understands that the material goods are less valuable and temporary in comparison to the eternal treasures of living in the permanent home, “On high erect” and “framed by that mighty Architect” (Ruiz et al. 97). This poem demonstrated the dichotomy between secular, the divine, and the human being’s comprehension of the two elements.
Another noticeable element in the Puritan plain writing style is symbolism (Cody). Almost all Bradstreet’s poems had symbolic meanings to them. Its extensive use was that it could allow the substitution of a large phrase with the use of few simple and understandable words. For instance, in the lines “I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw” (13) in the poem “The Author to Her Book,” the author incorporated symbolism to demonstrate how she carried several corrections in her books trying to eliminate the messy parts. She also symbolizes the fact that she attempted to remove some parts in her book to improve it, but it does not make it better through the line, “and rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw” (14). Symbolism was attached to the Puritan plain style in the classical period, and it is still incorporated in present-day poems.
Conclusion
Over time, Bradstreet received applause during her time for the long meditative poems that comprised classical themes. These poems also captured modern readers’ interests, especially those that were more personal and intimate as she reflected her experiences with love, marriage, and loss. The personal poetry is noticeable for the tensions revealed between the author’s affection for worldly things and her puritan commitment to shun the earthly things to focus on spiritual matters. The passions evoked for her husband and children attain a balance with the individual reminders that these attachments need to remain second to one’s life for Christ. The author’s r also reflected the status of worms in the Puritan community, especially her role as a female writer. She created tensions through her poetry. Her poems provided a rare insight into the innate pressures of being a woman and a writer, especially in the Puritan world demonstrated even in the plain writing style.

Works Cited:
“Puritan Plain Style – Literary Devices & Terms.” Google Sites, sites.google.com/a/oregonsd.net/literary-devices-terms/3rd-grade.
Bradstreet, Anne. “The Author to Her Book by Anne Bradstreet.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43697/the-author-to-her-book.
Bradstreet, Anne. “To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43706/to-my-dear-and-loving-husband.
Bradstreet, Anne. “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th,….” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43707/verses-upon-the-burning-of-our-house-july-10th-1666.
Cody. “Essay: Puritan Plain Style.” Cody’s Blog, 2 Nov. 2009, blogcodys.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/hello-world/.
Glenn, Gillian. “Puritan Plain Style Poets.” Gillian Glenn, 2015, gillianglenn.weebly.com/blog/puritan-plain-style-poets.
Ruiz, Eva Flores, and Jesús Lerate de Castro. “Puritan Women Facing Suffering: Texts as Tests of Survival in Bradstreet’s «Verses Upon the Burning of Our House» and Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God.” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 10 (2004).
Shannon, Christy. “From Hierarchy to Balance: Anne Bradstreet’s Union of Renaissance and Puritan Influences.” (2000).

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