Anne Bradsreet Literary Response

Steve Epting
AP English
Literary Response: Anne Bradstreet
In these two different poems, Anne Bradstreet has a unique style of writing. In the first poem "The Author to Her Book", I think that she speaks in a general sense because she is not direct in her statements. “Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain." She's having a thought. Throughout this poem, she talks about these different ideas and by the end she hates every idea that she came up with, so she throws the story away.
She appeals to pathos by just telling personal thoughts. She is having an intrapersonal conversation with herself. The tone of this poem is enigmatic, precocious, and frivolous. The tone was puzzling to grasp the main idea of the poem, it was prematurely developed because the ideas weren’t well thought out, and it was lacking in seriousness because she couldn’t pick one idea to stay on so she trashed the whole thing. I could tell these two poems were written a long time ago because of the word choice with words such as didst, nought, thou, run’st, thee, thy, and may’st.
In the second poem, "To My Dear and Loving Husband", it is very clear that she is showing her deep, heart-felt affection towards her husband. She is married and her audience is her spouse. She expresses her deep love toward him in a very nice quote that says, “My love is such that rivers cannot quench.” I think this is more like a ballad to say that her and her husband will be together forever.
The tone of this poem was euphoric, saccharine, and poignant. The tone structured the poem to be all these because she was very happy when she wrote this and it was cloyingly sweet. Anne Bradstreet appealed to ethos in this poem because she was expressing her feelings.