The Prologue Analysis

The meter and the rhyme of this poem follow a really consistent pattern. Heck, even the stanzas are all the same length. Remember, this is a poem designed to respond to people who say that women ha...

In some poems, it's tough to tell who your speaker is and what kind of a person he or she is (or even if it's a man or a woman). Not here. We learn a lot about this woman. Actually, let's start the...

We can't see that there are any hints about where this poem is taking place. There's not a single reference to an actual physical space, either inside or outside—no rocks, no trees, no tables, no...

There's something about the rhythm of this poem just kind of relaxes us. The sound of it rolls along at a smooth and steady pace, like little waves, lapping on the shore. Here, we'll explain (you k...

Nothing too tricky's going on here—the title of this poem just gives us some basic information. Essentially, it tells us that this poem is a prologue, a short piece of writing that is meant to in...

Anne Bradstreet covered some ground in her career. She wrote philosophical and historical poems like those in her book The Tenth Muse, which this poem comes from. She also wrote poems about love an...

There's no way to get around it. This is an old poem. That makes our climb a little harder, since we have to scramble over some old-fashioned vocabulary, and deal with some references to things lik...

Bradstreet's brother-in-law John Woodbridge sent the manuscript of The Tenth Muse to publishers in London without her knowledge. (Source.)In addition to writing poetry, Bradstreet had eight childre...

Easy now—Bradstreet was a Puritan, and to say that those folks were not big on steamy poems would be a huge understatement. On the other hand, Bradstreet wrote some pretty romantic (if not exactl...

Guillaume du Bartas (7-12): Guillaume du Bartas (full name Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas—now say that three times fast) was a French Protestant poet. He was most famous for writing an...