First Essay: Anne Bradstreet

First Essay: On a Poem by Anne Bradstreet

Due: In class on Monday, September 20.

Length: 3-4 pages, typed, double-spaced.

Format: Staple or paperclip in the upper left-hand corner; put your name in the upper right-hand corner of each page. Always keep a backup electronic copy of your essay in a safe place in case your paper should get lost or misplaced. Be sure to title your essay; try to think of a title that is both interesting and that suggests what your essay is about.

Poems to choose from: "For Deliverance from a Fever" (p. 270), "Deliverance from a Fit of Fainting" (p. 272), "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" (p. 243), "In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet" (p. 258), "May 13, 1657" (p. 279).

Purpose: You will be striving for original and illuminating insights into the poem you choose. You will be writing about only one of the poems (though you may of course refer to other poems by Bradstreet in order to support your reading). Your goal will be to point out aspects of the poem that are not readily apparent but that, after close study, begin to reveal themselves as vital elements that help illuminate the way the poem works. Your essay should avoid simple paraphrase or summary; work instead to reveal some aspect of the poem that will help us understand the way Bradstreet's poetry works.

Some Guidelines: Read the poem that you choose again and again; move it from the page into your mind where you can get to know it better. (Memorize it if you can.) Think of the poem in relation to Bradstreet's other poems; make notes about similar images, related thoughts, parallel style and rhymes in other poems. Let the context of Bradstreet's other poems, of her prose, and of her times illuminate the specific text you are dealing with.

Look up words in the dictionary and learn their etymologies; discover the fossil poems that lie beneath the key words in the poem. Even words that you think you know (like "celebrate") have some surprising origins which often suggest wider possibilities. But don't overdo things; don't force words out of context in order to coerce the poem into an original but far-fetched interpretation. Instead, seek to enhance the context: illuminate the full power of the words as those words work in this particular poem.

Listen to the poem, its rhymes, rhythms, repetitions, insistences, its off-rhymes, odd jumps, internal rhymes. Work on how these things carry the meaning, create the meaning, make the poem. Make notes in the margins of your book.

Try paraphrasing the poem, saying it as simply and clearly as you can. Then go back to the poem and read it next to your paraphrase. The difference between your paraphrase and the poem is what you want to focus your essay on--the things the poem does and says that don't quite get into your paraphrase.

Choose a poem that you are fascinated and confused by. Begin in confusion; work toward illumination. You will write a better paper about a poem you are initially mystified by than about a poem you think you fully understand the first time you read it. Your first draft should probe, question, try out various interpretations. Don't spend a lot of time thinking about the poem before you put anything down on paper; think about the poem by writing about it; think in writing. (Writing is slow motion thinking.) Force your ideas onto paper; sometimes it will seem as if your hands have an intelligence of their own. Then compose your essay out of the best of what emerges. Edit out the dead ends from your initial drafts. Never hand in your first draft. Focus on the insights that you come to see will help you and us (the class) see things in the poem that we hadn't seen before, things that will help us hear and understand the poem more clearly than we had before.

Your audience is this class--a group of people who have recently read Bradstreet carefully. So there are things you don't have to waste space saying (you don't need to tell us Bradstreet was a Puritan poet who lived in New England in the seventeenth century, for example); there are contexts that we are as a group aware of, that you can draw on but don't need to dwell on. Feel free to draw upon class discussion, but don't simply repeat things that have been said in class: use the insights you have gained in class to discover new aspects of the poetry. When you have finished your essay, you should feel satisfied that you have discovered some new things about the poem that you simply had not seen the first couple of times you read it.

Proofread your final copy carefully; edit out careless errors before the essay gets to your reader, where those errors will distract from and undermine the force of your argument.

Use the Resources page on the course website, where you will find links to dictionaries, to tips on writing essays about poetry, and to information on Bradstreet. Scroll down on the Resources page past the links, and you'll find a guide that I've prepared on how to quote from and cite poetry in your essay. Please read this guide and follow it.