Puritan Poetry
Anne Bradstreet
Essential Questions
What is inversion?
 How does Bradstreet use inversion to
achieve meter and rhyme?

Anne Bradstreet
First American writer, an English woman
 While we have writings before
Bradstreet, she is the first producer of
what we call literature.
 In 1630, Anne journeyed across the
Atlantic aboard the Arbella to the part of
New England around Salem that would
become known as the Massachusetts
Bay Colony.

Style
Unlike the ornate “high style” popular in
England at the time, the Puritan plain
style used simple sentences and
common words from everyday
speech.
 The plain style contained few or no
classical allusions, Latin quotations, or
elaborate figures of speech.

Plain Style
The plain style, Puritans felt, was much
more effective in revealing God’s truth
than the ornate style.
 Despite the fact that the style used by
Puritan writers now seems hard to read,
it was once considered simple and direct
in the 1600s.

Bradstreet’s Use of Plain Style

Although Anne Bradstreet’s “Upon the
Burning of Our House” contains some
figurative language, it is a good example
of the plain style.
Plain Style vs. Ornate Style
Ornate Style
Plain Style
Shabby but beloved,
my shoes house my
feet as they carry me
from place to place.
The pen spills ink-blood
as it brings words to
life.
My shoes are old,
brown, kind of wornout, but comfortable for
walking around in.
The pen is a blue
ballpoint with a leaky
tip.
Inversion
Bradstreet also used inversion.
 Inversion is the reversal of the normal
word order in a sentence or phrase.
 Write this in – it is not in your notes.

Inversion
For example, Bradstreet writes “I
wakened was with thund’ring noise”
instead of “I was wakened with
thund’ring noise.”
 Inversion is often used to make a poem’s
rhyme scheme work out or to maintain a
fixed meter.

Rhyme

Rhyme is the repetition of vowel sounds
in accented syllables and succeeding
syllables. Types of rhyme include



end rhyme
internal rhyme
approximate, or slant, rhyme
Rhyme Scheme

End rhyme refers to rhyming words at
the end of lines.

End rhymes usually follow a regular pattern
within a poem, called its rhyme scheme.
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
A
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; B
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
A
And rise and sink and rise and sink again . .B
Rhythm and Meter
Rhythm is the alternation of stressed and
unstressed syllables in language. Rhythm
occurs naturally in all forms of spoken and
written language.
 Meter is the regular pattern of stressed and
unstressed syllables in poetry.


One meter commonly used in poetry is iambic
meter—an unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed syllable.