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After reading Bradstreet’s work, what impresses me is the authenticity her poetry reflects on her life. Bradstreet’s poetry vividly delivers the world as a puritan in the New World, and also reflects her interior thoughts on life.

“The Prologue”

The reason why I think Bradstreet’s poetry authentic is because in her poem, I can see she talks about her feelings toward inequality in gender. In “The Prologue,” she expresses her voice as a female writer and discusses her claim with historical views. I feel like this poem of Bradstreet’s is full of emotion and clever thoughts, that she knows about her writings. Moreover, “The Prologue” shows a sense of strong self-awareness and feminism by claiming what she will write about.

"Verses Upon the Burning of our House"

As I mentioned, Bradstreet pours her feelings and heart into her works. On this poem, we can see a real tragedy, that her house was burned down. What I feel about this poem is that the house is more than a house; in other words, the house also symbolizes Anne Bradstreet’s life as a Puritan. The life back then was rough and hard and unstable, how devastating it must be when everything Bradstreet had had suddenly burned down into dust? The kind of living is actually beyond our imagination. In addition, when she addresses to God in her poem, to me, it seems to a kind of self-conforming way. The fact that she couldn’t control anything and her house burned down without a trace is a matter that Bradstreet could not stand to make reason out of, thus, she tossed the problem and trouble to God. (And that kind of reminds me of most people in the modern world.)