Please answer the questions below in no more than 200 words.

Your answers should be

concise and to the point. Please make sure to support your ideas with at least 2 quotes or
examples from each poem.

1. Anne Bradstreet, was a Puritan wife and mother, who had eight children (please read
more about her here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-bradstreet). She
was also the first published poet in America. In her poem “The Author to Her Book,”
she responds to the publishing of her collection The Tenth Muse without her consent.
What comparison is she making in the poem and why? What does this work reveal
about Bradstreet’s perception of herself as a poet?

The author compares the book to her own child. She wants to throw it out of her sight but
knows that it belongs to her as if it were her own child, and she is unable to. She decides to
take it under her wing and attempt to improve it. All of her efforts are in vain though and she
is forced to send her “child” away. She tells it to go somewhere that it is not known and to
pretend that its mother was too poor to take care of it. (linie 8)

2. In “Verses Upon the Burning of our House, July 10, 1666,” Bradstreet writes about
another event in her life: the fire that destroyed her home. How does she respond to
this loss? What elements of Puritan faith/ideology is she responding to?

In the first lines speaker begins by saying that it was on a “silent night” that the poem events
took place. She has taken her “rest” and was not waiting to soon be assaulted by “sorrow.”
The speaker, who is, in fact, Anne Bradstreet herself, was woken in the night to a “thund’ring
noise” and terrible shrieking. (lines 1-6)
From the lines 14-20we can see her thoughts that, her belongings and “dwelling place” were
not really owned by her anyway. They were God’s from the beginning. She does not want to
“repine” the loss as God has allowed her to survive physically unharmed.

3. Edward Taylor was a colonial American poet and preacher. Please read more about
him here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edward-taylor. In his poem “Upon
a Spider Catching a Fly,” he develops an extended metaphor. What is this metaphor
and what function does it perform? Who is a “Spider” and who is a “Fly”?

This poem talks about how Satan can catch anyone In a web of sins and easily kill
someone strayed from God (the Fly) rather than killing someone that follows the lord
and has his protection (The Wasp and the Wasp's stinger). Satan is scared of God and
his power, and will only attack those who do not follow God, The ones who follow
God will have eternal happiness and glory.
The spider spins a web to trap those who fall easily. The wasp was able to evade the
web, just as Adam obeyed God. Eve, like the fly, fell for the devil's tricks. The fly died
Just as Eve's purity died.