CC-V A critical appreciation of Anne Bradstreet :The Prologue

 

A Prologue is often considered Anne Bradstreet's personal statement about her role as a female poet in a male-dominated puritan society. She wrote this poem in a time When women were mean to leapt quite and tend to the children and home, i.e. when women were relegated to traditional roles. In the first four stanzas, Bradstreet essentially denigrates her ability as a poet. In the first stanza, the poet writes that she cannot, for example, discuss such things as "wars, of Captains, and of kings" because "My foolish, broken, blemished muse" is not up to that task. She believes that these topics are too "superior" for her pen, and should be written by historians. She admits that her lines are more "obscure" than and she focuses on more personal, intimate matters. In the second stanza, she sadly notes that she does not have the skill of the great French historian and poet, Guillaume Du Bartas Whose work was popular with Puritans because of its emphasis on Christian history. She does not even aspire to be his equal, but rather, to be simple and true to her skill.

        In stanza three, she claims that readers do not expect  fancy words from schoolboys or sweet music from broken instruments, and blames her muse for giving her "broken, blemished" words. In stanza four, the poet alludes to Demosthenes, the famed Greek orator who overcome a lisp to achieve great prestige. She, however, does not feel that it is possible to overcome " a weak or wounded brain". In stanza five, Bradstreet stands up for her right to write poetry. She excoriates those tell her that her hands is better suited for a needle than a " poet's pen" and laments the fact that even if her poems do attain prominence, people will claim that she either stole them or chanced upon them by accident. 

                           In stanza six, she returns to the topic of the Greeks. Bradstreet  explains that the Muses, a group of nine females, Occupy an exalted strata in Greek mythology. Unfortunately, most Greek men were still not particularly Open-minded about women's rights, and instead, " did naught but play the fools and upholds domesticity as a valuable source of verse. As is indicative of her time period, she does not make claim of gender equality or suggest that patriarchy ought to be discarded, but argues that women are capable of producing worthy work, and that critics and readers should offers " some small acknowledgement" for a female poet's right to express herself.

                                      In the last stanza, Bradstreet conveys that she believes her work in humble. Her poems are not "bays" but rather, they are "Thyme or parsley wreaths", which are simple, unimpressive household plants.

                     Thus , the poem is intellectually stimulating because the poet invokes a historical and global context. It is actually a bold assertion of the poet's skill and her right too compose verse  in an era when feminism was far from becoming a political movement.