It is hard to sympathize with a person when you have no idea where he or she is coming from or what they are going through. Similar experiences allow us to extend our sincere appreciation and understanding for another human being's situations and trials of life. Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" expresses the emotions that Bradstreet felt when her most intimate thoughts were published to the world without her consent. In this poem, Anne Bradstreet uses the conceit of the relationship between mother and child, a common situation that many people can sympathize with and understand.

The average person would not see the cause for distress that Bradstreet feels in this situation. She had written a collection of poetry of personal reflection and did not intend to share these poems with anyone else. Many people would wonder why she would be disturbed about these works being printed when they had brought many people pleasurable reading and had brought Bradstreet herself much personal fame. Therefore, Bradstreet cannot just write a straightforward poem to tell how she feels about her stolen thoughts. Unless the reader happens to be a writer, he or she would not be able to sympathize wi

Bradstreet mentions the mistakes in her work and the shame she feels at not being able to perfect the work before it was published. As Rosamond Rosenmeier acknowledges in Anne Bradstreet Revisited, the term child includes "an implied or stated standard of maturity or fulfillment that is not yet reached" (41). She compares her work to a child clothed in "rags" (line 5). She feels shame that the "errors were not lessened" (line 6) and refers to her work as a "rambling brat" who is "one unfit for light" (lines 8-9). Because her "child" was taken so suddenly and without her knowledge, she had no time to correct its mistakes. She feels a sense of shame, just like a mother would feel shame for her child who has misbehaved or a child whose mother has not had proper time to train them in the correct way to behave. Her shame is not necessarily in the fact that she may have made some mistakes in her writing. A mother feels her most shame, not when a child misbehaves, but when a child misbehaves in the sight of others. This reflects badly on the mother- making it look like she does not discipline or try to correct her child. In this same manner, Bradstreet does not feel shame because she made mistakes, because everyone makes mistakes, but instead because the mistakes in her works were made public so that "all may judge" (line 6).

th Bradstreet in this matter. Instead, Bradstreet had to use a situation in which her readers could comprehend the many emotions she experienced. No doubt, many women read her poetry, and the majority of women during that time were, or would one day be mot

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Approximate Word count = 1068
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)