Burning Of Our House

Puritan religious ideas are found in Anne Bradstreet’s poem “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House”, in which themes of devotion and selfless love for God are present throughout. There are also instances where those religious ideologies clash with the emotional response the speaker of the poem has while watching the burning house; and in this paper I argue that, through allusion to scripture and poetic form, there are comments on the struggle between knowing scripture and actually putting their rules and ideas into practice. The genre of lyric poetry is how these discrepancies are portrayed in a way that must be interpreted through form, and this is how “The Burning of Our House” smoothly introduces questions about faith and
The enjambment here is used because it is one example of many times Bradstreet does this in the poem, in order to give certain lines more urgency and less rhythm. There are seven instances of enjambment in the first twenty-five lines of the fifty-four line poem. With the first half of the poem majorly focusing on her description of the burning of the house, lines such as “Then, coming out, beheld a space/ The flame consume my dwelling place” (11-12) show what the speaker of the poem is tragically more focused and passionate about. If the religious conventions and scripture were to be the most important themes in the poem, the attention would not have been drawn to these tragic lines so
There are allusions to the Bible and lines about thankfulness and the fault of attachment to possessions, which are directly followed by lamentations for what was lost in the fire. When this contradiction occurs, it is an indication that the speaker of the poem was internally questioning the principles she was taught to have, and which have clearly not usurped every part of herself. The form of the poem allows these questions to develop without directly criticizing the strict Puritan