In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet.
Manuel Rodríguez Fernández B1
In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet.
Anne, as the speaker of the poem, begins describing her feelings at that sad moment. She feels sorry for her grandchild because she thinks that God took her so soon. The repetition of the word “farewell” at the beginning of the first three verses emphasizes the tragic situation that she is living. However, the way how she comes to terms with death in this first part of the poem is really unusual for a Puritan person. She thinks that her grandchild should not have death as soon as she did, in some way she is saying that God did not let her grandchild leave and she complains about it in this first part of the poem. This attitude about death is quite different from the usual Puritan view of death, that accept it as a part of the life that God has prepared to them, so the poet resists to accept the common view of death (common for the Puritans). The comparison with the flower in the third lane evidences this though. As the poem advances, Anne says that she should not complain more about her lost, because she is gone and nothing can bring her back.
On the other hand, if we go deep in the second part of the poem we can see a change on the poet´s mind. Her religious thoughts “develop”, in some way, coming back to her traditional ones. However, in this second stanza she plays with the metaphor of time, she makes a relation between the pass of time and the death, the end. In some way she tries to say that everything that starts have to end sooner or later. The first part of the second stanza refers continuously to the pass of time related with the nature, as we can see in the first verses where she does a metaphor with trees, plums, apples, corn and grass. With this, she want to describe the cycle in the nature, where the death come when there is not more time to life, when the lifetime expire. With that imagery of nature I think that the speaker show some kind of
In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet.
Anne, as the speaker of the poem, begins describing her feelings at that sad moment. She feels sorry for her grandchild because she thinks that God took her so soon. The repetition of the word “farewell” at the beginning of the first three verses emphasizes the tragic situation that she is living. However, the way how she comes to terms with death in this first part of the poem is really unusual for a Puritan person. She thinks that her grandchild should not have death as soon as she did, in some way she is saying that God did not let her grandchild leave and she complains about it in this first part of the poem. This attitude about death is quite different from the usual Puritan view of death, that accept it as a part of the life that God has prepared to them, so the poet resists to accept the common view of death (common for the Puritans). The comparison with the flower in the third lane evidences this though. As the poem advances, Anne says that she should not complain more about her lost, because she is gone and nothing can bring her back.
On the other hand, if we go deep in the second part of the poem we can see a change on the poet´s mind. Her religious thoughts “develop”, in some way, coming back to her traditional ones. However, in this second stanza she plays with the metaphor of time, she makes a relation between the pass of time and the death, the end. In some way she tries to say that everything that starts have to end sooner or later. The first part of the second stanza refers continuously to the pass of time related with the nature, as we can see in the first verses where she does a metaphor with trees, plums, apples, corn and grass. With this, she want to describe the cycle in the nature, where the death come when there is not more time to life, when the lifetime expire. With that imagery of nature I think that the speaker show some kind of