War
War is one of the big subjects of epic poetry. It's what a lot of the famous Greek poets, like the ones our speaker looks back to, wrote about. But it's not her subject, at least not for now. What...
The Pen
In this poem, the idea of the "pen" is mostly a symbol, like when people say that "the pen is mightier than the sword." They don't actually mean you should fight someone who has a sword using a pen...
Tongues
There's actually kind of a weird amount of references to tongues in here, for a pretty short poem. We can think of a couple of reasons why that might be. For one, the "tongue" works as metonymy (a...
The Needle
In this poem, the needle is a big time symbol of prejudice against women, of the ways in which they were restricted in Bradstreet's time. Like in a lot of other cases of figural language in this po...
The Bay Laurel Crown
A crown made of laurel leaves is an ancient and powerful symbol of victory. In this case, it refers specifically to the crown that was given to the best poet in a competition. Have you ever heard o...
Ore and Gold
This is the final image of the poem. Our speaker compares her work to ore (that's the raw rock that you extract gold from) and the work of her nervous male critics to "glist'ring gold." Once again...