Contrast the personal, domestic register of Bradstreet's poetry with the public, terrifying register of Edwards's sermon, and explain how each writer's purpose and audience shape the figurative language chosen.
Anne Bradstreet, one of the first published poets in the English colonies, wrote poems meant to be read privately or shared among family -- love poems to her husband, reflections written after a house fire destroyed nearly everything she owned. Her voice is personal and sometimes openly doubting: in "Upon the Burning of Our House," she registers real grief over lost possessions before turning, deliberately and with visible effort, toward religious acceptance. That visible effort matters -- the poem is more honest, and more moving, because the doubt is not erased before the faith is stated.
A century later, Jonathan Edwards's 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" occupies the opposite register entirely: public, communal, and designed to provoke terror rather than quiet reflection. Preached during the religious revival known as the Great Awakening, it builds one sustained, escalating image -- sinners held over a pit of fire the way a person holds "a spider, or some loathsome insect," suspended only by God's restraint. Where Bradstreet's figurative language is intimate and personal, Edwards's is a public instrument, engineered sentence by sentence to produce an immediate emotional and physical reaction in a room full of listeners.
Mastery looks like: They can contrast the audience and register of a private and a public colonial text and correctly identify the vehicle and tenor of an extended metaphor.
Common stumbles: Assuming all Puritan writing shares one uniform tone; describing Edwards's extended metaphor only as "scary" without naming the specific comparison it builds and sustains.
See it visually
Interactive, spoken-aloud tools that show this idea in motion.