"Verses Upon the Burning of Our House," by Anne Bradstreet uses language reminiscent of the Bible, a wistful tone, and an unbroken iambic tetrameter to convey her internal struggle between her lust over material things which should pale in comparison to her love of God. Lines eleven thru twenty express Bradstreet’s strangely content demeanor as she watches “the flame consume [her] dwelling place” (12). Bradstreet’s unbroken iambic tetrameter adds to the strangeness of the piece giving it a sing-song quality not unlike a children’s rhyme. The lines prompt a tone of both melancholy and ultimately acceptance of her circumstance. The most significant of Bradstreet’s tools is the powerful phrasing she employs to convey her message of inner turmoil between her love of the worldly and the spiritual. Her most powerful lines in the section are the concluding couplet where she declares, “He might of all justly bereft/But yet sufficient for us left” (19-20). In this couplet Bradstreet is thanking God for having taken only the things that were never hers. He was justified in taking what he did because it is He who has the power to create and destroy. It is also important to note that she adapted the Bible verse “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” to read “I blest His name that gave and took,” emphasizing her love for her creator (14). More interestingly though, it is coupled with the previous line “and when I could no longer look,” which portrays her feeling of loss and agony (13). The coupling of line thirteen and fourteen heavily stresses Bradstreet’s internal struggle. The tone of the piece is also significant due to its stark contrast with the subject, which offers an interesting insight into Bradstreet’s motive for writing the poem. Perhaps she is attempting to sooth her agony over losing her material possessions by convincing herself that those possessions never act