Captivity (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Louise Erdrich
- First Published: 1984
- Type of Work: Narrative
- Genres: Free verse, Poetry, Narrative poetry
- Subjects: Culture, Europe or Europeans, New England, God, Native Americans or American Indians, Seventeenth century, Women, Food, Identity, Puritans or Puritanism
The Poem
“Captivity” is a medium-length narrative poem in free verse, its fifty-eight lines divided into six stanzas which are, respectively, nine, ten, eleven, eight, ten, and ten lines long. The title refers to the subject of the narrative: It is a woman’s story of her capture by a band of American Indians in the seventeenth century. No names are given for the narrator or any of the other characters—the man she identifies as her captor, a woman associated with him, and the narrator’s child and husband. An epigraph, a short quote from Mary Rowlandson’s 1676...
[The entire page is 1662 words long]
