Captivity
by Louise Erdrich
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See Also
- Louise Erdrich (Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets)
- Louise Erdrich (Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition)
- Louise Erdrich (Dictionary of World Biography: The 20th Century)
- Louise Erdrich (American Indians (Ready Reference series))
- Louise Erdrich (Identities & Issues in Literature)
- Louise Erdrich (Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition)
- Louise Erdrich (Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Louise Erdrich
- First Published: 1984
- Type of Poem: 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 1862 words.)
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