Anne Bradstreet's To My Dear And Loving Husband

Anne Bradstreet was born in the early 1600s and grew up in an educated and privileged household. She was the most prominent English female poet in North America, and the first to be published in England (Kennedy and Gioia, 2013). She was also a devout Puritan and it was one of her goals to show that she could fulfill what she considered a woman’s virtue, but still be valued as an intellect and a poet. Being a devout Puritan meant that marriage played a large role in the poet’s life. The Puritans believed that marriage itself was a gift from God, which becomes evident in her poem written in 1678, “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” Anne Bradstreet is a woman who used poetry as a vehicle for going beyond the bounds of her life as a puritan and wife. …show more content…
/ If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. / If ever wife was happy in a man, / Compare with me, ye women if you can,” (Bradstreet, 1678, lines 1-4), Bradstreet makes the strong statement that if two people can be joined completely by love, then she has achieved this with her husband. In the following quatrain she goes on to show that the love they share is beyond any other type of value, through metaphor and imagery. “I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, / Or all the riches that the East doth hold/My love is such that rivers cannot quench, / Nor ought but love from thee give recompense,” (Bradstreet, 1678, lines 5-8). She carefully crafts early metaphor with spiritual imagery here. Emphasizing readers to prize early love more than early riches. There is a careful line to be walked here, in not upsetting her peers (her fellow Puritans) and emphasizing her total love to her