Bradstreet's To My Dear And Loving Husband

Poetry is oftentimes associated with the subjects of love and romance. Poets throughout the ages have used this medium to express their deepest emotions in the most eloquent of ways. Whether the poet is a man or woman is irrelevant. Poets of both genders have succeeded in expressing a heartfelt love to another with a poetic language that speaks volumes in a relatively short amount of text. Two poets from two separate eras each wrote a poem with just such a theme. Anne Bradstreet in “To My Dear and Loving Husband” and Edgar Allan Poe in “Annabel Lee” created magic by writing these poems that express a love for another that transcends time and place.

Anne Bradstreet's poem, To My Dear and Loving Husband, shows her profound love and undying affection for her husband. For a Puritan woman who is supposed to be reserved, Bradstreet makes it her obligation to enlighten her husband of her devotion. She conveys this message through her figurative language and declarative tone by using imagery, repetition, and paradoxes.

The poem “To my Dear and Loving Husband” by Anne Bradstreet, is not just an exceedingly felt expression of a wife’s marital love and commitment to her husband, as it is about a puritan women who is supposed to be reserved but she makes it her obligation to enlighten her husband of her devotion. A thorough analysis of the poem’s paradox, hyperbole, imagery and repetition reveals how she conveys her message.

Bradstreet wanted her poetry to remain private. She accepted her poetry unconditionally, like a mother accepts her child, because if she tried to correct the poem's flaws more flaws appeared. A distinct expression of Bradstreet true love to her

William Shakespeare once wrote, “the course of true love never did run smooth.” Shakespeare’s philosophy, extracted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, appropriately pertains to the storylines of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and Alfred Noyes “The Highwayman”. Within Poe’s “Annabel Lee”, the narrator depicts of the true love that he and his “Annabel Lee” harbored but it evokes resentful angels to pursue and murder his lover. As within Noyes’ “The Highwayman”, the narrator portrays of a love so pure between the highwayman and Bess, the landlord’s daughter, in which Bess willingly sacrifices her life in hopes of saving the highwayman from being killed but

poem wherein she’s revealing her never-ending love, devotion, and appreciation for her spouse. The fact that she was born around the seventeenth century could mean it is puritan culture for women to remain reserved, regardless of how they may truly feel; however, she makes it her obligation to make her husband aware of feelings, whether positive or negative. She uses figurative language and declarative tone through imagery, repetition, and paradoxes to send her message. "To My Dear and Loving Husband" can be interpreted in many ways by many different people depending how it is initially read. This uncertainty allows the poem to be interpreted on a surface level and on a deeper level.

Anne Bradstreet, in her poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband” identifies love and unity between her and her husband during the Puritan literary period. Bradstreet describes the value of her through her husband’s perspective and how she is both greatly valued and prized. Bradstreet uses the anaphora “If ever” many times to persuade the audiences about her love of her husband. Finally, Bradstreet describes the marriage from the Bible’s perspective.

The title, To my Dear and Loving Husband, clearly signifies that this poem was intended for her husband alone. Bradstreet did not live in a time where woman authors would have been very highly respected for their work; this allowed her the opportunity to create very personal pieces because she believed that they would never be published. If Bradstreet had intended for her poetry to become available for the public she would have been forced to write much differently. Bradstreet understood the implications of writing her true emotions and never would have done so if she had not felt that they would have been kept safe from the scrutiny of her fellow puritans. The fear of being ridiculed, banished or killed would have stopped Bradstreet from ever composing poetry for the public as racy as the poems she created for her family especially her husband. Due to the fact that she believed no one would read this poem besides her husband she was able to write more closely to how she truly felt without fear or trepidation, this is apparent in the fact that this particular poem is much different from many of her other poems.

In Bradstreet’s poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband”, Bradstreet mentions the reciprocal love her and her husband share and how she prays that God will realize the strong bond the couple shares and that their love will be ever-lasting and will persevere even after death. Bradstreet stressed how important it was to her to be a good and humble Puritan wife and her poetry exuded the beliefs, values, and ideals of Puritan life.

Compare and contrast the presentation of love and marriage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pride and Prejudice and The Great Gatsby.

“Wish for a Young Wife”, by Theodore Roethke, may seem to be more than just a simple epithalamium, for the way the poet presents his writing compels the reader to question his true intentions. Nevertheless, although it is easy for the reader to trip down this path, a closer reading, in which one pays particular attention to aspects such the poem's imagery, rhyme scheme, meter, and parallelism, allows them to acknowledge that as the poet appreciates his wife and elaborates on what he wants for her, it is in fact the ambiguity of the poem that doubles the effect of his sincerity and love for his young wife.

In Anne Bradstreet’s poems she describes her husband’s love for her by using comparisons of money and gold and again puts herself as the less worthy one of the pair as she does with her parents. Bradstreet feels she will never be able to repay her husband for his love and further goes on in her poem “Another” (239), expressing her desires to be with him and not leave his side until they are divided by death. This particular poem demonstrated not only her true love for her husband, but also demonstrated how even the love she had for her husband was all built upon their beliefs of God. Even though, it is very hard to find individuals who hold their religious beliefs as closely as the Puritans did, there are still couples who display this same marital bond in both their private homes and in Church. This shows that even after all this time has passed, there are still people who blend their

For my first post, I chose Anne Bradstreet’s poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband”. As a wife that remains in love with her husband after 14 years of marriage, I got connected with this poem right away just by reading the title. The author describes her compatibility and love towards her husband right away by saying that she and her husband could be one being. You also can sense the strong bound and how much she appreciates his love “more than gold and all the riches of the East.” (Bradstreet, 1612, pp. 120). She concludes the poem by saying that she and her husband should love each other so strongly while they're alive that they will live forever. I am married to a perfect husband that makes me feel special every day and reminds me how lucky

Anne Bradstreet’s first collections of poems are titled “The Tenth Muse” referring to the mythological Greek goddesses who inspires mortals in specific art. It is clear to see that Anne's faith remained strong during her hardships, and so was her love for children and her husband. A Puritan in thought and lifestyle but also a woman, her

As a Puritan living in Boston in 1678, it was highly unacceptable for a woman to be so open with her feelings. Within her community, “any woman who sought to use her wit, charm, or intelligence …found herself ridiculed, banished, or executed by the Colony’s powerful group of male leaders”(Andregg). “Her domain was to be domestic, separated from the linked affairs of church and state, even ‘deriving her ideas of God from the contemplations of her husband's excellencies,’” according to the BiographyofAnneBradstreet. Even with this knowledge, Bradstreet still took the chance of writing down the love for her husband with words. Another obstacle she was faced with was her struggle for self-importance, when her culture clearly valued God above anyone else. Love during the Puritan era was meant only to occur between God and oneself, and people were not permitted to write about feelings for another person. Love is a powerful thing and can encourage people to do things they normally wouldn’t. In this case, Bradstreet went against everything she knew to express her feelings for her husband.