A Timeless Love Letter By Anne Bradstreet

This poem, a timeless love letter from Anne Bradstreet to a phantom man, dramatizes--or more appropriately, romanticizes--eternal love in every way possible. The voice of the speaker is a woman in love, “If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee. / If ever wife was happy in a man.” (2-3) who seems to start off the first few lines of the poem as a dare. It is as if she is saying, you can try to be happier than me, to claim to be more in love than I: “Compare with me, ye women, if you can.” (4). She goes on to compare her love to material objects, such as gold “I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold,” (5), alluding that his love is worth more than any amount of riches the world has to offer.. She then compares her love to rivers, “My

This pattern continues with the second and third lines “If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee. / If ever wife was happy in a man.” (2-3). The repetitive pattern of “If ever” specifically, “ever” plays into the “everlasting” lost her and her husband have between them. Anne is claiming that she is the happiest, most loved person in the world, and by repeating the first two words of her first claim, she is further solidifying not only her love, but the soundness of her love. The following line, “Compare with me, ye women, if you can.” (3) is the beginning of the BB rhyme, which is intentional because the subject has changed. She is not longer speaking in a narrative, but to an audience of women that she hopes she may describe her love to. She plays off her new subject of attempting to describe this love in ways that will make more sense than her internal descriptions of “if two were one,” (1) by comparing her love to material objects. The purpose of starting a new rhyme scheme (CC) “I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold / Or all the riches that the East doth hold.” (5-6) is to bring attention to the things she is contrasting. Like stated above, she claims her love is worth more than gold, the riches that people hold dear; and she wants these women who cannot compete with her love to know