Anne Bradstreet's To My Dear And Loving Husband

Anne Bradstreet’s poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband” was written between the years of 1641 and 1643. “Not until the year 1678, six years after Bradstreet’s death, the poem was published” (Ruby 228). A poet with Puritan beliefs, this poem uses the religious language, hyperbolic metaphors, paradox, and antiquated diction and style in order to explain the devotion and love for her husband as she struggles with the Puritan way of life along with the uncertainty of her reassurance of love. Reading this poem over and over for countless hours I came to the conclusion that there are two messages that Bradstreet was trying to project in this poem, the Literal way and the sarcastic way. The Literal way clearly shows the readers the love of a wife for her husband. She explains that he is the most amazing man that any woman would want. Above all women that had ever loved a man, she loves him more

“Thy love is such I can no way repay. The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray” (226). Lines 9 and 10 show a Feminist criticism point of view, these verses make the suggestion that the wife may be inferior to her husband, implying the husband’s superiority. Line 3, “If ever wife was happy in a man” (226), in which the word wife is used but man rather than husband is employed. The word wife in the line means belonging and dependency while man represents strength and independence. Ann Woodlief, the author of the biography of “Anne Bradstreet” states “Anne was viewed as an intriguingly feminist writer, merging her sometimes overtly sexual imagery with the concepts of both her love for God and for her husband and family” (Woodlief 2015). This eventually led to a more in depth examination of her writings by feminist critics “in the mid-20th century” of her individualist take on more traditional