To My Dear and Loving Husband

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1678

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“To My Dear and Loving Husband” is a lyric poem written in 12 lines, consisting of six rhyming couplets. A rhyming couplet is a pair of immediately adjacent lines that rhyme with one another; unlike the standard rhyming quatrain format A-B-A-B found in many lyric poems, a rhyming couplet is A-A and has no intervening lines containing a different rhyme-sound. The form of Bradstreet’s poem is therefore A-A-B-B-C-C-D-D-E-E-F-F.

The rhyming couplets in the poem, with no deviation from this form from beginning to end, reflects the subject matter of mutuality and balance in love. Just as she and her husband are “two” (Line 1) people who are now “one” (Line 1), so too are the lines of the poem matched up as pairs that share the same end-sound to form a rhyme. Each couplet is therefore a “marriage” of structural elements, producing a harmony and balance that reflect the marital equipoise that the poem celebrates.

Additionally, with only a few exceptions, the poem is wholly iambic pentameter. In other words, the lines have five metrical feet, each consisting of a one unstressed syllable and a stressed syllable, as in Line 1:

If e | ver two | were one, | then sure | ly we.

Because it pervades the poem, this metrical pattern creates a force and regularity that, combined with the subject matter, contributes to the speaker’s forthright, ardent, tenacious tone. Moreover, the poem’s aural consistency—its rhyme scheme and meter—reflects the stability of the speaker’s feelings and the calm assurance of reciprocity.

Repetition and Conditionals

The poem’s opening lines present a series of conditional statements, or logical assertions divided into two parts: the hypotheses (“If…”) and the conclusion (“then…”). Rather than treating these statements as literal, logical premises, Bradstreet uses them for rhetorical effect: “If ever two were one, then surely we. / If ever man were loved by wife, then thee / If ever wife was happy in a man [...]” (Lines 1-3). This repetition creates a continuity of form in the opening quatrain, emphasizing the speaker’s declarations by creating a delay between her hypotheses and her reassuring conclusions. In using the same form to make the same point in three different ways, the speaker stresses both the mutuality and the strength of the love she and her husband share. Yet Lines 3-4 can be read together as a single conditional, though slightly different. It is not just a logical statement but an imperative and a challenge: “If you other married women think you’re happy, then just try to compare your happiness to mine—you’ll find yourselves lacking.” This conditional both extends the repetition and departs from it through a small but consequential variation.

Hyperbole

The speaker uses hyperbole—or poetic exaggeration—to emphasize the strength of her love and to imbue it with a transcendent quality. She wishes to stress that her love, as well as her husband’s, is extraordinary in various ways. In claiming that she “prize[s]” (Line 5) her husband’s love more than “whole mines of gold” (Line 5, emphasis added) and “all the riches that the East” contains (Line 6, emphasis added), the speaker depicts her husband’s love as worth more than even the most valuable and desired things on earth. Similarly, in describing her love and desire as “such that rivers cannot quench” (Line 7, emphasis added), the speaker suggests her love supersedes even the forces of nature in its boundlessness and strength. Finally, she asks “the heavens” (Line 10) to “reward” (Line 10) her husband, calling upon God himself to give her husband all that he deserves since she, despite her intense love, cannot hope to “repay” (Line 9) him. All these instances of hyperbole embody the idea that their love transcends any mortal scale—and is therefore all the more worthy of celebrating in verse.