Emanuela Kucik on Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband"

As college students, we are often surrounded by misguided and corrupted ideas of love, ideas based largely in physicality and materiality. Therefore, reading poems about true love is both refreshing and enlightening. However, Anne Bradstreet’s To My Dear and Loving Husband takes the concept of true love to new levels in its last two lines by taking marital love beyond Earth and into an eternal realm. The poem’s preceding lines lead up to this concluding idea of having a mortal love so complete that its strength outlasts death and becomes immortal.
In the poem’s opening line the speaker immediately conveys the intensity of the love between her husband and herself by stating that they were as one being. The speaker continues to describe the strength of the love they shared in the next three lines by stating that she loved her husband as much as possible and that she was as happy with him as any wife could be with a husband. In the fifth and sixth lines, the speaker begins using objects to illustrate the depth of her love for her husband by saying that she loves him more than gold and values his love more than material wealth. In the seventh and eighth lines the speaker elaborates on her love by saying that not only is it unquenchable, but the only thing that could possibly compensate for it is love from her husband; once again invoking the idea that their love is unmatched by anything of solely material value. In the ninth and tenth lines the speaker ceases discussing the magnitude of her love for her husband and asserts that since she could never repay him for his love, she hopes that God rewards him for loving her so completely. All of these ideas work towards the climax of the poem, the concluding lines in which the speaker tells her husband that they should spend their lives loving each other so that when they die their love will live on, thus allowing them to metaphorically live forever because their love in life was so strong.
While this poem clearly pertains specifically to one woman and her husband, I also see the poem as a sort of inspiration, or hope, for others. In this poem, true love is manifest and therefore the poem births a seed of hope in the reader that such a love is possible not only for the poem’s speaker and her husband, but perhaps for the reader as well. Just as it is easy to feel despair after reading poems such as William Blake’s The Sick Rose, it is easy to feel cheerful and hopeful about the possibility of romance after reading Bradstreet’s To My Dear and Loving Husband.