From our contemporary perspective, it reads like a traditional Elizabethan love
sonnet (though it’s composed of 12 lines instead of 14). Compared to Bradstreet’s
earlier discourses on science, religion, and politics, it is written in a relatively plain
style and unabashedly declares her abiding love for her husband. Formally and
thematically, it echoes Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s
Day?,” in which the poet promises immortality to his young lover, and also Sir Philip
Sidney’s sonnet “My True Love Hath My Heart,” which celebrates a perfectly
balanced marital union from the woman’s perspective.
Seventeenth-century readers, however, familiar with Puritan theology and the
tricks, tropes, and conceits of metaphysical poetry could read her poem as a
rhetorical argument intended to persuade them of her position on the schism that
had threatened to tear apart the colony at Hutchinson’s trial. Bradstreet’s poem
speaks obliquely to the competing beliefs on how to conduct one’s life on earth
given the contradictory nature of Puritanism: even though God had predetermined,
or elected, those who would attain salvation, one still had to conduct one’s life on
earth so as to prepare to receive grace, or salvation, in the hereafter. The early
American historian Edmund Morgan coined the term “the Puritan dilemma” to
describe this conundrum:
Puritanism required that a man devote his life to seeking salvation but told him he
was helpless to do anything but evil. Puritanism required that he rest his whole
hope in Christ but taught him that Christ would utterly reject him unless before he
was born God had foreordained his salvation. Puritanism required that man refrain
from sin but told him he would sin anyhow.
The extent to which individual Puritans pinned their hopes on being counted among
the elect is impossible to underestimate. Puritans engaged in a continual and
exacting introspection in which all personal and national events were interpreted as
signs of their readiness to receive grace. For example, when she was 14 years old,
Anne fell in love with her father’s assistant, Simon Bradstreet, whom she married
two years later. Believing such feelings were sinful outside of marriage, she prayed
unremittingly to be rid of her carnal lust. When she fell ill that same year with
smallpox, she viewed it as God’s punishment for her sinful ways.
In “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” written many years later, God doesn’t make
an explicit appearance. Instead of painstakingly estimating whether she is worthy to
receive grace, Bradstreet estimates her power to reciprocate love. What’s changed
in the intervening two decades? Since her arrival in America at age 18, she had given
birth to all but one of her eight children, buried numerous relatives and friends, and
singly managed a pioneer homestead while her husband traveled on colonial
business throughout New England and across the Atlantic.
During this period, she found time to write poems and letters, and to keep a diary.
Instead of the religious conversion narratives many Puritan women wrote, her work
as a whole tells of her conversion to the joys and suffering of ordinary life. After The
Tenth Muse was published, Bradstreet turned to poetic subjects that seemingly
show her fulfilling a Puritan woman’s duty—raising (and burying) children,
contemplating God, and loving her parents and husband. Yet within the context of
being dutiful and celebrating ordinary joys, these more domestic poems display her
capacity to argue theology and invent lasting art.
In “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” Bradstreet persuasively presents her views on
how to resolve the basic contradictions of Puritan faith—in other words, how to live
in this world while keeping an eye on heaven.
In the opening quatrain, her ability to reason, to construct an argument, commands
center stage. Turning to anaphora, a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a
sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them
emphasis (and perhaps in a nod to future computer programmers), she opens with a
series of logical “If then” statements:
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,
Compare with me, ye women if you can.
She boasts that if a core human paradox is true (“If ever two were one,”)—if it is
possible that love can wholly join two singular individuals—then she and her
husband have achieved a perfectly balanced union. Her husband is as loved by her
as she is by him. Bradstreet breaks the symmetry of her syntax and argument in the
second couplet, in which, instead of addressing her husband, she directly addresses
“women,” the same audience to whom Anne Hutchinson was punished for
dispensing spiritual advice: “If ever wife was happy in a man, / Compare with me, ye
women, if you can.” Unlike Hutchinson, she can address other women publicly
because she does so within the context of being a loving Puritan wife.
Having established the value of her love through the power to reason in the first
quatrain, she offers proof that its value is beyond compare in the second quatrain
through the use of monetary metaphors and scriptural imagery:
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
In claiming to value her husband’s love more than “whole mines of gold,” Bradstreet
echoes Psalm 19 (“The judgments of the Lord are truth; / they are righteous
altogether, / And more to be desired than gold,”), a reference that would have
resonated with Scripture-steeped 17th-century audiences, yet she subverts the
imagery’s traditional Puritan religious use. Instead of instructing readers to prize
their love for God more than material riches, she instructs them to prize earthly love
more than earthly riches. Because her emphasis might have seemed blasphemous,
or at least risqué, to fellow Puritans, it would have definitely snagged their attention.
With that in hand, she begins to shape her monetary metaphor into a metaphysical
conceit, which she uses to resolve the duality, or value, of earthly and heavenly love,
husband and wife, and God and man.
Thus, in the second quatrain, the monetary imagery with which she extends the
metaphor (“the riches that the East doth hold” and “the mines of gold”), coupled
with the scriptural imagery, inflate the value of her human love by giving it religious
significance. The riches from the mythic East most likely refer to the equally mythic,
godly society on earth that she is devoted to building. And water (that “rivers that
cannot quench”) was a common figure of speech for salvation, or union with Christ.
Loving her husband, then, is a spiritual as well as an earthly reward. Her nimble
weaving of religious and monetary language implies that just as there is no greater
reward for humanity than receiving Christ’s love, there is no greater reward for her
(“Nor ought but love from thee give recompense”) than receiving her husband’s
love.
Interestingly, ending the eighth couplet on an unstressed rhyme (“recompense”)
creates a hesitancy that musically emphasizes the inadequacy she feels in finding a
way to compensate, or “repay,” her husband’s love. She turns to heaven, something
greater than herself, for his reward:
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
The final couplet completes the poem’s theological argument by claiming that it is
possible to realize, rather than transcend, duality through achieving a balance
between earthly and heavenly love. Deeply felt human love, she seems to be saying,
is a kind of salvation, one so fulfilling here on earth that she hopes it is a glimpse of
the hereafter where it will live forever (“That when we live no more, we may live
ever.”). As Bradstreet scholar Robert D. Richardson Jr. writes: “The union of the
lovers in eternity is the outcome of their earthly love. . . . As the poem expresses it,
the transition from this world to the next involves not renunciation, not a change
even, but an expansion.”
This is tricky religious ground that mirrors Hutchinson’s faith in a living spirit that
works within and outside of the religious traditions—in daily family life—a spirit
that is inseparable from Christ’s spirit. At the same time, Bradstreet’s hope that
marital love is a foretaste of heaven’s love argues against one of the primary beliefs
for which Hutchinson was excommunicated—that on dying, the body is not
resurrected with the soul.