To My Dear and Loving Husband - Blackbird...

Poem explanation Critical essay Work overview Biography Plot summary

To My Dear and Loving Husband

Poetry for Students

Ed Mary Ruby Vol 6 Detroit Gale Group 1999 p227-240 COPYRIGHT 1999 The Gale Group COPYRIGHT 2007Gale

Full Text

To My Dear and Loving Husband

Anne Bradstreet 1678

Author Biography

Poem Text

Poem Summary

Themes

Style

Historical Context

Critical Overview

Criticism

Sources

For Further Study

Page 228 |

ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo was written between 1641 and 1643 by Anne Bradstreet Americarsquos first publishedpoet This poem offers modern readers insights into Puritan attitudes toward love marriage and God In the poemBradstreet proclaims her great love for her husband and his for her She values their love more than any earthly riches andshe hopes that their physical union on earth signifies the continuation of their spiritual union in heaven In this poemBradstreet views earthly love as a sign of spiritual salvation This poem presents a central question in Puritan thought how doonersquos earthly and immortal lives connect

This poem was first published in 1678 six years after Bradstreetrsquos death in an edition of her poems entitled Several PoemsCompiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning Full of Delight During Bradstreetrsquos lifetime there were almost nowomen writers because education was rarely wasted on daughters Over half of the women in colonial America wereilliterate Bradstreet was very privileged she but also courageous and dedicated to her art Despite her culturersquos biasesBrad-street wrote poetry that was widely acclaimed and remains relevant today for its emotional honesty and wisdom

Author Biography

Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley around 1612 in England to a Puritan family Her father Thomas Dudley

Anne Bradstreet

was steward to the Earl of Lincoln Because of Dudleyrsquos high position his daughter received an excellent education In 1630she moved with her parents and husband Simon Bradstreet to the Massachusetts Bay Colony where her husband andfather served as governors of the settlement As a New England colonist Bradstreet encountered a life of hardship to whichshe was unaccustomed Despite illness and the difficulties of raising her eight children in the American wilderness she foundtime to write By the age of thirty she had composed most of her poetry When her brother-in-law John Woodbridgereturned to England in 1647 he took with him the manuscript of Bradstreetrsquos poems Without her knowledge he publishedthem titling the collection The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America The volume met with immediate success inLondon Surprised by the workrsquos reception but disturbed by its un-polished state Bradstreet began to revise the poems

Page 229 |

Some of these alterations were lost however when her home burned in 1666 Bradstreet died in 1672 and six yearsafterward the revisions along with a number of new pieces were published under the title Several Poems Compiled withGreat Variety of Wit and Learning Full of Delight

Poem Text

If ever two were one then surely weIf ever man were lovrsquod by wife then theeIf ever wife was happy in a manCompare with me ye women if you canI prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold 5Or all the riches that the East doth holdMy love is such that Rivers cannot quenchNor ought but love from thee give recompenceThy love is such I can no way repayThe heavens reward thee manifold I pray 10Then while we live in love letrsquos so persevereThat when we live no more we may live ever

Poem Summary

Line 1

The first line establishes the couplersquos complete union The speakerrsquos confident use of the words ldquosurelyrdquo and ldquowerdquo impliesthat she can speak for her husband about his feelings because they exactly match her own In lines 1 and 2 the poet omits animplied last word ldquoarerdquo Bradstreet may omit this word to make her rhymes and meter work to stress the couple in the endwords ldquowerdquo and ldquotheerdquo (you) or because the linesrsquo meanings are clear without it

Line 2

Line 2 repeats the syntax of line 1 This repetition of structure serves to emphasize the poetrsquos point this union in marriage ismore harmonious and passionate than all others across all of time The repetition of ldquoeverrdquo points the reader toward a keytheme in this poem the passage of time The repetition of the phrase ldquoIf thenrdquo highlights the poetrsquos intent to persuade heraudience of the truth of her claims Rather than exclaiming ldquoHoney I love you so muchrdquo the poet conveys her message in a

phrase usually reserved for arguing philosophical truths Bradstreet reinforces the authority of these two lines throughpunctuation Whereas all of the subsequent couplets form one sentence ending with the second line lines 1 and 2 are eachcomplete sentences with periods at the end In other words Bradstreet begins her poem with two bold independentdeclarative statements in order to underscore her confidence in this union of two strong independent spirits

Lines 3-4

In these lines Bradstreet turns from addressing her husband (ldquotheerdquo) to address other women with ldquoye womenrdquo She daresother women to even try to compare their marital happiness with hers Like the end words of the first two lines the end

words of these lines rhyme to form a couplet Unlike the first couplet lines 3 and 4 form just one sentence

Lines 5-6

Having compared her love to other peoplersquos relationships the speaker now addresses her husband again (ldquothy loverdquo) andcompares how much she values his love to the most valued goods on earth gold and riches It is common for poets andlovers to place greater value on love than money While boasting of the extraordinary value of their love she humbly restrictsits value to a human scale of worth so as not to insult her Lord Gold is only valuable in human society it has no value afterdeath Bradstreet may capitalize ldquoMinesrdquo simply to emphasize vast wealth Until almost the early nineteenth century rules forcapitalization were not standardized and writers often capitalized nouns for emphasis

Line 7

Shifting from how much she values this earthly love the speaker expresses the scope and insatiability of her desire Byarguing that ldquoRivers cannot quenchrdquo her love the speaker implies that her love is an ongoing thirst that no amount of watercan slake The metaphors of thirst and rivers introduce the idea that the speakerrsquos desire can be neither stopped norquantified (as riches can) These ldquonaturalrdquo earthly images of never-ending desire prepare the way for the speakerrsquos wish foreternal heavenly love later in the poem

Line 8

This line can be paraphrased as ldquothe only thing on earth that equals or compensates my love for you is yours for merdquo Bychoosing the word ldquorecompencerdquo Bradstreet returns to the metaphor of monetary exchange This couplet is the only one inthe poem that uses a slant rhyme The words ldquoquenchrdquo and ldquorecompencerdquo do not rhyme exactly as the other end words doBradstreet may have paired these slightly ill-fitting sounds to parallel the mismatch of ideas since comparing love to thirst andthen money in the same sentence creates a mixed metaphor

Lines 9-10

Line 9 expands the idea in line 8 the speaker cannot ldquorepayrdquo her husbandrsquos love only heaven can The first four words ofthis line rhyme with

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Media Adaptations

An audio cassette titled Anne Bradstreet was released by EverettEdwards in 1976The Courage to Write III Pioneering American Poets was released as audio cassettes by the University ofWisconsin Board of Regents in 1996Three Hundred Years of Great American Poetry from Anne Bradstreet Through Stephen Crane a sound tapereel is part of the Caedmonrsquos ldquoGreat American Poetryrdquo series

those of line 7 ldquoMy love is suchrdquo and thereby link the previous couplet to this one through sound Bradstreet connects thecouplets because both develop the metaphor of love as riches This rhyme reminds the reader of the spousesrsquo mirroredreciprocated love That mirror however implies an exact exchange that lines 7 though 10 contradict That is the speakerimplies she cannot repay her husbandrsquos love exactly perhaps because she is a woman and therefore unequal to men Theonly greater source of love is God so the speaker prays in line 10 that ldquothe heavensrdquo will reward her husbandrsquos loveldquomanifoldrdquo or in multiple and diverse ways Note that the word ldquorewardrdquo continues the metaphor of monetary exchangeBradstreet also invokes the phrase ldquoour heavenly rewardrdquo which means that one will be rewarded for good works in lifewith eternal life in heaven

Page 230 |

Lines 11-12

The closing couplet of this almost-sonnet has stirred much controversy among scholars Though in line 11 the speaker merelyurges the lovers to ldquopersevererdquo or persist in loving while they live in line 12 she dares to wish that their love live on foreverBradstreetrsquos wish that love outlive death follows from the poemrsquos argument that ldquoholy matrimonyrdquo on earth is spiritual andmay be the vehicle of salvation In Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet Robert Richardson sees earthly and heavenly loveas continuous ldquoAs the poem expresses it the transition from this world to the next involves not renunciation not a change

even but an expansionrdquo Many critics observe that Bradstreetrsquos poems detail great love for the creatures and experiences ofthis world but then reassert a Puritan devotion to spiritual existence in their final lines and images Some critics view theseendings as insincere attempts to reconcile wayward feelings with Puritan dogma Other critics regard these dualistic poems asprayers in which the speaker explores the limits of her faith in order to reaffirm it more truthfully in the end However oneinterprets the last lines of ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo this poem closes on a heartfelt note In one sense as you readthe poemrsquos lines Bradstreetrsquos wish for immortality is granted

Themes

Wealth

The speaker of this poem discusses her love in terms of income and wealth for two different reasons Sometimes she usesthe wealth that is valued on earth to show how insignificant material possessions are when compared to her feelings She alsouses financial imagery to compare her love with that of her husbandrsquos The first use appears in lines 5 and 6 with her mentionof ldquomines of goldrdquo and ldquothe riches that the East doth holdrdquo She brings up these extreme examples of wealth in order tobelittle them and show that even though they represent shocking excesses of material fortune in worldly terms they areworth less to her than the love of her husband The next set of images from the world of commerce takes money a little moreseriously The poem makes frequent use of nouns that are usually associated with financial transactions ldquorecompencerdquoldquorepayrdquo and ldquorewardrdquo all suggest resources passing from one party to another usually to balance out something equallyworthy passing in the other direction This technique is effective for Bradstreetrsquos purpose which is to measure the quantity ofher love against the quantity of her husbandrsquos Money after all is just a way to measure the material possessions of oneperson against the possessions of everyone else if everyone on earth owned the same amount then exchanging money wouldbe pointless According to the financial balance sheet that is presented here the speaker of this poem feels quite satisfied thatthe love she gives out to her husband is paid back to her but she fears that he is not being given a fair

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Topics for Further Study

This poem uses rhyming couplets to steadily emphasize the speakerrsquos love for her husband But what if he feels exactlythe opposite Write a poem in this style about a husband who hates his wife Try to use the same iambic pentameterrhythmStudy Puritan life in America during the 1600s Not much is written about personal relationships but find out what youcan and make some assumptions Based on the available evidence explain whether you think Bradstreetrsquos relationshipwith her husband was typical for a Puritan of her timeOver the years the power has been lost from familiar associations like ldquoMines of goldrdquo ldquoriches of the Eastrdquo and lovethat ldquoRivers cannot quenchrdquo What fresh new expressions could be used in their place to make readers realize howextreme the speakerrsquos love is

Page 231 |

repayment for all that he does for her The balance of their transaction is off because as she humbly admits her ability islimited Her hope is that the love he gives her will receive an equal return when he dies goes to heaven and receives thereward that she sees herself as being too weak to provide

Time

The concept of time introduces several points of contradiction into this poem and it is these contradictions that make ldquoToMy Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo as interesting as it is The first two couplets with their heavy reliance on the phrase ldquoIf everrdquo imply the concept of eternity which is an idea that is often associated with the romantic conception of love Eternity isoften used to show as this poem is attempting to show the supernatural power that love has But these lines do not actuallysay anything about the speakerrsquos love lasting forever only that the love between her and her husband are better than otherloves throughout eternity ldquoEverrdquo here says nothing about how long their love will last only that there has not been another to

match it throughout history To claim a love that lasts beyond death would contradict the principles of Bradstreetrsquos strongPuritan faith which held that personal relations were supposed to end with death along with all other things of the earth Thespirit would then be able to proceed to heaven unencumbered As a matter of fact line 11 does put a time limit on lovesaying that it lasts only ldquowhile we liverdquo and implying that love will therefore expire when life ends The last line thoughcontradicts this by saying that love dies not end with death but that it can overpower death causing life to last for eternityCritics who are familiar with Anne Bradstreetrsquos strongly held religious beliefs doubt that she would contradict the teachings ofher faith by saying that love lasts eternally or even worse that it would be love of others and not Godrsquos grace that createseternal life These critics soften the meaning of the word ldquothatrdquo in the last line making worldly love and eternal love twoseparate things with no real connection If that were Bradstreetrsquos point a clearer way to say it might have been ldquoin love letrsquosso persever And when we live no more we will live foreverrdquo

Sex Roles

It is clear that the speaker of this poem relies on her husband for her sense of who she is this idea is present in the first linewhich tells readers that these two are one The identity that the speaker willingly assigns to herself is ldquowiferdquo In lines 2 and 3using parallel phrasings she expresses both her love and then her contentedness with the relationship in terms of being a wifeBoth times however she using the word ldquomanrdquo not the corresponding term ldquohusbandrdquo this grants him a degree ofindependence from the relationship that she does not give herself The imbalance in this marriage with her unquenchablethirst for his love has been called an indicator of the unevenness of gender roles in Puritan culture in which the wife isvulnerable and subservient to the husband A similar type of vulnerability though has been expressed by men throughout thecenturies it is the identifying trait of romantic love a tradition handed down from the chivalrous code of King Arthur and theKnights of the Round Table since the sixth century In a sense the fact that the speaker of this poem sacrifices her will forlove is a claim for the mental and emotional abilities of women At a time when women were dismissed lightly by men asbeing ignorant and shallow Bradstreet demonstrates through her poem a depth and profundity that challenges thestereotypes assigned to her gender

Style

ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo is written in iambic pentameter which means that five iambs occur in a row in most linesof the poem A few variations in this rhythmic pattern keep the meter from sounding monotonous If we mark iambs asunstressed then stressed syllables here is how the syllables in the first line are stressed

If e ver two were one then sure ly we

Page 232 |

In addition to regular rhythms each pair of lines rhymes These rhymed pairs are called couplets In this poem the coupletsreinforce the theme of love between two people There are twelve lines in the poem It is just two lines short of being asonnet A traditional form the sonnet has 14 lines follows a regular rhyme scheme and rhythmmdash usually iambic pentametermdashand often discusses love or mortality This poem is also written in first person point of view using ldquoIrdquo Although speakersin poems and stories often represent fictional characters or personas critics agree that Bradstreet speaks as herself in thisand many other poems

To emphasize the wife and husbandrsquos mutual love Bradstreet uses internal rhyme rhymes within the lines and parallelismphrases with parallel or repeated syntax The rhymed and repeated phrases reinforce two ideas one that each spousersquos lovemirrors the otherrsquos and two that this earthly love mirrors eternal love The first two lines employ a parallel phrase ldquoIf ever were thenrdquo The third word in each line signals key themes ldquotwo man wiferdquo The phrase ldquoIf thenrdquo is also a rhetoricaltool used to persuade an audience of an argumentrsquos truth Through such repetition of parallel persuasive phrases Bradstreettries to convince both the reader and her husband that their great love may signify salvation Bradstreet uses additionalparallel rhymed phrases in lines 7 and 9 ldquoMy love is suchrdquo and ldquoThy love is suchrdquo and lines 11 and 12 ldquoThen while we liverdquoand ldquoThat when we liverdquo

Historical Context

Anne Bradstreet was the first significant poet living in New England which developed into the United States She came fromEngland to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 as part of the Great Migration of Puritans Many brief histories ofAmerica refer to the fact that the Puritans who left

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Compare amp Contrast

1678 Only eleven of the original thirteen colonies had been established Virginia Massachusetts New YorkMaryland Rhode Island Connecticut Delaware New Hampshire North Carolina South Carolina and New JerseyWilliam Penn purchased Pennsylvania from the Indians in 1682 and Georgia was added in 1732

Today No new states have been added since Alaska and Hawaii in 1959 although Puerto Rico is always considereda possible candidate

1678 England was alive with talk about a ldquoPopish Plotrdquo which supposedly was a plan by the Catholic Church tomassacre Protestants burn London and assassinate Charles II Historians doubt that such a thing existed but thePapistsrsquo Disabling Act that was passed kept Roman Catholics out of Parliament until 1829

Today The Roman Catholic Pope is recognized as a statesman and welcomed with enthusiasm throughout the world

1678 Dutch traders sold approximately 15000 slaves from Angola in the American colonies each year It would bealmost two hundred years until the Civil War was fought to free the descendants of these slaves

Today Racial divisions in America reflect the fact that American society has included slavery for nearly twice as longas it has been without it

England did so to avoid religious persecution leaving the impression that they were a small band with unusual religiouspractices that the government decided suddenly to hunt down and destroy Actually the roots of Puritanism run deep within

Page 233 |

the Church of England and far back into English history The defining characteristic of the Church of England also referred to

as the Anglican church is its opposition to the Catholic rules that require obedience to the pope Back before 597 ADancient Celtic religious practices were followed in England but in that year Catholic missionaries from Rome arrived AsCatholicism grew it created as any idea brought into a new environment will a unique blend with the religious notions thatpreceded it By the sixteenth century Catholicism was clearly the single most dominating religion in Western civilization (aterm used to indicate the societies of western Europe) but many people were unhappy They felt that Roman Catholicceremonies placed too much emphasis on the officers of the church inserting levels of cardinals bishops and even the popebetween ordinary people and God In Germany Martin Luther led the Protestant Reformation when he published his Ninety-five Theses in 1517 objecting to the Churchrsquos practicesmdashespecially the way that it collected money In France JohnCalvinrsquos Institutes of the Christian Religion which emphasized the virtues of hard work and supported a doctrine ofpredestination became the most influential work of the Protestant movement In England King Henry VIII tried to have hismarriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled by the Catholic Church and when his request was refused he created the separateChurch of England making the ruler of England the head of the church When his daughter by Catherine Mary Tudorbecame queen in 1553 she tried to restore Catholicism in England executing many Protestants and forcing hundreds moreto leave the country She died in 1558 and her sister Elizabeth took the throne Queen Elizabeth restored the Church ofEngland that Mary had for the most part dismantled About a sixth of the Protestants returning from exile though did notagree with Elizabethrsquos policies feeling that she was giving too many concessions to the Catholic Church They felt that theChurch of Rome was corrupting the purity of human relations with God and so they gained the name Puritans

The Puritansrsquo doctrine emphasized the belief that all humans are sinners and that man cannot understand God Their beliefswere unpopular and the ideas of religious tolerance that we are familiar with mostly because of the influence of their

experience were unknown then The fortune of English politics shifted between Catholics and Protestants but neither sideliked Puritans who were tortured and jailed With the development of New England Puritans saw a chance to get awayfrom the persecution they suffered at home In 1606 the Virginia Company was organized as a functional corporation todevelop the resources of the new land they settled Jamestown the first European settlement in New England in 1607 In1623 the Reverend John White of Dorchester arrived in America with about fifty Puritans but the land where they arrivedwas too hard to cultivate so most went back to England leaving a few who with the help of the Indians settled SalemMassachusetts In 1628 White founded a new corporation the New England Company which he later renamed theMassachusetts Bay Company for legal reasons They received permission from the government to establish the territory ofMassachusetts and most important to run the government of the colony from Massachusetts not from England TheMassachusetts Territory ranged for about sixty miles north and south of Salem (a western boundary was not set becausethey believed America only extended a few miles past the Atlantic ocean anyway) In 1630 eleven ships owned by theMassachusetts Bay Company carried Puritans to America On the flagship the Arabella were seventeen-year-old AnneBradstreet her husband and her parents

The Puritans saw America as a broad empty wilderness that was open for development They did not see the indigenouspeople the Indians as being fully human but as ldquosavagesrdquo and therefore it did not bother them to encroach upon theIndiansrsquo land The Puritans who had gotten used to unfamiliar sometimes deadly experiences since the first moments oftheir sea voyage were for the most part disappointed when they arrived in the New World They had concentrated on therich fertility and open spaces of the land and found themselves cultured and educated urban people for the most part facedwith clearing trees plowing soil and building houses Thomas Dudly the first deputy governor of the colony inMassachusetts and the father of Anne Bradstreet explained in a letter back to England that accounts of wealth and easyliving in the colony were often exaggerated ldquoIn a word we yet enjoy little to be envied but endure much to be pitied in thesickness and mortality of our peoplerdquo Before farms were developed Puritans went hungry when the first winter came theweather was harsher than they could have guessed and sicknesses that they did not recognize infected the colony Evencommon illnesses were deadly because of a shortage of medication Faith kept many working along and even more stayed

Page 234 |

because they feared that the ocean voyage back would be just as bad as the one that had brought them Eventually citiessprung up and a culture arose although it was still more than a hundred years until the colonies fought the Revolutionary Warand formed their own independent country

Critical Overview

Most critics observe a distinct split between Anne Bradstreetrsquos early and later poetry The early poetry published in the1650 volume The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America concerns public formal themes This poetry demonstratesBradstreetrsquos considerable knowledge and poetic skill but critics prefer her later poetry published after her death in the 1678edition Several Poems The 1678 volume includes more ldquoprivaterdquo or personal poems than the earlier volume including ldquoToMy Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo In these poems Brad-street records her personal experiences as a Puritan woman wifeand mother Through these experiences the poet analyzes her religious faith and draws lessons for living

Critics agree that ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo along with Bradstreetrsquos other private poems offers a unique glimpseinto the mind-set of both the Puritans and Anne Bradstreet The Puritans were not quite the dour religious fanatics that manypeople once believed they were They gratefully celebrated physical love food nature and other worldly pleasures as giftsfrom God ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo demonstrates that a Puritan womanrsquos physical passion could be proclaimedas the nearest thing on earth to heaven However the speakerrsquos love for her husband almost seems to outweigh her devotionto God Devout Puritans tried not to love any earthly thing more than God The poet wishes for the union to continue afterdeath even though Christians then and now believe that earthly unions dissolve at death Critic Robert Richardson writing inthe collection Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet argues that ldquoIn this poem this world and the next validate one anotherLove is the way to heaven and the best image of heaven is a realm of eternal loverdquo Critics disagree over how conventionalBradstreetrsquos religious beliefs were Most agree however that the poet powerfully dramatizes tensions between ldquothe flesh

and the spiritrdquo in her struggle to interpret earthly signs of Godrsquos will

Criticism

Ann Stanford

In the following essay Stafford summarizes Bradstreetrsquos poetic achievements

The poetry of Anne Bradstreet has two claims upon the reader of American literature The first grows out of her place as theearliest poet to produce a large body of original work in America the second by far the more important comes from thehigh quality of the poetry itself Hers is a voice which overleaps the limits of an age and speaks in fresh and vibrant tones ofhuman concerns In recognition of such timelessness at least one edition of her poems has been published or reprinted in eachcentury of our history

Given its place and merit the poetry of Anne Bradstreet deserves the scrutiny of a full-length study for her accomplishmentbecomes clearer in the light of the circumstances both literary and ideological under which she wrote Her work isinfluenced first of all by the ideas circulated generally among all educated people of the late sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies ideas of the nature of man and the universe and of politics that differ markedly from those we hold today Beyondthese her work reflects the Puritan religious concepts with which she was thoroughly indoctrinated it shows too aremarkable sensitivity to the forms and genres which she inherited from the Elizabethans and which were being developed byother seventeenth-century writers

Page 235 |

But above all Anne Bradstreetrsquos entire canon represents the struggle between the visible and the invisible worlds Earth andthe things of earth had on her a solid grasp Though the spirit might point out the virtues of the unseen Anne Bradstreet wasalways most conscious of the pleasures and rewards of earthmdashlove family comfort learning fame Even the harsh realitiesof the new world this wilderness in which she made her home were preferable to the gold and jewels of the invisiblekingdom Her argument was a constant one conducted life-long the voice of the world was never quite overwhelmed evenin her most religious poems In keeping with her long inner dialogue most of her poetry takes the form of argumentmdashin theearly poems between characters in the later between the two parts of herself During the first half of her career the world isclearly supreme during the latter part the invisible wins but never a clear victory

The poetrsquos involvement in the world is symbolized by the wide range of forms in which she cast her writing and the influenceswe can see in them Her range included the encyclopedic quaternions rhymed history metrical prayers formal memorialeulogies elegies of personal grief political broadsides Biblical paraphrases love poems meditative poems and in prose apersonal journal and meditations All these she wrote in ldquoa few hours snatched from sleep and other refreshmentrdquo and allthese she wrote in styles varied according to the purpose of each as dictated by the literary decorum of her day But thoughshe was familiar with the general current of ideas and with the work of many of the then popular writers she did not slavishlyfollow any master She rearranged and synthesized the literary forms she encountered to serve her own purposes Despite itsroots in the baroque her work is essentially pragmatic and realistic as befits a writer so admiring of the world In part thesequalities grew out of the poetrsquos character But they may also have come from her experience of the American wildernesswhere severed from the full impact of changing literary fashions she developed her own responses to those events whichtouched her most

Like other true poets she enlivened the conventions she received transforming them into a unique and vigorous instrumentBut she did not use that instrument for small or temporary ends Her work is very much a whole

Source Ann Stanford preface to Anne Bradstreet The Worldly Puritan New York Burt Franklin amp Co 1974

David Kelly

David Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College and College of LakeCounty in Illinois In this essay Kelly explains the reasons we want to believe that a poet like Bradstreet unlikemodern poets is entirely open but then he raises doubts about whether this poem really is as simple as it seems

What draws me to Anne Bradstreetrsquos poem ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo is the directness of the poetrsquos expression ofher love We donrsquot see that in literature especially not in twentieth-century literature where authors have learned to tell about

a thing by talking about anything but the thing By modern standards a poem that claims to be about a womanrsquos love for herhusband would really intend to suggest her childhood traumas or the husbandrsquos personality or just about anything exceptwhat it seems to be about Not that complexity though sometimes frustrating is bad Overall Irsquom glad when a work ofliterature tries to keep a few steps ahead of its readers dodging and hiding behind whatever camouflage it can muster andleaving us wondering where it is going and where it has been Life would be a lot less interesting if poems said things flat outsuch as ldquoThis is a tree and I like itrdquo The human mind will wander anywaymdashtwentieth-century authors prepare for thatcuriosity and write their poems mindful of the fact that people are going to want to know more about what a poem is tellingthem than just what it says They program clues into the blank spaces to indicate who is telling us this and why they like thetree Some of this comes from the rise of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the century and its theory that the subconsciouscreates events that we cannot see some of it is the result of stratospheric jumps in the numbers of educated peopleespecially in the college-educated since World War II which has given us a huge army of literary critics trying to gouge eventhe tiniest clues out of a poem Once in a while after pondering poetry for a long time it is nice to just sit down with a poem

Page 236 |

like ldquoTo My Dear And Loving Husbandrdquo that has a thing to say and says it then lets its readers go off to new pursuits

I should say it would be nice but unfortunately a good poem never releases its grasp and any good poem deserves studyThe basic questions are answered within this poemmdashthe person speaking is Mistress Bradstreet herself and the ldquowhyrdquo forher writing is that she loves her husband very much and wants him to know about it Even these simple answers though raisefurther issues Who is this Bradstreet woman The normal dismissive answer is that she is a Puritan followed by a longessay about who the Puritans were and what they stood for Why is she so bent on telling her husband how much she loveshim especially since Puritans were a notoriously tight-lipped and unemotional bunch who generally are not considered thetype to pour out their emotions The conventional answer is that she was a poet and this is what poets domdashpour out theirfeelings on the page for all to see

In her book Anne Bradstreet Revisited Rosamond Rosenmeier raises the question of whether

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What Do I Read Next

Bradstreet was a fan of one of Englandrsquos greatest poets John Milton who wrote during her lifetime Miltonrsquos moststunning achievement in a full career was the book-length poem Paradise Lost which was published in 1667Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet who wrote at the same time as Bradstreet He frequently wrotesatirical works including his most famous poem ldquoTo His Coy Mistressrdquo which takes the opposite position from theone that Bradstreet took toward love This poem and others are in The Essential Marvell published in 1991 byEcco PressBradstreetrsquos poetry has been in print continuously since its first printing in 1678 The 1967 Harvard University Pressedition of The Works of Anne Bradstreet edited by Jeannine Hensley has a good introduction by respected poetand critic Adrienne RichAn American Triptych Anne Bradstreet Emily Dickinson Adrienne Rich by Wendy Martin examines thecontinuity in styles and themes of female writers from the seventeenth nineteenth and twentieth centuries This bookwas published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1984A postmodern look at the world Anne Bradstreet faced came from one of the centuryrsquos greatest poets JohnBerryman who first gained national attention with his long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet It was published in1956 first in The Partisan Review and then as a book by Farrar Straus

ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo or any of the other four that make up the group we refer to as ldquoThe Marriage Poemsrdquowas actually meant for the public to see The Marriage Poems were added to the 1678 edition of her poetry afterBradstreetrsquos death there is no way of determining what her wishes were about their publicationmdashwhether she meant them

only for her husband (but he felt they were so good he had to share them with the world) or if she meant all along to usethem as part of her overall message to the world (addressing them to him as a literary device) On the one hand there seemsto be no reason to question the poemrsquos sincerity when it speaks to Bradstreetrsquos husband Simon as mentioned before thedemand for irony and complexity that has intensified over the past hundred years had not come to bear on Bradstreet in theseventeenth century and besides her staunch religious beliefs would make her unlikely to bend the truth too far in the nameof ldquoart for artrsquos sakerdquo On the other hand as Rosenmeier points out there are signs within the Marriage Poems such asBiblical allusions and recurring imagery from Renaissance science that make it seem clear that these poems werenrsquot justpleasant colorful little gifts for Simon Bradstreetmdashthey were written with the public in mind

At this point the question seems entirely academic (which is to say that itrsquos the sort of thing that only a college professor with

Page 237 |

too much time to kill and an itch to stir up controversy might raise) It is a sweet poem and a lot of readers would probably

like to leave it at that But once the question is raised about whether what we see in this poem is Anne Bradstreet talking toher husband or a character named ldquoAnne Bradstreetrdquo talking to us readers then there is no way to read the poem wellwithout feeling confident about one answer or the other

Since historians and Anne Bradstreetrsquos biographers have never been able to settle on a satisfactory answermdashthere is neithera journal entry saying ldquoAm working on a poem about marriage but Irsquoll address it as a letter to Simonrdquo nor a note on theoriginal poem telling her husband ldquoDonrsquot show this to anyonerdquomdashthe best place to look is at the five Marriage Poems Thesepoems were probably written within a close time frame and they address events in the authorrsquos life ranging from the birth ofone of her children (she had eight) to her husbandrsquos travels on political business (he was a governor of Massachusetts andhad to leave their home in Ipswich to spend time 200 miles away in Boston)

The first poem in the set is titled plainly enough ldquoBefore the Birth of One Of Her Childrenrdquo and is addressed directly to herhusband Of the group this one seems most likely to have been meant for his eyes only and not for public display I say thisbecause it contains orders about what he should do if she should die during childbirth which was a likely enough possibility inthose days She asks to remain in his memory while at the same time encouraging him to go on with his life ldquowhen theknotrsquos untiedrdquo She tells him to watch after their children but then adds that he is not to let a new wife have them (ldquoThese Oprotect from step-damersquos injuryrdquo) presenting him with a complex mixture of permission and threat The mixed emotionsthroughout suggestmdashthough of course there is no way to prove itmdashthat this is a personal poem or is at least spun fromemotions that Bradstreet herself experienced with no tradition to defend it

By contrast ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo seems stiff and formal The imagerymdashmines of gold riches of the Eastmdashisstandard and unoriginal the kind of stuff that can be appreciated equally by a great number of people Perhaps SimonBradstreet was an unoriginal thinker and his wife knew that the way to praise him in a poem was to address him in thebroadest terms possible but the evidence leans toward her having at least one eye on her literary reputation here

ldquoA Letter To Her Husband Absent Upon Public Employmentrdquo takes a personal situationmdashit even mentions that she is atIpswich rather than vaguely defining the situation with two unnamed placesmdashand uses a more universal condition the wintersunrsquos absence to broaden it Is this a letter As with ldquoBefore the Birth of One Of Her Childrenrdquo the references seem to bepersonal and even sexual (ldquoHis warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt My chilled limbs now numbed lie forlornrdquo) Of allthe marriage poems this one seems the most careful balance of public and private describing a situation that loverseverywhere cope with and also Anne Bradstreetrsquos situation in particular If ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo is purepoetry the kind of thing a wife might use to engrave a clock or raise a glass to toast with ldquoA Letter To Her Husbandrdquo offersthe kind of personal expansion on her husbandrsquos life that we have come to expect of poetry

The last two Marriage Poems are both called ldquoAnotherrdquo in the authoritative version of Bradstreetrsquos collected works althoughthe first of them is sometimes known as ldquoPhoebusrdquo which is its initial word This one is addressed to Phoebus the MiddleEnglish name for the Greek sun god Apollo asking the sun to carry her love to her husband far away conveying to him thedarkness she lives in while they are apart It is the only one of the Marriage Poems that is not addressed to her husband yet

there is a vulnerability to it that is missing from ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo as in the qua-train before last ldquoTell him Iwould say more but cannot well Oppressed minds abruptest tales do tellrdquo The second ldquoAnotherrdquo seems like a creativewriting exercise in the device of the simile comparing her marriage to two deer some mullet and turtles The comparisonsare more developed than ldquomines of goldrdquo and ldquoriches of the Eastrdquo but that could merely be because more time is spent inthem

The older a poem is the less credit we give its writer for cleverness and diversity In Anne Bradstreetrsquos case the historicalfacts help to scatter readersrsquo expectations often more attention is given to the social circumstances that limited a woman in

Page 238 |

colonial Massachusetts and not enough is paid to what her overall plan was I do not think she had a hidden agenda inwriting ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo and I do think that too much time can be wasted in treating this poem as anarcheological artifact a signifier rather than taking her at her word It wouldnrsquot bother me though to know if her audiencewas the wide world of readers as I think the polish of the poem implies or if it really was meant just for her husband

Source David Kelly in an essay for Poetry for Students The Gale Group 1999

Ann Stanford

In the following excerpt Stafford discerns Bradstreetrsquos views on love and marriage as evidenced in her poems to herhusband

Anne Bradstreet had small patience with the Petrarchan convention in which a poet adores his lady from afar

For Anne Bradstreet the ideal love finds its consummation and continuation in marriage

The importance of marriage for her as for all Puritans was increased by the belief in the family as the basic unit ofgovernment in both the state and the congregation Especially in New England the state was considered to be made up offamilies who were expected to exercise control over their members Thus marriage was important to the state but essentialto marriage was love God had commanded man and wife to love one another hence the duty to love was a part of themarriage contract Though marriages were usually arranged by Puritan families on the basis of social rank young peoplewere not forced to marry where they felt love would be impossible That a tender relationship was achieved among manyPuritan couples is attested by such writings as the letters of John Winthrop to his wife Thomas Shepardrsquos references to hiswife in his Autobiography and the poems Anne Bradstreet wrote to her husband Four of these are love poems The firsttwelve lines titled ldquoTo my Dear and loving Husbandrdquo comes as close to being a sonnet as anything Anne Bradstreet wroteBut it rhymes in couplets and the syntax is simple and direct without the involution of phrase or meaning to be found in mostsonnets The other three are letters ldquoto my husband absent upon Public Employmentrdquo Since they bear the same title I shalldistinguish them by terms prominent in them as the ldquoIpswichrdquo the ldquoPhoebusrdquo and the ldquoLoving-hindrdquo poems

Just as thematically the poems express a love exactly opposite to the Petrarchan ideal so the methods characters andimagery differ Here is no oxymoron no freezing while burning as in the Petrarchan conceits but a straightforward analogymdash the author is cold when her husband is away and warm when he is there regardless of the season Neither lady or love isidealized or distant rather the marriage is happy in its consummation

The Petrarchan love poem tended to blend with Neo-Platonism and the final outcome of Petrarchan love was the approachto heavenly or ideal beauty through a series of steps beginning with physical love For the Puritan such an approach toheavenly beauty was not possible Love was not used for the purpose of striving for ideal beauty since the ideal was to beachieved by other meansmdash the regenerate heart was given the power to see the ldquobeauty of holinessrdquo and the world as anexpression of Godrsquos glory The Puritan attitude toward love was more utilitarian Married union was a near necessity Loveboth for Puritans and many other Elizabethans when consummated by marriage was to issue not in aesthetic appreciationbut in the procreation of children From the Epithalamion of Spenser which closes with several references to fertility andprocreation as the hoped-for outcome of the joys of the wedding night to Milton who couples marriage and procreation inthe lines ldquoHail wedded Love true source Of human offspringrdquo the theme recurs Nor does Anne Bradstreet divorce herlove for her husband from a consciousness of loversquos utilitarian functions In the Ipswich poem she says ldquoIn this dead timealas what can I more Then view those fruits which through thy heat I borerdquo Here married love while treatedmetaphorically is nevertheless approached in a straight-forward almost sensuous manner

The four lyrics are bound together around a central ideamdashthe union of husband and wife and the insistence on that unitydespite physical separation The first poem states the theme ldquoIf ever two were one then surely werdquo The Ipswich poemcontinues inquiring ldquoIf two be one as surely thou and I How stayest thou there whilst I at Ipswich lyerdquo The poetaddresses her husband as Sol and begs him to return northward while he is in the south the day is too long In the Phoebuspoem she reflects this idea in the first line (ldquoPhoebus make haste the dayrsquos too long be gonerdquo) before proceeding to ask thesun to carry a message to her husband The Loving-hind poem which compares the poet to a hind a dove and a mulletrepeats the idea which concludes the second poem of the series (ldquoI here thou there yet both but onerdquo) by stating ldquoI here hethere alas both kept by forcerdquo and ends by asking him to return so they may browse at one tree roost in one house glide inone river Its last line echoes the first line of the first poem by ldquoLetrsquos still remain but one till death dividerdquo Thematically thenthe poems are closely knit The expression of sorrow over separation controls them as each moves toward the conclusionthat the division should be ended by the reunion of the spouses

The linking of the love poems by reiteration of a common theme illustrates a practice Bradstreet followed in several genresThe early elegies for example though written at different times coalesced around the theme of fame heightened in each caseby the central technique of showing the subject outdoing other great figures Later ldquoContemplationsrdquo and the personalelegies written as successive pieces of a long work or as single poems were to be connected by central themesBradstreetrsquos poetic canon shows a remarkable wholeness Themes and images recur often controlling the structure of all thepoems in a single genre or like the concept of the four elements being repeated as motifs throughout her work The fourpoetic letters to her husband are the most conspicuous example of Bradstreetrsquos ability to unify separate pieces of her workbut the tendency persists throughout

Within the letters themselves movement occurs by a method characteristic of other lyrics of the late sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries when poetry was considered a branch of rhetoric The three letters of Anne Bradstreet were allwritten with the ostensible purpose of persuasion Their method is not to describe realistically the state of her mind but tomove her husband by a series of arguments Puttenham in his discussion of ldquothat form of Poesie in which amorous affectionsand allurements were utteredrdquo comments on the appropriate language for love poetry ldquoit requireth a forme of Poesievariable inconstant affected curious and most witty of any othersrdquo Anne Bradstreetrsquos language and metaphors in generalconform to the rules of poetic decorum described by Puttenham Certainly these love poems are the most ldquocurious and wittyrdquoof her work

The three love letters may have been written between 1641 and 1643 a period of high poetic excitement for AnneBradstreet Possibly she wrote them soon after the re-reading of Du Bartas in 1641 for they represent her closest approachto the use of exaggerated comparisons By the time she wrote another poem to her husband a few years later she hadcompletely abandoned the ldquowittyrdquo style and adopted the more direct manner of her later poetry

The language of ldquoBefore the Birth of one of her Childrenrdquo is completely straightforward Writing with great seriousness thepoet suggests that she may die in the coming childbirth She asks her husband to forget her faults and remember what virtuesshe may have had and to protect her little children from ldquostep Dames injuryrdquo She is aware that life is fleeting but she alsosays

love bids meThese farewell lines to recommend to theeThat when that knotrsquos untyrsquod that made us oneI may seem thine who in effect am none

It was the Puritan belief that a marriage was dissolved at death Marriage was for the earthly life only and in any after life anyunion between spirits was no longer in effect Perhaps partly for this reason the regenerate spirits in Wigglesworthrsquos poemThe Day of Doom (stanzas 195ndash201) could watch without a quiver while their spouses children or parents went down toeverlasting hell God had said that a person must not love any earthly thing inordinately and even excessive grief for a

Page 239 |

departed spouse was contrary to Godrsquos command Anne Bradstreet voiced the Puritan view when she spoke of untying theknot ldquothat made us onerdquo just as she expressed it in the last line of the Loving-hind poem ldquoLetrsquos still remain but one till deathdividerdquo But she tries to get around the idea of the complete severance of death by writing lines so that ldquoI may seem thinewho in effect am nonerdquo She wants to be remembered Admitting that her husband will probably marry again she still hopesthat

if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verseWith some sad sighs honour my absent HerseAnd kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake

Further she requests him

when thou feelrsquost no grief as I no harmsYet love thy dead who long lay in thine arms

In its emotional content the poemmdashone of Bradstreetrsquos several farewells to the worldmdashtries to gain for its author earthlycontinuance in the memory of the living In the earlier love poems also the poet attempted to circumvent the finality of deathThroughout they reflect a love that goes beyond the merely rational and dutiful ldquoTo my Dear and loving Husbandrdquo ends

Then while we live in love lets so persevereThat when we live no more we may live ever

The turn of phrase here reminds us of Cavalier poetry though the lines themselves are ambiguous They may mean that theloving couple will produce descendants so that they may live on in their line Or the couplet may mean that the two willbecome famous as lovers and live on in that fame And the fame will come in part through the exertions of Anne Bradstreetrsquosmuse

Such might be the whole import of these lines had they been based completely on the commonplaces of Renaissancesonneteers But the intensity with which the Puritans focussed on grace and divine love adds religious overtones to this poemThe word love is played upon As Saints the lovers must persevere in the consciousness of the divine love within thecovenant of grace in order to live ever The love between husband and wife in the ideal state of marriage may be consideredan analogy for the love between Christ and the soul or Christ and his Church So the ldquoArgumentrdquo preceding the Song ofSolomon in the Geneva Bible explains ldquoIn this Song Salomon by moste swete and comfortable allegories and parablesdescribeth the perfite love of Jesus Christ the true Salomon and King of peace and the faithful soule or his Church which hehath sanctified and appointed to be his spouse holy chast and without reprehensionrdquo Even so the ardor with whichBradstreet addresses her husband in this ldquosonnetrdquo and the three love poems threatens to overshadow a proper love of Godby placing so high a value on one who is a mere creature

Source Ann Stanford ldquoThe Poems to Her Husbandrdquo Anne Bradstreet The Worldly Puritan New York Burt Franklinamp Co 1974

Sources

Bremer Francis J The Puritan Experiment New England Society from Bradford to Edwards New York St MartinrsquosPress 1976

Carroll Peter N Puritanism and The Wilderness The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier 1629-1700 New York Columbia University Press 1969

Page 240 |

Kenyon J P Stuart England New York St Martinrsquos Press 1978

Morison Samuel Eliot Builders of the Bay Colony Boston Houghton Mifflin Co 1930

Richardson Robert D ldquoThe Puritan Poetry of Anne Brad-streetrdquo in Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet edited by PattieCowell and Ann Stanford GK Hall amp Co 1983 pp 101-15

Rosenmeier Rosamond Anne Bradstreet Revisited Boston Twayne Publishers Inc 1991

Stanford Ann Anne Bradstreet The Worldly Puritan An Introduction to Her Poetry Burt Franklin amp Co 1974

For Further Study

Douglas Emily Taft Remember the Ladies The Story of Great Women Who Helped Shape America New YorkPutnam 1966

As the title indicates the tone of this book is quite more patronizing toward female authors than is generallyseen in more contemporary studies still the sheer range of women covered here putting Brad-street in acategory with Eleanor Roosevelt and Isadora Duncan makes this source worthwhile

Dudley Thomas ldquoProblems of Settlementrdquo The Puritan Tradition in America 1620-1730 edited by Alden T VaughanColumbia University of South Carolina Press 1972 pp 59-63

This brief excerpt written by Anne Bradstreetrsquos father (who came from England with her) describes thestarvation and freezing faced by the Puritans on their arrival This whole book consists of first-person accountsof Americarsquos early days

Dunham Montrew Anne Bradstreet Young Puritan Poet Indianapolis Bobbs-Merrill 1969

Although this book is actually written for children in primary school it is one of the few sources to concentrateon the poetrsquos childhood before she left England

Hammond Jeffrey Sinful Self Saintly Self The Puritan Experience of Poetry Athens University of Georgia Press1993

Hammondrsquos book explores the religious determinism that shaped Bradstreetrsquos thought and defined herexperience

Miller Perry Orthodoxy in Massachusetts 1630-1650 Evanston IL Harper Torchbook 1933

The interesting thing about this history is the way that it treats religion as a political tool showing how thePuritan way of thought evolved into the American way of social interaction

Piercy Josephine K Anne Bradstreet New York Twayne Publishers Inc 1965

This is a very thorough and basic overview of Bradstreetrsquos life and the critical reception of her oeuvre


A companion piece to Piercyrsquos book this corrects some historical inaccuracies and takes a more psychologicalapproach to Bradstreet using newer materials

Stanford Ann Anne Bradstreet The Worldly Puritan An Introduction to Her Poetry New York B Franklin 1975

A respected survey of the poet and her work that is written at a level appropriate for readers who are notfamiliar with Bradstreet

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) To My Dear and Loving Husband Poetry for Students Ed Mary Ruby Vol 6 Detroit Gale Group 1999 227-240Gale Virtual Reference Library Web 13 Mar 2013

Document URLhttpgogalegroupcompsidoid=GALE7CCX2691400027ampv=21ampu=k12_gvrlampit=rampp=GVRLampsw=w

Gale Document Number GALE|CX2691400027

28 |

ldquoTo My Dear and Loving Husbandrdquo was written between 1641 and 1643 by Anne Bradstreet Americarsquos first publishedpoet This poem offers modern readers insights into Puritan attitudes toward love marriage and God In the poemBradstreet proclaims her great love for her husband and his for her She values their love more than any earthly riches andshe hopes that their physical union on earth signifies the continuation of their spiritual union in heaven In this poemBradstreet views earthly love as a sign of spiritual salvation This poem presents a central question in Puritan thought how doonersquos earthly and immortal lives connect

This poem was first published in 1678 six years after Bradstreetrsquos death in an edition of her poems entitled Several PoemsCompiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning Full of Delight During Bradstreetrsquos lifetime there were almost nowomen writers because education was rarely wasted on daughters Over half of the women in colonial America wereilliterate Bradstreet was very privileged she but also courageous and dedicated to her art Despite her culturersquos biasesBrad-street wrote poetry that was widely acclaimed and remains relevant today for its emotional honesty and wisdom

Author Biography

Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley around 1612 in England to a Puritan family Her father Thomas Dudley

Anne Bradstreet

was steward to the Earl of Lincoln Because of Dudleyrsquos high position his daughter received an excellent education In 1630she moved with her parents and husband Simon Bradstreet to the Massachusetts Bay Colony where her husband andfather served as governors of the settlement As a New England colonist Bradstreet encountered a life of hardship to whichshe was unaccustomed Despite illness and the difficulties of raising her eight children in the American wilderness she foundtime to write By the age of thirty she had composed most of her poetry When her brother-in-law John Woodbridgereturned to England in 1647 he took with him the manuscript of Bradstreetrsquos poems Without her knowledge he publishedthem titling the collection The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America The volume met with immediate success inLondon Surprised by the workrsquos reception but disturbed by its un-polished state Bradstreet began to revise the poems

Page 229 |


Poem Text


Poem Summary

Line 1


Line 2



Lines 3-4



Lines 5-6


Line 7


Line 8


Lines 9-10


Sidebar Hide

Media Adaptations



Page 230 |

Lines 11-12



Themes

Wealth


Sidebar Hide



Page 231 |


Time



Sex Roles


Style



Page 232 |



Historical Context


Sidebar Hide









Page 233 |






Page 234 |


Critical Overview




Criticism

Ann Stanford




Page 235 |





David Kelly




Page 236 |




Sidebar Hide

What Do I Read Next





Page 237 |










Page 238 |



Ann Stanford














Page 239 |










Sources



Page 240 |






For Further Study




















|


Poem Text


Poem Summary

Line 1


Line 2



Lines 3-4



Lines 5-6


Line 7


Line 8


Lines 9-10


Sidebar Hide

Media Adaptations



Page 230 |

Lines 11-12



Themes

Wealth


Sidebar Hide



Page 231 |


Time



Sex Roles


Style



Page 232 |



Historical Context


Sidebar Hide









Page 233 |






Page 234 |


Critical Overview




Criticism

Ann Stanford




Page 235 |





David Kelly




Page 236 |




Sidebar Hide

What Do I Read Next





Page 237 |










Page 238 |



Ann Stanford














Page 239 |










Sources



Page 240 |






For Further Study




















|










Page 238 |



Ann Stanford














Page 239 |










Sources



Page 240 |






For Further Study




















|



Ann Stanford














Page 239 |










Sources



Page 240 |






For Further Study



























Page 239 |










Sources



Page 240 |






For Further Study




















|










Sources



Page 240 |






For Further Study




















|






For Further Study




















To My Dear and Loving Husband - Blackbird...

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Transcript of To My Dear and Loving Husband - Blackbird...