My Dear and Loving Husband Essay Example

Anne Bradstreet's poem "My Dear and Loving Husband" is one of the most romantic poems of all time. Being that Anne Bradstreet was a very early poet of the Puritan times this poem is very unconventional. The poem has a very loving air to it that carries throughout. The tone of this poem is very romantic and gives off a feeling of deep admiration. The speaker of the poem is praising her husband and speaking of only how perfect and wonderful he is. This poem, although set in a time period of the late 1600s, brings a strong aura of adoration when reading it today. Since it was written in a very conservative time, writing something of this nature was looked down upon. Anne Bradstreet broke all molds by showing her writing abilities and education, making this poem very powerful, especially in those times. Two specific techniques are used to convey the idea of how the woman in the poem feels about her husband and how she expresses her feelings. These two techniques are rhyming and repetition. The use of rhyming gives the poem a flow to go by. Every last word of a line rhymes with the following last word to create a greater effect of what is being tried to say. The rhymed words give the poem an accent helping to capture the romanticism of the poem. Repetition is seen in the first three lines of the poem when the speaker says, "If ever." The use of these words over and over again show how the speaker feels that it is near impossible to find another love such as the one she has at the moment. These two techniques give the poem an atmosphere of true love and compassion.
The speaker also uses hyperbole in order in exaggerate the amount of love felt toward her husband. The use of the lines, "I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold, or all the riches that the East doth hold," and, "My love is such that rivers cannot quench," shows that the wife in the poem truly believes there is nothing better in the earth then the love that is shared between her and her husband.