I like Anne Bradstreet, I confess, because she has done that good deed that many American poets do: She has kept her margins wide and her words between them short. I love brevity in writing. I think this disease I have- short attention – is supposed to be a personal flaw rather than a mere symptom of living in a distracted generation. But anyway, I have it.

            Also Anne Bradstreet’s introductory material contains one dashing sentence that I marked in yellow: “After her marriage she continued writing.” My two favorite things, writing and marriage, meet in one 16-year-old American girl who has big margins and skinny words!

And her marriage, I mention, must have found stabilization in the devotion that Bradstreet confesses in the poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” 

I get out my spade and dig: I like the poem’s clean words. But it doesn’t stick as hard to me as other poems have done. One line, in particular, I find a little grating: “Compare with me, ye women, if you can.” To me this line feels like Rachel gloating over Leah.

I like Bradstreet’s statement that “Thy love is such I can no way repay.” The kind of love she appears to have focuses on her husband rather than herself. That a woman should celebrate a man refreshes me. In our generation, women (I think) have a unique opportunity to glorify God and shape culture simply by giving honor to men as God has designed them to. Wives have the privilege of changing the world by honoring their husbands.

As to the last two lines - which Bradstreet has given extra feet and whose antiquated rhyme makes our eyebrows knit and our tongues stumble – I think she should be allowed them by virtue of her far removal in history.

 

 

Chelsea Kolz

Senior

"To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet

Fall 2012