Response to Poem

To My Dear and Loving Husband is one of the many well-respected poems by Anne Bradstreet that was published in her first and only publication throughout her life-time, “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts”. Through figurative language, syntax, and imagery, Anne Bradstreet effectively conveys the message the title of the poem simply states: she loves and respects her husband.
Use of words and phrases help shape the way the poem flows and moves through figurative language and syntax. Every word written has its own special connotation besides its dictionary meaning throughout the short piece. Words such as “live”, “prize”, “repay”, and “quench” hold special meaning through out the poem while adding on to the elegant style. The word live holds meaning through the connotation of living life with Anne’s husband as well as through the after-life, their love is and always eternal and that their love continues on even after one of them dies. Prize states how Anne feels about her husbands love compared to the worth of gold. This similarity proves that Anne feels her husbands love is valuable and worth the equivalent of anything in precious value. Repay is a play on words in a sense due to its dictionary meaning and the meaning in the poem. Anne shows how her husband has paid her with his love through out her life and states that she cannot give back the amount he has given to her. Although the meaning in the poem is similar to the one in the dictionary, it is symbolic through the act of giving back something that is inanimate. And lastly, Quench shows the irony in which the words pan out. The line, “My love is such that rivers cannot quench” (Line 8) shows that irony of Anne being thirsty but not for any water. Instead, she craves for the rush of her husbands love that no amount of water can equal to in order to satisfy her thirst. Anne’s own use of the symbolic words and their meanings come together to create metaphors that create descriptive images that portray Anne’s feelings entirely. Her choice of words bind together to form descriptive sentences that allow the reader to read with ease while composing a mental picture of what Anne is comparing. Her imagery is the effect of her choice in syntax and helps the reader visualize the poem in its entirety. The figurative language helps compare one thing to another- in this case, Anne’s husbands love to an object- in order to help the reader understand the depth and meaning of each line. An example would be the comparison of Anne’s husbands love to the worth of gold (line 5). Anne simply states that her husbands love amounts more than mines full of gold. The instant image the reader gets when reading is mines full of the precious metal while thinking of the love two people share when they are truly committed to one another. Another example would be the comparison of her husbands love to preservation. Anne uses her husband and his affections to portray how she wants them to love each other until the moment they die in order for their love to live on forever. Te visual the reader gets instantaneously is two people in love and some sort of contraption used for preservation. The imagery helps the reader understand the metaphor better if not understood the first time while giving them an outlet to look through in order to understand the poems meaning through out. The images play as the looking glass the reader uses to understand the connotation and figurative language.