To My Dear Loving Husband

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To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet is about a woman profound love and never-ending affection she has for her husband. The poem opens with a rhetorical technique known as "anaphora", in which repetition of a word or words is used to achieve an aesthetic effect. In this case, the repeated word is "ever". It is used three times in the first three lines and one time at the end along with the word "persevere". Both uses of the word suggest to the readers that the speaker is obsessed with having an everlasting love with her husband that will continue in time. She believes that the love she and her husband share is for eternality and time only makes it stronger. Bradstreet uses the word in two different ways, in the beginning, it is used to allude to the past, and in the end, it is used to allude to an endless future.…show more content…
It creates an expectation of what one should have in a loving relationship. In lines 1-2, the speaker says, if ever two were one, then surely me [and] if ever man were loved by wife, then thee" first she is admiring the pure love she and her husband have and will not trade it for anything in the world. Then in the second line, she compares their love to every couple that has "ever" loved in the world to show how confident she is with the love she and her husband share. In line 3, "if ever wife was happy in a man", the speaker is basically saying she is an expert in loving one man and she challenge other women to share that same love with their husband. In other words, she tells other women to try to match her when it comes to being happy with one
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