Response to "To My Dear And Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet

To My Dear And Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet is a poem about a wife explaining the unmeasurable love for her husband. Most notably in lines 5-7, the speaker is comparing her husband to beyond 'the worth of gold or riches', and that 'my love is quenchable', and in these lines it is basically saying that 'my love is priceless and will never end'. The speaker at the beginning of this poem talks about her immeasurable love, however shifts at the end to talk about her immeasurable love after death. The last lines, "Then while we live, in love let's so persever, that when we live no more, we may live ever," explain that while being alive lets keep love alive and when we die our love will live on forever; in other words, the speaker is talking about love after death. A theme of this poem arises in these last lines, the theme of love defies death, or love cannot be ‘quenched’ by death.   

As I was reading I had an struggles, and questions as well of what was additionally was going in the poem that was not explicitly stated. One struggle that I had was understanding and paraphrasing the old english of which this poem is written in. The lines that were to paraphrase are the ones that started with ‘if ever’ as the ‘if ever’ and words like ‘thee’ and ‘ye’ are always confusing as we would just use ‘you’ and ‘your’, also I cannot still translate ‘if ever’ if it is that complicated. One question that arose while reading was if the speaker was actually dying, or is the poem written to make the speaker seem like they are dying? When looking at the title it says ‘dear’ and the poem is talking about death, therefore it could mimic someone writing a death letter or on their deathbed saying this to their beloved husband.