Analyzing Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet

Edward Taylor’s “Huswifery” and Anne Bradstreet’s “To my dear and loving husband” poem both are expressing deep beliefs about their puritan background, however Edward’ poem displays a more puritan message, while Anne simply expresses her love for her husband. These poet’s use apostrophe and metaphors to describe what they were writing about, while Bradstreet uses different metaphors, Edward uses a much longer, descriptive metaphor called a conceit. The conceit compares his everyday choices and words to every stitch and spoole needed to sew together his holy robe that allows him into the elect. Bradstreet’s poem is a wife showing her affection to her husband through exquisite poetry.

She explains in detail how strong their love is and how much she appreciates him loving her. For a women of her time she was highly educated than most woman. Woman were not allowed to express themselves in literature at this time, but she did not mind that. One of the things that show differences of these two poems is that Anne expresses her love as not enough for her husband. She says in poem “love from thee give recompense,” She asked God to reward her husband for loving her wall by making him part of the elect. Edwavrdd on the other hand shows his longing to be closer to God, he describes the many ways how he would like to be used by God and his desire for the lord to take over his life and to use his life to further his kingdom. Edward basically compares the aspects of the spinning wheel to his life, and how God can take each spiece dosf our life and change it for his good.

Annewas not just a wife showing marital love and affection to her husband, sh ws a pritan women who was supposed to be resere, but she challenged this tradition to enlighten her husband of her devotion. The opening lines of the poem show how strong her feelings are for her husband, Just the title “To my dear and loving husband” is a succinct yett bold expression of marital love. One thing i did not quite get is that if puritans believed in predestination then how come Anne questions God by asking to replay her husband for loving her? Wouldn’t she have known that regardless of what happened destiny was already chosen and she could do nothing about that? Or i could be wrong, maybe she had different religious views thats why also she didn’t mind writing literature because she knew God would not mind her doing that, such as other things probably too.

Edward was believed to have not chosen to publish his poems because the poems joyfulness and delight was counter puritan belief that poetry should be a moral instruction only, Edward chose to preserve his poems to not cause any problems. Anne and Edward’s poems show how much they love something or someone and even though its against their traditions they still are willing to go against it to express their true feelings for something, truly the puritan beliefs were irrational for what they could of and couldn’t do, because how would it have caused a problem I Edwards was simply expressing himself to God? Even though it was not formal for the time it still was expressing what he felt for God and what God can do in reality to a person, but he was smart about his decision to not publish the poem because he did not want to make it a big deal, he just preserved them for himself. Both poets had to hide to the world what they wrote but regardless of that, there literature lived on to today.