ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
To some degree, Bradstreet’s career rehearses in miniature the stylistic shift
from Elizabethan “copia” to Jacobean concentration. When she left England in
1630, much of what was “new” about the seventeenth century had not yet
appeared in print. But the shift to a more concentrated utterance in the poem
to her husband is also inseparable in Bradstreet from a shift from public to
private address. In the arena of domestic love, Bradstreet writes with Donnean
assurance, predicating an eternity of love on a passionate commitment in the
present. The control displayed in this poem develops unequivocally from the
opening line; and if sincerity of expression replaces witty conceit as the means
of making two into one, Bradstreet’s is an eros that still presses outward,
measuring itself against the competition (“Compare with me, ye women, if you
can”) across space and time and collapsing barriers along the way that
traditionally denied women the role of the amatory aggressor. The special
emphasis Puritans placed on the sacrament of marriage—Milton’s “Hail,
Wedded love”—gave Bradstreet access to a language of erotic courtship not
available to women in the courtly tradition:
But when thou northward to me shalt return,
I wish my Sun may never set, but burn
Within the Cancer of my glowing breast,
The welcome house of him my dearest guest.
Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence,
Till nature’s sad decree shall call thee hence:
Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,
I here, thou there, yet both but one.
(“A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment”)
The passage is notable for illustrating how fully Bradstreet accepts the traditional
role of the loving spouse—and also the ease with which she enters into Adam’s
language in Genesis and claims it as hers, or rather, as theirs. She plays Eve
speaking to her silent Adam, rehearsing the lines that bind them and which
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