To My Dear and Loving Husband

“To My Dear and Loving Husband” is a lyric poem written in 12 lines, consisting of six rhyming couplets. A rhyming couplet is a pair of immediately adjacent lines that rhyme with one another; unlike the standard rhyming quatrain format A-B-A-B found in many lyric poems, a rhyming couplet is A-A and has no intervening lines containing a different rhyme-sound. The form of Bradstreet’s poem is therefore A-A-B-B-C-C-D-D-E-E-F-F.

The rhyming couplets in the poem, with no deviation from this form from beginning to end, reflects the subject matter of mutuality and balance in love. Just as she and her husband are “two” (Line 1) people who are now “one” (Line 1), so too are the lines of the poem matched up as pairs that share the same end-sound to form a rhyme. Each couplet is therefore a “marriage” of structural elements, producing a harmony and balance that reflect the marital equipoise that the poem celebrates.

Additionally, with only a few exceptions, the poem is wholly iambic pentameter. In other words, the lines have five metrical feet, each consisting of a one unstressed syllable and a stressed syllable, as in Line 1: