In “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” Bradstreet persuasively presents her views on how to resolve the basic contradictions of Puritan faith—in other words, how to live in this world while keeping an eye on heaven.
In the opening quatrain, her ability to reason, to construct an argument, commands center stage. Turning to anaphora, a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them emphasis (and perhaps in a nod to future computer programmers), she opens with a series of logical “If then” statements: