Anne Bradstreet Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Anne Bradstreet with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“All things within this fading world hath end, Adversity doth still our joyes attend;”
Meaning & context
Writing with childbirth and mortality in view, Bradstreet begins from the instability of worldly life before leaving loving instructions and remembrance for her husband and children.
Source details
“Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” represented by Poetry Foundation. The poem is a seventeenth-century farewell written in the historical context of maternal mortality; it is personal religious-era reflection rather than medical guidance about childbirth.
Source identified2
Image design Midnight
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“Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain,”
Meaning & context
Bradstreet compares her published book to an imperfect child, combining embarrassment, affection and the writer’s persistent wish to revise work already exposed to readers.
Source details
“The Author to Her Book,” represented by Poetry Foundation from Bradstreet’s posthumous 1678 collection. The extended parent-child metaphor reflects authorship, unauthorized publication and revision rather than a literal statement about children.
Source identified3
Image design Charcoal
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“If ever two were one, then surely we.”
Meaning & context
Bradstreet opens with a compact assertion of marital unity, setting up a poem that measures the value of mutual love against material wealth and even mortality.
Source details
“To My Dear and Loving Husband,” posthumously published in the 1678 second edition of Several Poems; represented by Representative Poetry Online. The poem is a Puritan-era personal love lyric with explicitly religious closing language.