Anne Bradstreet's letter in verse begins with a wife left behind. Her husband is away on public business, she is at Ipswich, and the imagery puts the separation in the dead of winter. Her central idea is that marriage makes two people one body, so distance feels less like sadness than like an amputation. The poem tries to talk that distance out of existence, and in the end it half succeeds.
The opening is a rush of tenderness: "My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay more." She runs through the body, then reaches for something bigger, calling him "my magazine, of earthly store," a storehouse in the old sense of the word. Then comes an argument that sounds almost legal: "If two be one, as surely thou and I, / How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?" She is puzzled, even a little accusing, and the logic is hard to answer. The next couplet pushes it further. If only a neck lay between head and heart, they would soon be together. The image is playful, but it also hints at something severed.
From there the poem moves to the sky. Her husband becomes "My Sun," travelling far south "in's zodiac," and she begs "sweet Sol" to return "from Capricorn." The cosmic metaphor gives her private mood a physical cause. The earth "mourn[s] in black," and so does she. When he was near, "nor storms, nor frost I felt," because his warmth made the cold melt. Now her "chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn." The cold is seasonal and emotional at once, and the heavy, slowing rhythm of that line makes the reader feel it.
The poem then looks for consolation in the children, "those fruits which through thy heart I bore," who are "True living pictures of their father's face." The fruit image suits the barren season. The phrase "through thy heart" also gives him a share in the bearing, as if the children came from both of them in the same way the poem insists the couple is one. Yet this comfort lasts only "for a space." The next exclamation, "O strange effect!", admits a paradox. In winter the sun's days are short, but without him she finds the day "so long." Time drags even as the light shrinks.
The wish for his return grows daring. She wants her Sun never to set but to "burn / Within the Cancer of my glowing breast." Cancer is the sign the sun occupies at its summer height, so the word here means warmth, though a modern reader may flinch at it. Her body becomes "the welcome house of him my dearest guest." This is a domestic image, a home with a permanent lodger, and it is also unashamedly physical. He is told to stay "Till nature's sad decree shall call thee hence," and death appears for a moment as the only acceptable reason for parting.
The form supports all this. The poem is written in rhymed couplets, mostly iambic pentameter, and the pairings (more/store, felt/melt, space/face) give the lines a settled, almost conversational order. Some rhymes strain. To modern ears "sever/together" and "gone/long" only half match, and that looseness suits a poem about things that will not quite meet. Repetition does emotional work too: "Return; return" and "ever, ever stay" sound like pleading. The last couplet then shortens the line to four beats: "Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, / I here, thou there, yet both but one." It echoes the biblical language of Adam's description of Eve, which makes the marriage sacred as well as loving. The syntax mirrors the idea, as "I here, thou there" holds the two apart before "both but one" pulls them together.
The poem matters because it joins a household's private feeling to a large conceit drawn from astronomy, anatomy and scripture. Written from a Puritan home in colonial Massachusetts by one of the earliest poets in English in colonial America, it shows a wife speaking openly about longing, warmth and need. The letter never ends the separation, but it gives her a way to say that the separation cannot divide what the marriage has made one.