Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan wife and mother in colonial New England, and the title gives the occasion: she is about to give birth and cannot be sure she will survive. Childbirth was one of the great dangers of a woman's life in her century, so the fear is entirely reasonable. What she does with it is remarkable. She writes a farewell letter in verse, a kind of spoken will, addressed to her husband and meant to be read only if the worst happens.
The poem opens in a calm, proverb-like voice. "All things within this fading world hath end" sounds like something carved on a gravestone. For six lines she speaks in general truths, borrowing the language of the law court: death is a "sentence past," "most irrevocable." Then comes the turn, "How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend," and the abstraction becomes personal. The word "attend" has already appeared in line 2, where adversity "doth still our joys attend." The echo quietly turns her own case into an example of the rule she has just stated.
Structurally, the poem is twelve rhymed couplets in lines of about ten syllables, a form that suits someone putting her affairs in order. Each couplet closes with a small click, and the poem works through its requests like a checklist: forget my faults, remember my virtues, keep loving me, look after the children, protect them from a stepmother, read these lines. The control is the point, but it slips in places. The first couplet's long, soft-ended rhyme, "irrevocable" and "inevitable," makes the line stretch and trail off, and in the middle of it she lets out a very unofficial "yet oh." It is the first crack in her composure, and a tiny one.
The imagery is domestic and often legal. Marriage is a knot, and death will "untie" it. The next line holds the poem's most striking paradox: "I may seem thine, who in effect am none." Once she is dead she will only seem to be his, and she will no longer be a wife in any real sense. She also speaks with unsentimental frankness about what comes next. "When thy loss shall be repaid with gains" treats grief like an account that will eventually balance, and the phrase quietly assumes he will remarry. She does not argue with this. She only worries about its cost, which is why "stepdame's injury" hits so hard. Her appeal, "if thou love thyself, or loved'st me," covers both motives, as if she knows love for her may not be enough on its own.
Some of her best touches are small. Her faults are to be "interred in my oblivious grave," so the grave itself is made forgetful, while any virtue should "live freshly in thy memory," like something growing. Memory is the only place she expects to go on living. The phrase "love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms" is startlingly physical for a poem so orderly. And "my dear remains" for her children carries a double meaning: they are what is left of her, and "remains" is also a word for a body.
The ending turns the poem into an object. She imagines her husband finding the verse, honoring her "absent hearse," and kissing the paper, which will stand in for her body. The "salt tears" of the last line leave a trace of the writer in the poem. She writes in the present but speaks from an imagined future, so the ink is both a living woman's grief and a dead woman's voice.
That double position explains the poem's importance. It is a seventeenth-century woman's private fear, set down in plain, human terms. God appears only once, in the brief "God grant," while the weight of the poem rests on a marriage, a household and a mother's anxiety about her children. Bradstreet takes a tidy form and uses it to show how much feeling it can hold without breaking.