Anne Finch begins as if she were raising a glass. "This is to the crown and blessing of my life" has the ring of a toast, and a toast needs a room full of listeners. For the first six lines she speaks about her husband rather than to him. He is "him," the man whose "constant passion found the art / To win a stubborn and ungrateful heart." Her aim is to show "the world" that "They err, who say that husbands can't be lovers." Her answer to that cynical commonplace is the poem itself, offered as "tenderest proof."
Then the grammar swerves. The pastoral name Daphnis arrives, and the poem turns on a triplet: "due," "pursue," "you." Everywhere else Finch writes in tidy rhymed couplets, mostly iambic pentameter, so the extra line stands out, and it is also longer, an alexandrine of six beats instead of five. The extra length feels like feeling spilling over the form, yet what the line says is "my hopes and joys are bounded all in you." The longest line in the poem describes a world shrunk to one person, and she accepts that boundary gladly. The name itself is repeated three times in as many lines, like someone who cannot stop saying it. By the end of the triplet the public toast has dissolved into private address, and "him" has become "you."
The next couplet is the knottiest: "Even I, for Daphnis' and my promise' sake, / What I in woman censure, undertake." Finch never says what she is guilty of. The lines that follow, which mention "vanity," "who writes" and "who 'tis that reads," suggest that she means putting her feelings on paper for someone to read. That reading is an inference, but it fits the poem's nervousness. She admits to doing what she disapproves of in other women, then defends herself with a clean antithesis: "from love, not vanity." The following line, "You know who writes, and I who 'tis that reads," shrinks the audience from the whole world to a single pair of eyes. The poem begins to look like a letter, and the "world" of line five has been quietly shut out.
The poem's cleverest moment is its apology: "Judge not my passion by my want of skill: / Many love well, though they express it ill." Modest disclaimers like this were a familiar move in verse, but Finch makes hers do real work. She separates feeling from eloquence, and her couplet is so smoothly balanced, with "well" set against "ill," that it shows exactly the skill it denies. The joke is gentle, and it lets her be humble and accomplished in the same breath.
Her last couplet turns the poem from proof to longing. "I your censure could with pleasure bear, / Would you but soon return, and speak it here." The inverted word order makes it sound like a bargain: criticize me as much as you like, so long as you do it in person. The words "return" and "here" imply, judging by the text, that he is away, and the poem's last word marks the place where he is not. After all the confident claims about what husbands can be, the ache shows. She would rather be scolded face to face than praised from a distance.
The poem is significant because it argues for something that is easy to overlook, that love can be settled and still be passionate. Much love poetry is about wanting someone out of reach, but Finch writes from inside a marriage and insists that desire survives there. Her speaker is also quite unlike the silent, idealized beloved of so many love poems. She is a woman who woos back, worries about seeming forward, and uses wit to cover her vulnerability. The poem is public enough to make an argument and private enough to end on a plain wish, and the two sides never quite separate.