Marriage is judged through women’s comfort

1. The opening replaces romantic promise with an assessment of practical wellbeing.
2. Even favourable husbands supposedly demand difficult emotional work.
3. This sweeping judgement establishes the adviser’s persuasive position.
4. It should not become a factual claim about every marriage.

Appearances can conceal unhappiness

1. Worried faces become texts the speaker claims to read.
2. Outward composure may disguise private difficulty.
3. The reading metaphor challenges public images of successful marriage.
4. The wives themselves never confirm the adviser’s interpretation of their feelings.

Single life becomes a positive alternative

1. The crown metaphor gives unmarried life honour and contentment.
2. Repeated negatives accumulate burdens the addressee could avoid.
3. Fear, childbirth and childcare ground persuasion in bodily and domestic experience.
4. Idealised single happiness remains a rhetorical generalisation rather than a universal guarantee.

The advice combines freedom with restraint

1. Fewer domestic distractions can allow greater spiritual attention.
2. The repeated command makes resistance to romance urgent and deliberate.
3. Religious language reverses the expected devotion to love.
4. Suppressing desire makes this alternative require self-control rather than effortless pleasure.

The ending rejects a threat against unmarried women

1. The proverbial punishment would make single life a source of fear.
2. The speaker dismisses it, offering permission to refuse marriage.
3. Adjacent rhymes support a compact and decisive persuasive manner.
4. The poem ends with advice, not a narrated decision by the addressee.

Literary terms used in this guide

1. Anaphora: Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginnings of successive clauses or lines.
2. Allusion: A reference to a recognisable story, belief, text or cultural expression.
3. Apostate: Someone who abandons a faith or allegiance; the poem applies the term provocatively to a change of loyalty towards love.

Close analysis: A worked analytical paragraph

1. Philips’s adviser challenges the assumption that marriage guarantees happiness. Worried faces expose a gap between respectable appearances and private experience, while the catalogue of avoided burdens makes single life seem valuable. Yet the recommended alternative requires self-restraint, complicating a simple celebration of freedom. The final dismissal of punishment removes a fear used against unmarried women, reinforcing the possibility of choosing differently.

Using and checking quotations

1. References: Katherine Philips, “A Married State”; Jack Lynch edited text, checked against the Norton anthology reproduction.
2. Compare spelling, punctuation and line numbering with your assigned edition before learning a passage.