Puritans in Arcadia: Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Pastoralism

Since they wrote in 17th century Massachusetts, poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor are often overlooked in surveys of English literature.  Today, though, we'll bring them back into the fold as we look at how their puritanical religious beliefs engaged with the pastoral and metaphysical poetic traditions that celebrated "Arcadia," that vision of unspoiled Nature.

The Works of Anne Bradstreet: 

https://archive.org/details/worksofannebrads00brad/page/n7/mode/2up

The Works of Edward Taylor: https://archive.org/details/poemsofedwardtay00tayl

Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason.  Here in Vermont, summer is winding down, a new school year creeps ever closer, and people in my profession are cobbling together last minute plans for vacation.  I am not a great traveller, dear listeners.  Not quite a recluse, but there is a monkish withdrawal from the world that suits my rather hermetic character. It’s all my wife can do to pry me, like a recalcitrant toddler, from my armchair and get me to spend a weekend by the Rhode Island coast or in Boston.  I rarely venture further afield than the borders of my native and beloved New England.  

It was during one of these modest excursions that an idea sprung upon me for a podcast episode.  We were motoring along the highway and we passed a sign directing travellers to the exit for Acadia National Park in Maine.  This was not our destination, but the sign reminded me of the Elizabethan pastoral poets – Sidney and Spenser, et al. – and their bucolic utopian visions of Arcadia, that idealized landscape of unspoiled nature and rustic beauty in which swains and nymphs have nothing to do all day but look at their sheep, tootle on Pan flutes, and seduce each other.  And it got me to thinking about how that 47,000 acre plot of coastal Maine came to be called Acadia – without the R.  Well, explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano swung by the area in the early 1500s, recalled the peaceful and idyllic landscapes of Greece, and dubbed the region “Archadia.”  When it became a French colony, they frankified the name to Acadie.  That stuck.  I should also note that the indigenous Mi’maq people have a word “akadie” which means “fertile land.”  But, at any rate, the notion of what is now New England as a sylvan paradise persists.

As my wife and I rambled on, we came into Massachusetts, the site of the first 17th-century English settlements in this “Arcadia” – the Separatists we call the Pilgrims in 1620 and the Puritans in 1630 – the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Cape Cod and Boston.  Now, I’ve talked about Tudor utopian and pastoral literature, as well as the arrival of English on the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States, in several previous episodes.  But today, I’d like to look a bit at how those two cultural outlooks – pastoralism and Puritanism – came together in Massachusetts Bay by introducing you to two major poets in that colony: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor.  I want to look at Puritans in Arcadia.

But before I do, I would like to send a big thank you to a great friend of the show, Helen B. of Cornwall, for her recent gift.  And . . . my deep gratitude to Terri V. of California, I believe.  It really helps me keep the show going.  Thanks for your generosity, Helen and Terri, and for your loyal listening.  If you’d like to experience the thrill of hearing your name read aloud to literally dozens of listeners across the world, just click the “Support the Show” button to help the Classic English Literature Podcast with a financial contribution.  No contribution too small, or indeed, too large.  Go ahead – click away.  I’ll pause for a moment while you do so.  (elevator music) Thank you so much.  And now, on with the show.

In 1590, some years after the author’s death, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was first published.  Written to entertain his sister, Mary Herbert, Arcadia is a pastoral romance in prose concerning the chivalrous adventures of two young nobles across an idyllic Arcadian landscape.  We get really beautiful images of the natural world: “There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees” and “Meadows, enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers”; “the morning did strow roses and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the Sun.”  The text abounds with descriptions of such “delightful prospects,” and they are often personified: the natural world is alive, it has benevolent agency, it is “good”, as God affirms several times in the first chapter of Genesis.  This is the vision of Arcadia, the unspoiled world of the pastoral writers.  

Captain John Smith, the explorer and mercenary whose name doesn’t sound a bit as if he’s got something to hide, employed exactly such sentiments to entice commercial settlement in this American Arcadia.  His A Description of New England from 1616 notes the "moderate temper of the ayre" and the presence of "Gardens and Corne fields" and the abundance of timber.  Also, the "greatnesse of the fish," the presence of "many seuerall habitations vpon the Sea Coast" and "excellent good Harbours.”  This is a place of health and fertility, an embodiment of the pastoral ideal.  Well, that’s the way it was gonna look on the sales brochure.

Of the 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower who established the Plimouth colony, only 41 or so were religious separatists.  The bulk were merchants, craftsmen, soldiers looking for a financial leg up.  They were Smith’s kind of people.  The Pilgrims, however, did not see New England as a pastoral ideal.  Indeed, theirs, and that of the Puritans who followed, was a view of Nature not as Arcadia, but as the Valley of Death – not what would become the Romanticism of Rousseau, but the total depravity proposed by Calvin: “For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle … The whole man, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, is so deluged, as it were, that no part remains exempt from sin, and, therefore, everything which proceeds from him is imputed as sin.”

Their theology stressed the fallen condition of the natural world, the effect of human sin that transformed the “good” creation into a harrowing wilderness.  William Bradford’s record of the Pilgrim experience, Of Plimouth Plantation, describes a nature of “cross winds” and “fierce storms,” “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers,” a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”  

This is the institute of the Puritanical version of Christian religion that English radical Protestants brought with them to the New England Arcadia, and it is in the tension between these conceptions of the world that poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor composed their most enduring works.

Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 to the estate manager of the Puritan earl of Lincoln.  Her father stressed an education in excess of what was apportioned to girls of the age.  She married a Cambridge graduate when only sixteen, and he later was charged with assisting the Massachusetts Bay Company, and so they sailed with John Winthrop’s (he of “A Model of Christian Charity” which we looked at briefly in episode 70 – a good one to listen to if you haven’t before continuing on here – some good context for you) – uh, Anne and Simon Bradstreet sailed for Massachusetts with Winthrop in 1630.  Upon her arrival, Anne writes that her “heart rose” in resistance to this new country of strange men and manners.  Yet, in the fullness of time, she accommodated herself to life in Boston.  She confesses that, during her life there, she endured periods of spiritual crisis, especially regarding the verity of Scripture – a bedrock dogma of Puritanism.  In a letter titled “To My Dear Children,” she cops to her dark nights of the soul:

Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures, many times by Atheism how could I know whether there was a God; I never saw any miracles to confirm me, and those which I read of how did I know but they were feigned. That there is a God my Reason would soon tell me by the wondrous works that I see, the vast frame of the Heaven and the Earth, the order of all things, night and day, Summer and Winter, Spring and Autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the Earth, the preserving and directing of All to its proper end. The consideration of these things would with amazement certainly resolve me that there is an Eternal Being.

And so she eventually founded a renewed faith in the “Wondrous works, that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end.”  Such a faith in a divinely ordained natural order seems to me to yearn beyond Calvinist depravity, grasping for some Christianized vision of Arcadia.  We can see this yearning in her collection of poems, called The Tenth Muse, published in 1650 – unknown to her by her brother-in-law, who absconded to London with a manuscript – making her the first poet resident in the so-called New World to be published.  Handy bit of trivia for all you Jeopardy! aspirants.  A second edition came out in 1678.  In her poetry, Bradstreet presents long meditative works on the capital B capital Q “Big Questions,” leavened with intimate and domestic lyrics about everyday life.  In all of these, she hews fairly close to a plain style: rhyming iambic pentameter with some classical allusion, but nothing as ornate or bombastic as that of Donne or Milton.

In “The Prologue,” Bradstreet humblebrags about her ambitions.  In eight sestets, rhyming ABABCC (what is sometimes referred to as the “Venus and Adonis” stanza for Shakespeare’s use of it in that poem), she deprecates her right or ability “To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings, / Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun.”  She notes that, as a woman, she is 

obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better fits.

A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong,

For such despite they cast on female wits.

But, at the same time, Bradstreet points out that the Greek Muses were female, and “poesy made Calliope’s own child.”  The final stanza implores the Muse’s favor, and at once admits her presumption while asserting her right:

If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,

Give thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no Bays.

This mean and unrefined ore of mine

Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

In these lines, the speaker asks for “no bays,” that is, the laurel leaves that traditionally crown a poet.  Instead, she wants parsley and thyme.  These are, of course, humble herbs used in cookery and, at the time, sometimes as medicine.  They also carry particular symbolic associations: parsley with, paradoxically, gratitude and misfortune (also with removing bitterness, both figuratively and literally), and thyme with courage and strength.  So Bradstreet simultaneously accepts the caprice of life in the world with a determination to meet it.

We see this played out concretely in the poem “Before the Birth of One of Her Children.”  Written in plainspoken heroic couplets, it begins

All things within this fading world hath end,   

Adversity doth still our joyes attend;

No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,

But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.   

A reasonable sentiment, one might think, given the horrendous rate of infant mortality in the 17th century, especially in the colonies.  But as one reads along, one sees that it’s not the child’s death she addresses, but her own: “How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend, How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend.”  The alliteration in these lines draws the sentiments tightly together and almost approaches the character of nursery rhyme.  I should note that Anne Bradstreet had not been blessed with a sturdy constitution: rheumatic fever as a child left her chronically fatigued.  Yet she endured eight pregnancies, despite the critical danger.  At the end of the poem, she envisions a wicked stepmother – a second wife for her husband who may displace her children’s love for her or indeed may be cruel to children not her own.  She summons a great pathos with this anxiety, her acceptance of which is clearly a struggle for her.

“In Reference to Her Children” shows Bradstreet indulging in the pastoral mode.  As I just mentioned, she had eight children, and fittingly, this poem consists of eight-syllable (octosyllabic) lines.  Written in 1659, the poem presents each of her children as they have grown.  At this time, five had already begun lives of their own, so one senses a feeling of motherly accomplishment here, as well as, of course, some sense of loss and longing.  Bradstreet suffuses the poem with avian imagery, beginning with “I had eight birds hatched in one nest, / Four Cocks were there, and Hens the rest.”  The hens have married and started their own families, one of the cocks seeks academic distinctions: they “take [their] flight” and “[peck] corn,” while one, not yet fully mature, “Is ‘mongst the shrubs and bushes flown / And as his wings increase in strength / On higher boughs he’ll perch at length.”  What a great little image for the awkwardness of young adulthood: a bird scratching around in the low bushes, trying its independence but not yet strong enough to fly far from the nest.  I’m sure many of us relate to that.  I confess that I scrabbled about in the hedges for a while – dropped out of college several times, my Mom had to get me a job at the mail-order company at which she worked.  I was fully 24 before I finally flew to my own branch.  Anyway.

So, we get some good Arcadian-style imagery here.  The lines 

Mean while, my days in tunes I’ll spend

Till my weak lays with me shall end.

In shady woods I’ll sit and sing

And things that past, to mind I’ll bring.

seem to come straight out of a “pastoral by numbers” kit.  But once again, Bradstreet’s thoughts turn to her own death, leaving her children behind:

My age I will not once lament

But sing, my time so near is spent,

And from the top bough take my flight

Into a country beyond sight.

At least here, though, she anticipates not simply abandonment, but eternal life in heaven as well as being remembered to her grandchildren.

The pastoral mode again appears in several poems written when her husband was away on business, most notably when he had to return to London to renegotiate the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter with King Charles II.  In “Another Letter to Her Husband,” Bradstreet goes full Thomas Wyatt with the metaphor of the deer hunt:

As loving hind that (hartless) wants her deer,

Scuds through the woods and fern with hark'ning ear,

Perplext, in every bush and nook doth pry,

Her dearest deer, might answer ear or eye;

So doth my anxious soul, which now doth miss

A dearer dear (far dearer heart) than this.

As this is an audible medium, I must needs point out that “hartless” in line one is parenthetical, and spelled h-a-r-t-l-e-s-s, the hart, as in the mature male deer.  The pun, for a lonely lover, should be obvious. But here, the speaker is herself the hart, a bit of gender-swapping.  I think I can leave it to my clever audience to sort out the other puns in these lines.  If you do find them opaque, perhaps this is not the show for you.  May I direct you to certain podcasts of the “manosphere,” for which such doltish credulity is eminently suited.  What intrigues me about this poem, however, is that, as the hart, Bradstreet’s speaker places herself in, for this episode’s purposes, Arcadia – New England –  and the husband has been lost to the world outside, Old England.

In another poem addressed to her husband absent on public employment, we see a curious metaphysical development in her writing.  She writes

My head, my heart, mine Eyes, my life, nay more,

My joy, my Magazine of earthly store,

If two be one, as surely thou and I,

How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lye?

The reference to John Donne’s conceit in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is unmistakable.  She questions the paradoxical logic of “man and wife become one flesh” here, wondering how that’s possible when she remains at Ipswich, a town north of Boston, while her husband travels abroad.  The poem concludes with an unquestioning acceptance of what she calls “nature’s sad decree”: “Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, / I here, thou there, yet both but one.”

I wonder if any of my listeners are somewhat surprised by the evident love and passion Bradstreet expresses for her husband.  We are wont to think of Puritans as emotionally cold, suspicious of passion as the Devil’s playground.  But that’s mere stereotype.  Certainly, there is a sternness to their outlook, but Puritans were not bereft of human emotion.  They felt the same fears and joys as anyone, and we must look past historical shorthand when reading their writing.  Bradstreet reprises that Donnian conceit in one of her most anthologized poems, “To My Dear and Loving Husband.”  Here are the opening lines:

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

There’s the paradox of two souls being one, yeah, but in line 4, the address shifts from the husband to all other women: ours is the greatest marriage of souls, no other wife can compare with me.  It’s like John and Yoko without the bed-ins and bags.  This is followed by rather quotidian comparisons of marital love to gold and flooded rivers, metaphors that would make Brill Building composers blanch, and ends, again returning the address to the husband, with a Donnian resolution: “Then while we live, in love let’s so persever, / That when we live no more, we may live ever.”  Our love shall live forever, beyond even the grave that so haunts Bradstreet’s lyrics.  One is reminded of the sonnets of Spenser and Shakespeare in this poem’s assertion of love’s transcendent eternity.

In Westfield, Massachusetts, a community in the Pioneer Valley surrounding the Connecticut River, a poet and pastor named Edward Taylor possessed a copy of Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse in its second edition.  He was probably born in Leicestershire in 1642 to a yeoman farmer, and we can detect traces of that dialect in his poetry.  He probably had some university education in England before travelling to Massachusetts in 1668, and he spent three years at Harvard.  His emigration was prompted by his Puritanism – he refused to swear the oath of loyalty to the Church of England, and so accepted exile in the “howling wilderness” of the colonies. His poetic work embodies the belief in a direct communication and relationship with God – as opposed to one mediated by an institutional church – that still characterizes modern evangelical faith in the United States.  Curiously, what might at first presage a rather fundamentalist, severe, and anti-humanist (in the Renaissance sense of the term) attitude instead presents a love affair with the rich and profoundly metaphysical poetry of the day, especially that of Dr. Donne.

Taylor’s engagement with the pastoral conception of Arcadia is usually filtered through Donnian metaphysics.  As a minister, much of Taylor’s poetry is contemplative and meditative and often worked as a means of centering his preaching.  In the prologue to a collection tersely called Preparatory Meditations before my Approach to the Lord’s Supper, Chiefly Upon the Doctrine preached upon the Day of Administration, from about 1682 and containing private reflections on the text of his sermons for the monthly communion service, Taylor gestures towards both the classical and metaphysical traditions.  Comparing himself to a “crumb of dust” – a figure which does dual service by referencing the soil from which Adam was created and Christ as the bread of life – he humbles himself as an unworthy vehicle for God’s glory, and so implores the Lord as his muse to inspire the work upon which he embarks:

Let not th' attempts break down my dust I pray,

Nor laugh Thou them to scorn, but pardon give.

Inspire this crumb of dust till it display

Thy glory through't: and then Thy dust shall live.

Its failings then Thou'lt overlook, I trust,

They being slips slipped from Thy crumb of dust.

We have iambic pentameter lines – very much in the established English idiom – and the sestet rhyming ABABCC – the same “Venus and Adonis” stanza Bradstreet whipped on us for her own prologue to The Tenth Muse.  But perhaps you noticed, even in this early sample, that Taylor’s language, or his syntax anyway, is far less direct than his predecessor’s.  The placement of the dependent clause’s subject in the first sentence fits the rhythm beautifully, but is also syntactically tangled.  We’ve also the playful repetition of “slips slipped” in the last line, which seem primarily ornamental, though they do complete the thought, albeit somewhat obliquely.

Many readers find Taylor’s work more challenging to read than other, especially Puritan, poets.  The often labyrinthine grammar, the abstruseness of his metaphors, compounded by his frequent use of the native Leicestershire dialect, which lends a provincial appeal, can throw up barriers for the modern reader.  

We can see these at work in his most well-known poem today, “Huswifery” – uh, “house-wifery” or, more pertinent, “housekeeping.”  The metaphysical conceit here involves weaving, and Taylor identifies each part of the loom and spinning wheel as part of the process of regenerating the Christian soul.  He’s building off a parable from the Gospel of St. Matthew (chapter 22, verse 12, if you’ve got your copy of the Good Book handy), in which a king chastises a wedding guest for being dressed inappropriately.  The poem’s only 18 lines, so I can give it in full:

Make me, O Lord, Thy spinning-wheel complete.

Thy holy word my distaff make for me.

Make mine affections Thy swift flyers neat

And make my soul Thy holy spool to be.

My conversation make to be Thy reel

And reel thy yarn thereon spun of Thy wheel.

Make me Thy loom then, knit therein this twine:

And make Thy Holy Spirit, Lord, wind quills:

Then weave the web Thyself.  Thy yarn is fine.

Thine ordinances make my fulling-mills.

Then dye the same in heavenly colors choice,

All pinked with varnished flowers of paradise.

Then clothe therewith mine understanding, will,

Affections, judgement, conscience, memory,

My words and actions, that their shine may fill

My ways with glory and Thee glorify.

Then mine apparel shall display before Ye

That I am clothed in holy robes for glory.

“Venus and Adonis” stanza again.  Three of them.  The poem proceeds from the process of spinning yarn in stanza 1, weaving cloth in stanza 2, and finally dressing the garment in stanza 3.  The speaker first wishes to be the spinning wheel, scripture is the distaff (the stick used to wind wool or flax around), and the speaker’s affections are the flyers (a U-shaped gizmo for holding the bobbin).  His soul is the spool, prayer is the reel, and you get the jist.  Same process of substitution in the other stanzas: God’s commands are the “fulling-mills.”  What’s that?  Don’t know what a fulling-mill is?  Well, if you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll tell you.  

Fulling mills finished woolen cloth, making it suitable for clothing.  The mill uses mechanical action (often large mallets or stocks powered by water) to pound and agitate the fabric, often with the help of urine.  Yep, the ammonia in piddle acted as a cleaner, breaking down dirt and grease in the fibers and helped to bind those fibers together, to interlock, resulting in a more compact and robust fabric.  Also, bleached the cloth a bit.  After this, the cloth would be stretched on tenterhooks to dry and be ready for shearing, which smoothed the surface. 

There are a number of contact points between the demands of the Almighty and the rendering of raw wool into a stylish blouse.  The pounding action, the cleansing, the whitening, the stretching into the desired shape and texture.  It’s a good metaphor, but the pee stuff is somewhat distasteful.  Need to be soaked and pounded in piss before you don the “robes for glory.”  That might reasonably bring on the dark night of the soul.

Anyway, I bring this poem up as an example of the thoroughness of Taylor’s thought as well as the homeliness of his imagery.  But, some three and a half centuries on, not many readers will understand a word he says – we are no longer a weaving people.

Hmm . . . I’ve put myself in need of a rather clever segue.  You see, I did the prologue to Preparatory Meditations, then got carried away by “Huswifery,” and now I have to deftly move back to a discussion of some of the actual preparatory meditations.  Rather an awkward move.  Should’ve just kept on and put “Huswifery” at the end.  But, spilt milk and all that.  Tally ho!

I had been talking about Taylor’s sometimes baroque use of language and this feature is on vivid display in the meditations.  As I said, the pastoral, Arcadian analogues depend heavily upon metaphysical filters.  In “Meditation 8,” the conceit compares the soul to a “Bird of Paradise” captured within a “wicker cage” – the body (actually, what he calls “my corpse” in morbidly Puritanical fashion) – in a metaphor that distills Plato and St. Paul.  Here’s the opening stanza to that poem:

I kening through Astronomy Divine

The Worlds bright Battlement, wherein I spy

A Golden Path my Pensill cannot line,

From that bright Throne unto my Threshold ly.

And while my puzzled thoughts about it pore

I finde the Bread of Life in't at my doore.

OK, so “kenning” means “discerning” or “understanding” – we still hear the phrase “beyond my ken” to mean “I don’t understand or know.”  Well, sometimes we do.  Gold star to listeners who also recognize the term from the halcyon days of the podcast, when we spoke of Anglo-Saxon metaphors.  “Astronomy Divine” is like seeing the stars or the cosmos not just as physical phenomena, but as a manifestation of God’s plan and providence.  The “world’s bright battlement”?  The frontier between human understanding and divine wisdom.  Taylor’s pencil – his poetry – cannot trace the golden path between them.  Phew.  That’s just the first few lines.

But what makes Taylor’s poetry rewarding, even if it is a struggle at first, is the sheer pleasure of its language.  Even if you don’t know what he’s saying, hearing it said, or speaking it aloud, is a beautiful experience.  To take an expression from cookery, his poetry has a wonderful “mouth feel.”  And that, I think, comes largely from the way he manipulates rhythm, and especially his rather subtle use of enjambment.  

Enjambment, you may remember, is the technique of having the grammatical sense of the sentence run beyond the metrical boundary of the line, so the sentence doesn’t end when the line does, it just keeps rolling to the next line.  The elegant use of this technique is really difficult to do.  We often like our poetry end-stopped – the sentence ends at the line’s end.  And we really like it when the line ends with a perfect rhyme.  Very tidy, very accessible.  But Taylor enjambs all the time, and the rhymes are so liquid and smooth that they slip by, almost whispering their presence, tying the stanza together gently.  Often, Taylor then completes his stanzas with the heroic couplet, with hard, even aggressive rhymes.  The effect is dynamic, and soft-loud, legato-staccato, push-pull.  Quite physical, almost.

Look at this stanza from “Meditation 8”:

In this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run

Out streams of Grace: And he to end all strife

The Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son

Grinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life.

Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands

Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands.

Right, let’s not get distracted by God’s running bowels here – they’re not dysenteric – “bowels” is just Taylor’s way of indicating the inner body, uh, specifically the heart.  Who knows?  But look closely at the enjambments.  Line 1 ends with the verb “run” and line 2 begins with the adverb “out”, so the line ends before the action is fully understood.  The end rhyme comes in the midst of a phrase, and it will rhyme with line 3’s “son”, which is the subject of the verb that begins line 4, “grinds.”  If you read mechanically, line isolated from line and stressing the end rhyme – as many students unfamiliar with poetry often do – the poem feels all janky.  But if you read sentence by sentence, all of sudden this graceful flow materializes, languid, but not lazy.  All the rough edges file away to smoothness.

Here’s another good one from “Meditation 16,” a poem which borrows Donne’s conceit of gilding, covering with gold leaf, to examine the sanctified soul, and its vulnerability to being uncovered by sin.  Here’s the stanza:

I cannot see, nor will thy will aright.

Nor see to wail my woe, my loss and hue

Nor all the shine in all the sun can light

My candle, nor its heat my heart renew.

See, wail, and will thy will, I must, or must

From heaven's sweet shine to hell's hot flame be thrust.

Line 1 is firmly end-stopped: it’s a hammer blow.  I do not understand and cannot do God’s bidding.  Boom.  Declarative.  But then, the stanza modifies that statement with a three line sentence that is really a series of subordinate clauses, not a complete sentence.  Same enjambment techniques here, especially across lines 3 and 4, when again the subject is divided from the verb.  You probably also noted some homophonic repetition here: using the same word to mean two different things: in line 1, “will” as in to desire (a verb) and “will” as in the faculty used to determine action (a noun).  Kind of the same thing with the modal verb “must” in the fifth line.  Plenty of alliteration throughout, nice antithesis in the final line.  Taylor’s verse is just jam-packed with linguistic complexity, fully as complex in some ways as the Johns Donne and Milton, and surpassing many of the pastoral poets with his dexterity.

Well, I think I’ve babbled long enough.  I wanted to do this episode even though you don’t often find Anne Bradstreet or Edward Taylor in most English literature courses or anthologies.  They’re usually given over to American literature surveys, but I’ve always thought that rather an accident of geography rather than any new literary or cultural development.  As we’ve seen, these two English poets, living in what is now America, brought with them the literary heritage they knew and admired, filtered through their religious beliefs, and fired in the crucible of emigration.  They came to New England, both howling wilderness and Arcadian dream, and wrote of their experiences, both individual and historic.

Thanks for listening to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  I hope you enjoyed our time together.  Don’t forget to give us a 5-star rating on whatever platform you listen on – I’d be ever so grateful.  Send me your thoughts via text message, e-mail, or the anti-social media.  Be well, do good, and talk to you soon.