A selection of Edward Taylor’s poems

 A selection of Edward Taylor’s poems

There are four of Edward Taylor’s poems in The Penguin Book of American Verse.

Now, I know that the nature of the American nation is such that origins, as such, are important. Even so, this seems an undue amount of respect for what is, it must be said, pretty awful poetry.

I admit that he is more likely to receive a sympathetic reading from a Christian, but, again, even so, the ideas are … scarcely worthy of the word.

Taylor was born in England, not far from Leicester. Raised as a Puritan, he refused to accept the conditions of the Restoration and, consequently, he emigrated to the Massachusetts colony. There, he studied and became a priest, in a form of the church that he found, approvingly, even stricter than English puritanism. His poetry was not published until it was discovered in the 1930s, when it was enthusiastically presented as great American literature. One can only hope that opinions have been moderated in more recent years.

The first of the four poems in the Penguin anthology is the Preparatory Meditation beginning ‘Oh! What a thing is Man? Lord, who am I?’ It is a fairly straightforward presentation of judgement, that peculiar legal metaphor that drives so much of Christian thinking. It relies on a conceit of seeing God’s judgement in terms of a court, which is not particularly inventive, given that the idea is built into the religion in the first place. Asking Christ to be his ‘Advocate’, his lawyer, Taylor ends with this revealing couplet:

‘If thou wilt plead my case before the King:

I’ll wagon loads of love, and glory bring.’

We are a long way short of John Donne’s A Hymn to God the Father, artistically and theologically. The stance of payment in ‘love and glory’ is truly revolting. The attempted art of the poem doesn’t matter. The ideas are childish, simplistic and guileful. It pains me that the Wikipedia article claims a comparison between Taylor and George Herbert.

The second poem goes by different titles in other publications. It begins ‘Ye flippering soul, why dost between the nippers dwell?’ It’s a much more lively poem, sparkling with lively language. But follow the argument and tell me that it makes any real sense. Has our poet not, fairly catastrophically, mixed his metaphors, in order to arrive at a very simple conclusion? A religious version of ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’, there is little here in the form of reason or persuasion. It has the same level of rigour as Pascal’s wager, itself a severely limited presentation of possibilities. We are fortunate to live in an era in which awareness of different religions allows us to draw the conclusion that wagering on any one of them is a particularly slender gamble upon which to stake the living of one’s life.

The third poem is Upon a Spider Catching a Fly. The criticism of the spider attacking the fly but leaving the wasp alone is a bit rich coming from a coloniser. The spider is used to form the commonplace conceit of the web that Satan makes to trap sinners. The poem ends with the promise that, if God saves us, we will sing his glory. It really makes me wonder how Christians see emotional transactions. If the model King of the heavens requires his creations to sing his glory, we are left with the idea of a dreadfully emotionally stunted egotist as Supreme Being. No wonder so many evangelicals were able to see divinity in Trump.

The fourth poem is Huswifery, or Housewifery, depending upon whether the editor has modernised Taylor’s spelling or not. It’s a reasonably elegant conceit built around God as weaver. However, Taylor is praying for God to ‘fill my ways with glory’ so that he may ‘thee glorify’. As a sales pitch, it’s woeful. 

Taylor’s arrival in Massachusetts is three decades removed from the trial of Anne Hutchinson. The foundation of America is bound together with the pronouncements of preachers. Taylor’s simplistic reference to glory is the pitch, the price for which the colonists made others pay. Contentedly going to church and praying, while stealing land, livelihood and lives of those who were not ‘bound for glory’. By the time that Taylor arrived in New England, African slaves were already present. The horrors of the slave industry accelerated when Charles II granted a monopoly to the Royal African Company in 1672, just four years after Taylor’s arrival in Massachusetts. By 1710, there were over 20,000 African slaves in Virginia alone. Taylor died in 1729. 

What meaning can glorifying God have when the slaughter and enslavement of indigenous people, the transport, enslavement, and incidental slaughter of Africans, and the changing of laws to protect slave owners from accusations of cruelty, violence, rape and murder, and the crimes themselves, were carried out openly by the members of the church?

What value can such hollow poetry have in such a context?