Pain, Philip

Pain, Philip,
author of Daily Meditations (1666). Nothing is known of his life except the information on the title page, that he “lately suffering shipwrack, was drowned.” Since the work was published in Massachusetts, he may have been a New Englander, and the poems indicate that he was a very young man. They are concerned with the doubts, fears, and hopes of a devout man who is restive in his faith. The poetry has a deep personal note and is strongly influenced by the English metaphysical poets. If Pain was an American, as is supposed, his work is the earliest-known original verse printed in the American colonies.