SOURCE: Davis, Thomas M. “The Emergence of a Poet.” In A Reading of Edward Taylor, pp. 20-47. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Davis traces Taylor's early career as a poet, maintaining that the years 1679-82 were a period of increasing mastery of poetic technique for Taylor.]

The years from 1679 to 1682 are a defining period in Edward Taylor's life, at least for the two major concerns of this time: his recent ordination and his increasing abilities as a poet. These years were exceptionally full and perhaps for the first time in his life he came to know who he was and what he was about. We do not know—apart from what is too often unreliable family tradition—exactly what Taylor did in England. His admission with advanced standing at Harvard indicates that he had at least some kind of nonconformist education beyond the basic schools, yet he did take nearly the full course of studies here. We also know from the Diary that he was asked to deliver some kind of devotional talk during the voyage to New England.¹ but such “exercising” is not the sermon of an ordained minister, and even if he had had some kind of ordination in England, that would not have been valid until he was settled in a congregation and confirmed by New England principles. In this sense, then, with his ordination at the “gathering” of the Westfield church on 27 August 1679 something over ten years after he had arrived in the colony, at least the primary calling of his personal life had been realized. He was, after all this time, a minister, duly ordained under congregational principles, called and instituted in his office by the foundation men and the visiting elders.

Whatever the reasons that caused the delay of the organization of the church, these seem to have been put aside at least for the present, and he was committed to the life of a frontier minister.² Though there were several external problems—the lack of enough foundation men (though the Northampton colleagues thought there were enough), Taylor's single state (other ministers had assumed their pastorate unmarried), and the interruption of the skirmishing and real threats of Philip's War—he seems to have made that final psychological commitment to the life of the ministry. With his characteristic attention to detail, though the visiting elders caused him to revise completely the procedures (CR [Edward Taylor's “Church Record” and Related Sermons, ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis, Boston: Twayne, 1981], 8), the gathering of the church was completed and Edward Taylor accepted the ordination of the foundation men.

It would be difficult to overemphasize how personally significant these first years of his ministry were. In one sense, all of his life had been a preparation for this point: what training he had received in England, the commitments that caused his emigration, the three years at Harvard College, and the more than eight years in Westfield, preparing himself and the unchurched brethren for the actual founding of the Westfield congregation. The ordination of a new minister and the erection of a “particular church of Christ” to be a “habitation of God through the Spirit” (the doctrine of the Foundation Sermon, CR, 121) was a momentous event in the life of a man like Taylor and the community in which he lived and in the ongoing sense of New England's mission as well. Despite the objections of the visiting elders—led almost prophetically by Solomon Stoddard—the understated account of Taylor's acceptance of the call of the Westfield group does not conceal the import this held for him: “After the whole was done Mr. Stoddard being deputed by the Elders to give the Right hand of Fellowship to me in this Office did it as before which being done Brother Loomis Set the 122 Psalm, which being sung the Assembly was dismisst with the Blessing. & so the work was accomplisht” (CR, 160).

The two days of “gathering” in Westfield, now a provincial town of some two hundred people, must have been an impressive event, with the formalities of the foundation service, the sermon, the ordination, and the entertainment for the visiting dignitaries. The small meetinghouse, built the year after Taylor arrived in Westfield, was no doubt too small to accommodate the number of individuals who had assembled. And Taylor, always so deferential toward authority, was now one himself. With his wife and two sons—James was only nine months—an impressive beginning. And so, when at the completion of the ceremonies they sang “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord,” the work was “accomplisht.”

Taylor was now enrolled in the “godly cloud of witnesses” who had brought the message of God to the wilderness, and conscious as he was of the significance of the founding fathers and the near apotheosis he accorded them, he must have known a fulfillment unusual for him. Of central importance is that for the first time in his commitment to the Puritan order of worship Taylor was now able to administer the sacraments. During the years previous to the gathering of the church he no doubt “exercised” on the Lord's Day and perhaps in midweek services, and, as he says in the Church Records, after he had been in Westfield two years “we set up Conference me[eting in] which I went over all the Heads of Divinity unto the means of the Application [of Re]demption in order to prepare them for a Church State” (4). But since no church had been gathered and he had not been ordained, when sacraments, largely baptism, were observed by Westfield's inhabitants, they would have had to be administered elsewhere, perhaps in Northampton or Springfield. On 31 August, the Sunday after the organization of the church on the previous Wednesday, Taylor records in the Baptismal Records the first baptisms; two more were baptized the following Lord's Day, and others on successive Sundays. It was not until the first Sunday in December of the following year, however, that children baptized elsewhere were admitted to the Westfield congregation; at that time, over thirty children, including Taylor's two sons, Samuel and James, were admitted to membership under the terms of the halfway covenant.³ Taylor and the foundation men were admitted on the day the church was organized, of course. According to the Church Records the next admission of adult members was in January 1679/80; eight individuals, including Taylor's wife, Elizabeth, were admitted to full membership, and others periodically after that (162).

As the Church Records also indicates, while no elders other than Taylor were elected on the day of founding (and never were during the time he served) and no deacons selected at that time, “Brother Loomas [one of the foundation men] was desired to looke after the providing Wine, & Bread & to furnish the Lords Table” (173). We have no record of when the Supper was first observed, though it may not have been until the admission of full members some five months later. There is little evidence to indicate, particularly during these early years, how often the Westfield church celebrated the Supper.⁴ Further, none of the adult members of the Westfield church—including Taylor himself—had been able to observe the Lord's Supper during the years they had been in Westfield. It may seem surprising (in light of Taylor's later attitude toward the Sacrament) that there were no preparations for attending the Lord's Table the Sunday following the organization of the church—at least as far as any evidence we have indicates. Yet for the Westfield congregation and their minister the matter seems not to have been of central concern. Nor, apart from the foundation men, would there have been any full members to administer the Supper to, until other members were admitted five months later. Such was not the case in relation to baptisms, however, which began the first Sunday after the founding.

The events of August 1679 were to determine the direction of Taylor's life for the next half-century. Whatever reluctance he may have had about committing himself to Westfield and the ministry—and whatever disagreements with his parishioners followed (and there were more than a few), at an age when most New England ministers were in the middle of their ministerial careers, Taylor, in his midthirties, was just beginning.

As significant a change was also taking place in his poetry, not only in the kind of poetry he was beginning to write but in the quantity and quality as well. The acrostic ingenuities that characterize much of the Harvard poetry do not continue and the elaborate love poem to his bride-to-be, Elizabeth Fitch, “This Dove & Olive Branch to you,” is the last of the ingenious verse. His next poem, sent to Elizabeth the week before they were married, is in itself and in its characterization of the kind of verse he will write the first indication of this difference:

Were but my Muse an Huswife Good, & could
Spin out a Phansy fine, & Weave it Would
In Sapphick Web. …
.....But I no Rowling Phansy have to run,
Nor She Such Silken Huswifry ere Spun.
Hence Coarse Iämbick is the finest she
Can weave. …(5)

He says he is concerned primarily with his inability to express the extent of his love for her, but he is also characterizing his poetry in a different way. What might be read as a conventional statement of humility is in fact a statement of the change in his poetry; “Coarse Iämbick” will now be the web he weaves.⁶

The result of this change in direction is the first of a number of paraphrases of biblical books and passages, the first version of Taylor's paraphrases of the Hebrew Psalms. Since Elizabeth apparently had also written verse, the two may have collaborated on these paraphrases and may have used the versions in their own daily devotions, a practice fairly common among paraphrasts. The two versions, the first beginning in 1674/75 and the second transcribed in the early 1680s, may have never continued beyond Psalm 49. But these paraphrases are significant. They shift the discipline of his muse from the secular conventions of the acrostic and elegy to the biblical model, Israel's poet David. Rather than filling acrostic patterns, Taylor is now disciplined as a poet by the Divine Word and the responsibility of representing adequately the original Hebrew: fidelity to the original text, not ingenuity, is the basic demand upon the Puritan paraphrast. It is good practice, both in keeping a language active and in meeting some fairly strict demands on the craft of poetry. The paraphrases also point Taylor toward the major concerns of his life and his life in Westfield as a whole: a singer of Israel in sermon and song. David was God's servant; David led his people in the wilderness to the true faith; David's songs were appropriate praise to the God of Israel; and David was viewed as the archetypal poet-meditator.⁷ How much Edward Taylor thought of the similarities is speculative, of course, but the basic ingredients of the meditative poems are here in this initial attraction to David's poetry and his awareness of David's role. The Psalms, as Calvin asserted, do present the perfect example of the “right manner of praising God” (the form) and provide the emotional impulse for the “performance of this religious exercise”—that is, of meditating.⁸

Taylor had been in Westfield slightly less than three years when he and Elizabeth were married. That seemed, at least at the time, to be the last action needed before the church was fully organized. As he notes in the Church Records: “I determined within [myself that] in case things could go comfortably on, to Settle with them: & in [order thereto] Changed my Condition, & entred into a married State; hop[ing that the following] Summer would open a doore to l[et] us into a Church State” (4). What followed, however, was not the peaceful first years of a marriage and the normal activity leading to the founding of a church. On 20 June 1675 the initial raids of what came to be known as King Philip's War began, and for the next two years, though Philip was killed in the fall of 1676, sporadic Indian attacks occurred, serious enough to cause Westfield to remain garrisoned and continually aware of the potential for disaster.⁹ Two months after Philip's initial attacks, the Taylors' first son, Samuel, was born. The first daughter, Elizabeth, was born on 27 December 1676, shortly after the major Indian conflicts had ceased, but she died on 25 December the following year. During this time the town of Westfield was still garrisoned and though the major part of the conflict ended in the summer of 1676, sporadic attacks for the next eighteen months still made living on the frontier uneasy. It was not until August 1678 that the General Court authorized the “Christian people of Westfield in the Colony of Massachusetts, to enter into a Church State …” (CR, 8). By this time the inhabitants had returned to their homes and were able to resume some semblance of normal life. The Taylors, now with a second son, James (born 12 October 1678), turned from the events of the preceding years and began to make plans for the founding of the church. But the years of conflict left their mark and the western frontier was not fully secured until the turn of the century.

However distant the actual gathering of the church may have appeared, Taylor must have begun to make the needed preparations and to consider the direction the newly organized congregation would take. Certainly one of the problems he faced, as did all ministers of the colony, was the declining number of New England church members. The recommendations of the 1662 synod that “Church-members who were admitted in minority” and met basic requirements, “their children are to be baptized”¹⁰ were generally accepted, and as the founding sermon indicates, Taylor had no reservations concerning the halfway covenant. But the problems continued and were of enough concern for Increase Mather to call for a synod (that met two weeks after the Westfield church was organized) to address the question of “What are the Evils that have provoked the Lord to bring his Judgments on New-England?” For Taylor, who seems not to have attended the meetings in Boston, the problems were immediate and practical.

First, not all ministers were satisfied with the results of the 1662 Synod, nor would they be with the compromise of the Reforming Synod (1679). Of immediate concern to Taylor, however, was the attitude of Solomon Stoddard, his ministerial colleague in Northampton. Stoddard was more dissatisfied than most with the decision of the 1662 Synod and he apparently is the person Increase Mather refers to who has “espoused loose, large Principles here, designing to bring all persons to the Lords Supper, who have an Historical Faith, and are not scandalous in Life, although they never had Experience of a work of Regeneration on their Souls.” Yet Stoddard had made no changes in the practice of admission of members to full standing, and would not do so for more than a decade.¹¹ Despite Mather's comment, both Taylor and Stoddard were—at this point, at any rate—faced with the same dilemma: how to convince sincere, perhaps overscrupulous, and certainly still unregenerate members to come forward to claim full membership and its attendant privileges. As Taylor no doubt recognized, the matter was not simply theoretical but of immediate practical import: if Stoddard were able to eliminate a public relation of saving grace and admit a candidate to full privileges in the congregation, what would Taylor and the Westfield congregation do when such a person moved to Westfield (as a number of inhabitants from Northampton had already done) with the appropriate letters of Dismission from the Northampton church and requested admission to the Westfield group? Would they insist on a public relation? Or imply that the candidate was not converted and had been attending the Supper in sin? Or refuse admission to the Westfield congregation?

The issue is not solely the requirement of a public confession of saving grace, though that was certainly involved. Taylor's concern, at least, was with the distressingly large group of individuals who had received the sacrament of baptism, had grown up under the watch of the church, and yet had never been able, for whatever reason, to consider themselves among the elect. With barely enough foundation men to organize the church, its continued existence depended on replenishing the gathered members. Taylor casts this into the architectural metaphor of the Foundation Day Sermon:

If when Solomon had polisht materialls for the Temple these polisht materials had lain by … there had been no Temple raised of polisht, & suitable matter. Living stones in this Spirituall Building lie not in it as it is of this sort here below, eternally. There is now one, & then another gathered hence as a Choice Pearle to be sett in the Ring of glory. & hence in a little time the whole building will be translated hence, Stone after Stone. & so will disappeare, if there be no addition made to it, the which that it may not disappeare, God is polishing some for it, as he is fetching some from it. & hence the building stands in need of those that are prepared for it.

(CR, 151)

Of first importance to the newly ordained minister, then, was to try to discover how a conscientious pastor could “coach” his parishioners to the recognition of their elect status. A public relation of saving grace may not have been the end, but it was the means to the end. On this point Edward Taylor and Solomon Stoddard had no disagreement.

The issue at this time did not center on participation in the Lord's Supper, though that of course was the ultimate concern. When the Westfield church was organized and in the years immediately following, the most pressing concern was the resupply of materials for the church itself. In a sense three matters were involved: convincing reluctant halfway members to become full members; considering what requirements were to be stipulated for admission to full membership and what means were to be used, whether “orally or in some other way”; and deciding the standards for participation in the Lord's Supper. At this point, as the Records of the church indicate and the Foundation Sermon confirms, when the church was organized only the first two matters were Taylor's essential concerns.¹² So, by the time the church was organized and Taylor began his public ministry, his life in Westfield centered on two major experiences: the long period of warfare and the problem of reluctant halfway witnesses. These two concerns led quite naturally—almost inescapably for a poet like Taylor—to Gods Determinations touching his Elect.

The range of responses to the poem has been quite broad. As John Gatta notes:

Gods Determinations Touching his Elect has been usefully compared to a medieval morality play, to a formal Ignatian meditation, and to a standard Puritan homily. It shows some resemblance to hexameral literature, to the epic, to folk and proverbial discourse. And as a drama of salvation and Puritan conversion, this long poem has evident affinities with works like Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom or John Milton's Paradise Lost.¹³

But for my concerns here, what it is and what its structure is is not the most significant matter; but the context in which the poem should be read and the evidence the poem provides of Taylor's increasing ability as a poet.

Michael Colacurcio has convincingly shown that Gods Determinations is an occasional poem addressed specifically to “the failure of New England Congregational churches to replenish themselves with an ample supply of ‘saints,’” and that the “implied audience of the poem is precisely the half-way member of the Puritan congregation. …”¹⁴ The poem is, he continues, “designed to instruct and reassure hesitant half-way members who might be on the brink of confessing their full conversion.” With perhaps only one exception (the Psalm paraphrases) Gods Determinations is similar to Taylor's earlier poetry in that it responds to specific occasions, and it is, as the earlier poetry has been (again with perhaps the exception of the love poem to Elizabeth) a public poem. Yet as Dean Hall has demonstrated, the poem is not only concerned with the reluctant halfway members but also, in much of its imagery and dramatic structure, informed by the military events of Philip's War.¹⁵ These two topical concerns are reflected in the two major divisions of the poem, each with its own preface: the assaults of the satanic forces of the first part and the long “coaching” of reluctant souls in the interchanges between Saint and Soul of the second.

The poem has been variously dated: around 1700, “probably before 1690,” “by about 1682,” and so on. But there is persuasive evidence to identify the poem with the years between 1679 and 1681/82. The poem responds to the major concerns of the 1670s, Indian warfare, and the decline in church membership. Taylor must have begun working on it by the time the church was organized in the late summer of 1679, or shortly thereafter. The manuscript of Gods Determinations is an impeccably clean copy and it was transcribed in final form in 1681/82.¹⁶ We do not, unfortunately, have any manuscript evidence of revisions, changes in plan, relocation of material, material discarded, and so on nor do we know how the poem originally developed. My own sense is that the first part of the poem was written earliest, though some sections considerably revised, and that the part following the second “Preface” was written after the church was organized and the problems of halfway members had become insistent. But it is not a poem of only a year or so, considering all that Taylor had to occupy himself during this period. Moreover, the quantity of the verse, and certainly the varying quality, suggest several years of revision. Working from original conception to final transcription must have taken two or three years, perhaps from late 1678 to late 1681.

Of relevance here, too, are the number of parallels between the Foundation Day Sermon and Gods Determinations, reflecting their common concerns. A number of central images in the sermon appear in the poem: human nature is as “so many Shining Pearles sticking in a hard & impregnable rock”;¹⁷ the means of grace are the “strong gales of the Spirits breathing in fresh breizes” (148); quarreling in the house of God is to “make Satan Musick upon Christs own instrument, & to place Satans tunes upon Gods Pipes” (154); Solomon's “ivory Throne over laid With pure gold” (127). Satan's assaults on the soul are referred to several times throughout the sermon, culminating in the final part of the “Exhortation”: “Satan will assault you, you must look for it. You have no ground of any freedom from his assaults. You have neither example, nor promise of any such thing, Your priviledges will not exempt you, but rather expose you to the Same. For now you appear in the Camp of the whole world bidding battle to Satan …” (155). And certain sections of the sermon enunciate the theme of the glory and honor of those who are entered into a church state: “Looke here now Soule. What does thou say to this Society? is not this a Noble, & honorable, a glorious, nay, the most Noble, Honorable, glorious, & Excellent Society which is? & what will the Consideration thereof now set thy Affections a worke to enter hereinto? oh! delay not therefore …” (152). Here Taylor also addresses his congregation as “Soule,” the basic terminology of the poem.

In two of the major divisions of the sermon, God is presented in his role of Justice (“here is something representing an angry aspect from him that is the lord of this house,” 155) and Mercy (“here is something setting the pleasant Face of that gracious & glorious One,” 156). And the same tone of gentle persuasion that characterizes the last part of the poem is often expressed in the sermon; the following passage reflects also the central dichotomy of the poem, that between hope and despair:

… as it is a fault to enter unprepared, so it is a fault when prepared not to enter. O therefore do not proceed untill prepared, but do not delay to proceed when prepared. O my friends what say you? Will you be of the houshold of God or no? Will you be of the houshold of faith or no? will you be Fellow Citizens of the saints or no? Are you such as have trimmed your lamps? have your lamps any oyle in their Vessels or no? will you go out to meet the Brides groom or no? oh! then Come here. Enter your names among the living in Jerusalem. The doores of Gods house stand open unto you, have you a heart to enter or no? behold he calls thee saying turn in hither, turn in hither, why shouldst thou turn aside.

(150)

In fact, in a major section on the “Improvement of this doctrine” and “its usefullness upon the Will, & Affections,” Taylor characterizes in eight major divisions the relationship of the elect soul to the habitation of God: “Consider,” he says, “that thou hast a right in this house”; the soul has need of that “provision that God makes” for his elect, “therefore being a bidden guesst come”; God's house “hath need” of the soul; and so on. This section ends with the long allegorical paraphrase of Canticles 2:10-12, which in itself is a summary of the major concerns of Gods Determinations:

Consider, Soule that thou art called to enter here, if Prepared. Christ speakes unto thee in his language to his Spouse, Cant. 2.10, 11, 12, 13, arise, my Love, my fair one, & come a way. For lo! the winter (the time of thy unregeneracy) is past, the Rain (the means makeing thee to loathe thyselfe as a filthy thing have been effectual on thee) is over & gone. The Flowers (the sanctifying worke of Gods spirit) appear on the earth (in thy heart) the time of the Singing of birds (the ground of Spirituall melody) is come, the voice of the Turtle (the holy Spirit in the church) is heard in our land. The Fig tree putteth forth her green [Figs] ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ Vine with its tender grape (the fruits of new obedience) give a pleasant smell, (are clearly manifested, o therefore saith Christ) arise, my Love, my Fair one, & come away. What sayst thou to this? poore Soule canst thou withstand such soul inravishing Rhetorick?

(152)

Such parallels between prose works and poetry are relatively common in the later poetry, of course; Taylor often briefly introduces an image that ten to fifteen years later—or more—will become central in a poem or series of poems or series of sermons.¹⁸ Here in the Foundation Day Sermon, for example, he alludes in a quite minor way to “the man without the Wedden garment” (149) or the qualification of the “Wedden garment” (151) but he apparently does not develop the image in any detail until the Treatise sermons fifteen years later. But the parallels between the Foundation Day Sermon and Gods Determinations, coming at the beginning of Taylor's public career, indicate a common concern and also a closeness in time of composition.

Finally, neither in the sermon and the practice of the Westfield church nor in the poem is there more than an incidental concern with the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. The centrality of the Sacrament and its spiritual nourishment in Taylor's thought and poetry is a later development. There are in fact only two or three explicit references in the sermon to the Supper at all. In discussing the significance of the presence of God in his house, Taylor lists, quite briefly, six particulars of God's presence: he is present in the ministry of the word, in prayer, in “holy & heavenly Songs,” in baptism, and, “In the Celibrating the Feast of the Lords Supper, while the king sits at the Table his Spicknard sends out its Sweet Smel, Cant. 1.12.” And finally, in “Ejecting the obstinate” (124-25). In the last section before the Improvements, Taylor alludes again to these six particulars as evidence of God's presence in a particular church (142). Beyond these two specific references to the Supper there are of course more general allusions to the ordinances, the sacraments, the blessings of God's house, but none to the Supper is developed in any detail. Especially in the exhortation section of the sermon where Taylor, appealing to the will and affections of his hearers, celebrates the blessings of God's dwelling in a particular church—the “unspeakable favor & Priviledges” (144), the “ground of joy & praise” (144), the “highest priviledges & chiefe honour” (152)—the Supper is only alluded to once, and then under the general heading of “the means of Grace allowed thee of God, for thy salvation. By means of Grace understand ordinance-instituted means” (148). In the sermon Taylor is concerned with the prefatory requirements for participation in the Supper, not the Sacrament itself. And so his major concern—particularly with Stoddard present—is to defend the need for preparation and the necessity of a public confession of a conversion experience.

The absence of any concern with the Lord's Supper is also characteristic of Gods Determinations, though that at first may seem surprising. The Sacrament is not referred to once by name; there are no references to the Supper as a “banquet” and only two general references to a Feast. What references there are to the emblems of the Supper are general and not related directly to the Sacrament (for example, “Children's Bread,” 283). The few references to the ordinances occur mostly in the final lyrics and are quite general in nature (such as, “Each Ordinance and Instrument of Grace”; “with Ordinances and Instrument of Grace”; and “with Ordinances alli'de, and inaml'led”) and the only two references to the sacraments are likewise general in nature:

They now enCovenant With God: and His:
          They thus indent.
The Charters Seals belonging unto this
          The Sacrament. …

And in the following lyric:

          Christ's Spirit showers
Down in his Word, and Sacraments
          Upon these Flowers. …

(331-32)

Even in those poems where the subject of the Lord's Supper would seem appropriate, explicit references to the benefits do not appear. In “The Soule Seeking Church-Fellowship,” for example, the church is imaged as “Christ's Curious Garden fenced in / With Solid Walls of Discipline,” and Corruptions are kept out:

For on the Towers of these Walls there stand
          Just Watchmen Watching day, and night,
And Porters at each Gate, who have Command
          To open onely to the right.
          And all within may have a sight.

(330)

The protection of the Supper from unconverted participants is implicit here, yet neither in these verses nor in the remaining part of this poem does Taylor consider in any direct way the Lord's Table. The same is true of the following poem, “The Soul admiring the Grace of the Church Enters into Church Fellowship.” Stanza 5 contains the most direct reference in all of Gods Determinations to the Eucharist:

They now enCovenant With God: and His:
          They thus indent.
The Charters Seals belonging unto this
          The Sacrament
So God is theirs avoucht, they his in Christ.
In whom all things they have, with Grace are splic'te.

(331-32)

Thus, even in the most likely places, there are only the most oblique references to the Lord's Supper. Here, as in the Foundation Day Sermon, Taylor's concern is not with the Sacrament but with the preparatory stages themselves.

There are, I think two reasons for this. Taylor's major concern during the 1670s and early 1680s was to encourage the reluctant, backward elect to recognize their election, to come forward and to accept what was rightfully theirs: “Presumption lies in Backward Bashfulness, / When one is backward though a bidden Guest.” The Supper was important, of course, but in the sequence of events it was the end, not the means to the end, of full membership in the church. Hence there was little reason to assign a central place in either the sermon or the poem to the Lord's Supper. Further, and I discuss this point in chapter 2, Taylor's attitude toward the Sacrament demonstrably changed during the 1680s, particularly as it regarded those poems that come to be related to the Supper, the Preparatory Meditations.

Gods Determinations is an uneven poem. The generally high quality of the verse and techniques is often undercut by quite pedestrian lines that are flat and dull and by a shaky development of individual sections of the poem. Taylor is not always able to reconcile the needs of the poem as poem with the necessity of anatomizing the sins and supposed sins of the reluctant elect. And at times Taylor's aphoristic lines, in themselves often quite striking, and his homely imagery, reflecting an easy closeness to his imagined audience, are inappropriate to the role given to certain of the characters in the poem, and he is unable to sustain the characterization and the tone.¹⁹ Mercy and Justice, for example, are initially presented as representations of the Father and the Son. Justice asserts:

                    Thou from thy Fathers bosom must depart:
And be incarnate like a slave below
                    Must pay mans Debts unto the utmost marke.
                    Thou must sustain that burden. …

(267-68)

Mercy and Justice sometimes speak like the abstractions they are (“The Righteousness of God should be his all / The which he cannot have for want of hands”) but at other times they sound like neighbors haggling over a backyard fence:

JUSTICE
If any after Satans Pipes do Caper
          Red burning Coales from hell in Wrath I gripe,
And make them in his face with Vengeance Vaper,
          Untill he dance after the Gospell Pipe. …
MERCY
When any such are startled from ill,
          And cry help, help, with tears, I will advance
The Musick of the Gospell Minsterill,
          Whose strokes they strike, and tunes exactly
          dance.

(272)

The roles of Justice and Mercy are clear in the poem, conventional personifications that they are; what is not always clear and consistent is Taylor's characterization of them.²⁰ The verse is often uneven though that unevenness is occasionally rescued by a striking image or aphorism.²¹ The following stanza is a case in point; Justice speaks:

The Works of Merit-Mongers I will weigh
          Within the Ballance of the sanctuary:
Their Matter, and their Manner I will lay
          Unto the Standard-Rule t'see how they Vary.

There is little here to rescue the flatness of the language and the meter except the concluding couplet, which is one of the most incisive dismissals of a doctrine of works to be found:

Whosever trust doth to his golden deed
Doth rob a barren Garden for a Weed.

(272)

Often the verse is simply inappropriate—however striking the language might be—for the tone and movement that Taylor as stage manager (in the first part of the poem at any rate) creates. After the Almighty sends a “Royall Coach” for “Man in this Lapst Estate,” “Gods Selecting Love in the Decree” ends with a hymn of praise for the honor awarded to the Elect:

     O! Honour! Honour! Honours! Oh! the Gain!
And all such Honours all the saints obtain.
It is the Chariot of the King of Kings:
That all who Glory gain, to glory brings.

(276)

And in a striking series of lines Taylor balances the reactions, colloquially expressed, of those who come to see the coach with the heightened description of the coach/church. Then in his role as the stage manager, to characterize the rejection of the damned, he writes:

Their stomachs rise: these graces will not down.
They think them Slobber Sawces: therefore frown.
They loath the same, wamble keck, heave they do:
Their Spleen thereat out at their mouths they throw. …

My reservation about these lines is not with their slang and proverbial quality; throughout the larger poem Taylor often handles this kind of language with ease (“A Musty Cask doth marre rich Malmsy Wine”). Nor to the image of vomiting out the rich “graces” offered by the sender of the coach; the language of Satan's assaults is often harsher and cruder. But these lines do not fit the tone and movement that Taylor has established in this poem. They are simply out of place. It is as if the bookish Taylor, overly concerned about the capacities of his imagined audience, strains to find the meanest of colloquial images to make his point. It does not work, it seems to me, either here or in other places in the poem.²²

There are also a number of sections of the poem that are tedious in their unnecessary length and often flat poetry. In such poems as “A Threnodiall Dialogue between The Second and Third Ranks” and the first two poems following the second “Preface,” the verse is the weakest and the drama of the poem—such as it is—considerably slackened. It may be true that in the Saint's call for the ranks to anatomize their sins, given their scrupulousness a certain amount of tedium is inevitable. That may be the point. But it is also true that in poetic terms these poems could be more sharply focused. In the first, for example, when the Third Rank, insisting that its fallen state is more fallen than the Second, introduces the image of the toad (“We Cannot wish a Toade as wee”), this necessarily leads to the Second Rank's stilted response:

Our Pray'res, are pray'reless: Oh! to what we bee
An ugly Toad's an Angell bright we see.
Oh pray, pray you, oh pray, for us that so
The Lord of Mercy Mercy on's may show.

(304)

Part of this may of course be the exuberance of an emerging poet; part is almost a caricature of Taylor's favorite techniques: the repetition for effect (“Oh pray, pray you, oh pray”), the amplification (“An ugly Toad's an Angell”), and the characteristic fascination with ploce (“The Lord of Mercy Mercy on's may show”). Whatever the reason or reasons, these sections tend to be the weakest of the poem, indicating also in part a lack of control of the movement and verse itself.

Taylor is not always comfortable with the structure of his drama, though this is perhaps not so surprising when one considers that Gods Determinations is more than ten times longer than anything he has attempted before. Further, the disparities between the dramatic characterizations of the first part of the poem and the passive interchanges of the second part do not lend themselves to a sustained movement, particularly since the dramatic high point occurs well before the end of the first part.²³ The reason for these problems may be that Taylor himself does not have the ability at this point to reconcile the divergent demands of the various influences that inform the poem. Perhaps this is simply another way of saying that “congregational church poetry,” to use Karl Keller's apt phrase, precludes the dramatic control that arises naturally from the work itself. This also may explain in part the various “structures” differing critics have found in the poem—from Theocritan song contest to extended meditation is, it must be admitted, quite a range.

All this being said, however, and I have not been exhaustive, Gods Determinations is a good (if not fine) poem considered for itself, and an astonishing one in the context of Taylor's development as a poet. As Hall writes: “it is the transitional poem which demonstrates Taylor's movement from versifier to poet.”²⁴ And it is a poem that in its amount of accomplished verse and range and scope could not have been predicted from the poetry written up to this time. The first “Preface,” the last group of lyrics, and other individual poems (such as the two poems titled “Christs Reply”) have often been singled out for their quality. There are a good many more as well. Taylor is particularly successful in those poems presenting Satan's assaults on the timid souls, and in emphasizing through the striking imagery the hope/fear dilemma. Early in the poem, for example, Satan insinuates that he and God are equally the enemies of the disheartened souls:

He will become your foe, you then shall bee
Flanckt of by him before, behinde by mee.
You'st stand between us two our spears to dunce.
Can you Offend and Fence both wayes at once?
You'l then have sharper service than the Whale,
Between the Sword fish, and the Threshers taile.

(279-80)²⁵

The balance between the closed couplets and the run-on lines establishes the rhythm of the movement of Satan's argument as the poor souls are caught between the opening and closing of the “Monstrous Gyants Jaws” of God and Satan. And though the natural images, the whale and “Wheelhorn'd Rams that fight,” do not easily follow the fencing image (offend is also a fencing term), there is a certain skill and exuberance in the passage that indicates Taylor's increasing abilities.

Taylor is particularly successful in the contrast between Satan's active, raging, windmill-like assaults, both in the vigor of the lines and the colloquial imagery, and Christ's calm sustained assertion of the souls' ability to withstand Satan's attacks. Satan's argument usually moves from the world of sense to the world of spirit but he often reverses his approach and the central components of the faith are reduced to the flippancy of his slang:

… thy Pray'res are sapless most,
Or like the Whistling of some Dead mans Ghost:
Thy Holy Conference is onely like
An Empty Voice that tooteth through a pipe.
Thy Soule doth peep out at thine Eares, and Eyes
To bless those bawbles that are earthly toyes.

(288-89)

Christ, in contrast, moves from the emptiness of worldly temptations to the means and benefits of his graces:

Although thy Soule was once a Stall
Rich hung with Satans nicknacks all;
          If thou Repent thy Sin,
A Tabernacle in't I'le place
Fild with Gods Spirit, and his Grace.
          Oh Comfortable thing!

(292)

Taylor is often quite accomplished in his use of colloquial diction and rhythm; the lines move with an ease that belies the complex poetic form. Some of the best of these sections are in stanzas that work off of contrasting line lengths; in “An Extasy of Joy,” for example, the movement is from five feet to four to three:

Screw up, Deare Lord, upon the highest pin:
          My soul thy ample Praise to sound.
          O tune it right, that every string
                    May make thy praise rebound.

(296-97)

The best, however, in the second “Christs Reply,” balance four-feet and three-feet lines, while retaining the easy rhythm:

I dare the World therefore to show
A God like me, to anger slow:
          Whose wrath is full of Grace.
Doth hate all Sins both Greate, and small:
Yet when Repented, pardons all.
          Frowns with a Smiling Face.

(293)

Generally, in characterizing Christ's replies to the embattled souls, the meter is regular and the rhymes are exact; the jangling rhythm associated with Satan's assaults contrasts starkly with the calm assurance of Christ's response to the souls. Taylor is not successful throughout with these experimental forms, but when they work they indicate his developing skill.

Taylor's ability to develop an image, matching the form and meter to the movement of the lines, is one of the most striking contrasts between Gods Determinations and the earlier poetry. These conceits are sometimes quite flat; the ant in “An Extasy of Joy let in by this Reply” simply falls under the weight of the amplification technique, and even the usual proficiency of the varying line lengths is not enough to salvage the verse:

Can any Ant stand on the Earth and spit
          Another out to peer with this?
          Or Drink the Ocean up, and yet
                    Its belly empty is?

(295)

Perhaps the two best examples of extended metaphors that are finely controlled occur at the beginning and end of the poem, and both involve the “maker” motif. In the first God is the maker, the Infinite All who creates from the finite nothing. The first “Preface” is perhaps as good as Taylor ever is, both in the quality of the verse and the complex integration of the various traditions that inform the poem. The tone of the poem runs counter to the Job passages that underlie much of the movement and imagery. In Job, the assault out of the whirlwind aims to force Job to recognize his groveling finiteness, and after the initial concrete images the imagery of Job is of vastness and incomprehensibility: “springs of the sea,” “breadth of the earth,” “the treasures of the snow,” or the “ordinances of the heavens.” After these assaults by the Lord God, Job can only reply “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee?” (40:4), and “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6). But the movement and tone of Taylor's “Preface” is more complex than this, and his concern with the reluctant halfway members is to move them in the opposite direction from Job's. After the enunciation of text (a sermonic pattern informs the poem) Taylor moves quickly from the Infinity/All abstractions to the comforting and familiar domestic craft imagery. The initial movement is to assure his audience that the abstractions of divinity can be presented in terms that can be understood, and so the initial concern is to emphasize the hope of the hope/fear dilemma. But as the imagery unfolds from woodworking to smithing to masonry and to lacing and filletting to quilt balls and canopies: that is, from substance to filigree, from centrality to decoration, a countermovement develops because—and this is ultimately the result of the “domestication” of the infinite—the created orders of nature are after all not silver boxes or bowling balls. Nor is the activity of God's creative impulse comparable to pumping the bellows of a furnace or installing curtain rods, for “His Glorious Handywork [is] not made by hands.”

However much Taylor later emphasizes the merciful aspect of the godhead, mercy must still be seen in the context of God's justice: “Oh! what a might is this Whose single frown / Doth shake the world as it would shake it down?” The application section of this microsermon then moves to balance back and forth between the hope/fear dilemma. In contrast to the emphasis on “nothing Man,” the counterbalance is on the preciousness of “the brightest Gem,” the “lightsom Gem,” the “Brightest Diamond.” Though darkened by the Fall, “Darker by far than any Coalpit Stone,” nothing Man may be one of the elect and to gain his “All” he must come to recognize that in the cosmic drama of God's activities. Man, for all his smallness, is in fact the central figure in the drama of God's determinations.

Another successful section is near the end of the Saint's final advice to the souls, in “Difficulties arising from Uncharitable Cariages of Christians,” where Taylor further extends the God-as-maker motif in the web/net conceit. Weaving imagery, as others have noted, is one of the staples in Taylor's poetic stock. He uses it in what is perhaps his earliest poem, “∗ ∗ ∗ this in a Letter I sent to my schoolfellow. W.M.”:

What though my Muse be not addornd so rare
As Ovids golden verses to declare
My love: yet it is in the loome tyed
Where golden quills of love weave on the web.

(MP [Edward Taylor's Minor Poetry, ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981], 4)

It appears again in the “Last Declamation”:

Now that Speech Wealthi'st is, whose Curious Web
Of finest twine is wrought, not Cumbered
With Knots, Galls, Ends, or Thrums: but doth obtain
All Golden Rhetorick to trim the Same.

(26)

And again in “Were but my Muse an Huswife Good,” the poem sent to Elizabeth shortly before they were married:

          That long'd for Web of new Relation, gay
That must be wove upon our Wedden Day,
(Whose Warfe, & Woofe are thy true Love, & mine
Hearts golden Fleece, Spun into finest twine)
Shines like a Web of fulgent gold. …

(42)

These uses extend from a simple expression of his regard for a schoolfellow to a metaphor for the simplicity of English (in contrast to the “Knots, Galls, Ends, or Thrums” of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew) to an image of the relationship that will be woven in the marriage to Elizabeth. In each case the imagery points to the process of creating, a letter in the first instance, the wealth of English speech in the second, and, in the poem to Elizabeth, the “rich web” that will be a symbol of their newly created married state. In the love poem, however, the web is the central image and provides Taylor an occasion to extend the metaphor as the controlling frame. It is something that they will make and that will adequately represent the many relationships they have:

          Let's Cloath ourselves, my Dove
With this Effulgeant Web, & our pickt Love
Wrapt up therein: & lets by walking right
Loves brightest Mantle make Still Shine more bright.

(43)

Each time Taylor uses the image he sees more clearly the possibilities for it, the complex uses he can make of it.

In Gods Determinations, however, the same basic image of weaving is expanded to represent the design reflected in God's activities in relation to man, his providential control of the affairs of each human life. In the “Profession of Faith” Taylor drew up the day the church was founded and later expanded and entered into the Church Records, he touches on the significance the image will have in Gods Determinations:

… to Se God face to face, to se Jesus Christ, to Se the wayes of God in the World! to Se the Golden Checker work of the Draw net of Providence hung open before the view of the Soule, To behold how in the Meshes of the Same the Saints are Caught, & carried to Glory.

(80)

In Gods Determinations as the Saint presents his final advice to the souls, he contrasts—extending the hope/fear dilemma to the end of the poem—the snares of Satan with the “Curious needlework of Providence”: Satan sets “Traps, and Wilds … / For to intrap the Innocent therein: / These are his Wyers, Snares, and tangling Nets / To hanck, and hopple harmless souls in Sin.”²⁶ All of Satan's assaults are designed to make the souls stumble over the doubts implanted in his various accusations; Satan's perverse creations turn the Soul back upon itself and tempt it to become entangled in its own frightened introspection. By contrast, “Gods Way-Marks … / Points you the way unto the Land Divine, / … To New Jerusalem above the line”:

His Wildred state will wane away, and hence
          These Crooked Passages will soon appeare
The Curious needlework of Providence,
          Embrodered with golden Spangles Cleare.
          Judge not this Web while in the Loom, but stay
          From judging it untill the judgment day.
For while its foiled up the best Can see
          But little of it, and that little too
Shews weather beaten but when it shall bee
          Hung open all at once, Oh beautious shew!
          Though thrids run in, and out, Cross snarld and
          twinde
          The Web will even be enwrought you'l finde.
If in the golden Meshes of this Net
          (The Checkerwork of Providence) you're Caught
And Carride hence to Heaven, never fret:
          Your Barke shall to an Happy Bay be brought.
          You'l se both Good and Bad drawn up hereby,
          These to Hells Horrour, those to Heavens Joy.

(325-26)

Taylor's conceit here is a striking representation of the central Christian acceptance of the unknown: “Now we see in a glass darkly, then we shall see face to face” (the passage that introduces this image in the Foundation sermon, quoted above); “now we understand in part, then we shall fully understand.” It is a use of a domestic image in the strongest way of emphasizing the relation of the ordinary occurrences of this world to the determinations of God, from the beginning of time. However confused the elect souls may have been by Satan's “Wyers” and “Snares,” and however difficult it may be for them to see in this life more than “thrids run[ning] in, and out, Cross snarld and twinde,” they will find, caught in “the golden Meshes of this Net / (The Checkerwork of Providence),” that God's determinations are a “beautious shew!”

What is also striking about this section, as Hall points out, is the introduction of the “fisher of men” image (178). It is this allusion that unites the web and net images as one in the person of the Saint/minister. To those who have not yet recognized their election, the “Crooked Passages” of the web may seem chaotic; the Saint, of course, sees more and enough of the pattern to assure the timid souls that determinations for their ultimate knowing are a part of God's plan for them. Further, it is the role of the Saint/minister to so coach the hesitant elect into the “golden Meshes” of this net that they too will come to recognize, as the Saint has done, the configuration of God's determinations for their lives. And it is, finally, the Saint's role to bring the vacillations of the souls to an end and to point them “the way unto the Land Divine”:

Fear not Presumption then, when God invites:
          Invite not Fear, when that he doth thee Call:
Call not in Question whether he delights
          In thee, but make him thy Delight, and all.
          Presumption lies in Backward Bashfulness,
          When one is backward though a bidden Guest.

(326)

These stanzas are some of the best parts of the poem, not only for the successful conceit of the web/net that is strikingly unified, but also because they bring to full circle the movement from Fall to Redemption. The confusion created by Satan/Sin (“Man at a muze, and in a maze doth stand”) has in part been resolved, and the Soul coaxed into the recognition that once it accepts the call to grace, it will recognize the final unity of God's plan: the “Wildred state will wane away. …” It is also in these stanzas that Taylor's developing success with homely diction and rhythm is most evident. Here, as is not always the case in the poem, the domestic image is exactly appropriate to the abstract subject matter and the tone created by the colloquial style; the natural rhythm and conversational tone of the verse establish as much as anything else the basis for assurance in the Soul. Note, for example, how the run-on lines create the natural cadence, and persuasiveness of the Saint's admonitions: “For while its foiled up the best Can see / But little of it, and that little too / Shews weather beaten …” (326). If, as Taylor says in the Profession of Faith,²⁷ the Soul is caught in the “Golden Checker work of the Draw net of Providence,” then it will feel the “Ultimate Influence of heavenlie Glory …”:

& that is this it sets the Soule a Singing forth the Praises of the Lord. God having made the Soule Such a glorious Musicall Instrument of his praises, & the holy Ghost having so gloriously Strung it with the golden wyer of grace, & heavenly Glory have Skrew'd up the Strings to Sound forth the Songs of Zions King, the pouring forth of the Influence of Glory play upon the Soule Eternall praises unto God. & Now the Soule beg[inn]ing to Sing forth its endless Hallelujahs unto God.

(CR, 80)

Thus it is to the celebration of God's glory and grace that the final lyrics of Gods Determinations turn. These poems have been quite justly praised, not only for the quality of the poetry itself but also for their structural appropriateness as the conclusion to the whole of Gods Determinations. In “Our Insufficiency to Praise God Suitably, for his Mercy” the souls begin with a chorus of joy, though acknowledging that they can never praise God suitably for his mercy: “Though what we can is but a Lisp, We pray / Accept thereof. We have no better pay” (329). In one of their few positive actions in the poem, they then turn to seek “Church-Fellowship” within the “Curious Garden richly set,” Christ's paradise, a postlapsarian Eden. They enter, as the metaphor shifts, the glorious city, the “New Jerusalem above the line,” and in this garden within the city celebrate the “Glory of and Grace in” the church:

          Christ's Spirit showers
Down in his Word, and Sacraments
          Upon these Flowers
The Clouds of Grace Divine Contents.

(332)

In the final two poems the souls sing their admiration and joy in the glory and grace of the Church, and “Encoacht … in Christs Coach they sweetly sing; / As They to Glory ride therein.”

These last lyrics are significant in a number of ways: for their experimental quality; for the introduction of the first person persona; and for the insistence on singing as the appropriate response of the graced. In these lyrics (five poems if one begins with “The Soule Seeking …”) Taylor's proficiency with the verse indicates as clearly as one would want the movement from “versifier to poet.” What is seen intermittently throughout Gods Determinations is here sustained through the final section, the “choral epilogue.”²⁸ The poems extend the tone of thankful joy from one to the next, avoiding the often characteristic disruption in movement and disparity in language of the earlier poems. The central and first poem in the sequence, I think, is “The Soule Seeking Church-Fellowship,” for it is in this poem that the souls take the initiative for the first time—they now “seek” the public seal of their election. Their reservations are put aside and, as they have turned to Christ twice earlier in the poem, now as the “Lambs espoused Wife” they are dressed “like a Bride all Gloriously arraide” for entry into the fellowship of the congregation.

The striking variety—yet unity—of these last lyrics contributes to the thematic harmony of the complete poem's final movement. Of the last five lyrics (the last seven, for that matter) all are in six-line stanzas except the “Soule Seeking Church-Fellowship”—what I have called the central poem. In this poem the basic six-line stanza is shortened by one line. The final rhyme is doubled (a b a b b) and the b rhymes in each stanza are also the four-beat lines (5/4/5/4/4/). The variety of the verses in the last section is achieved not by differing stanza lengths, nor by the rhyme scheme, a b a b c c, which is the same for the last four poems (actually the last seven poems, again excepting “The Soule Seeking”). The variety and underlying motif of praise is accomplished by shifting the line lengths: for the last four poems, 5/2/5/2/5/5, 2/4/2/4/5/5, 5/3/5/3/4/4, and 5/4/5/4/4/4. The six-line form and rhyme scheme actually reflect the external structure of “Christ's Curious Garden fenced in / With Solid Walls of Discipline,” yet the variety within that framework:

     All flourish not at once. We see
               While some Unfold
     Their blushing Leaves, some buds there bee.
Here's Faith, Hope, Charity in flower, which call
On yonders in the Bud. …

(332-33)

Formerly enslaved to their thoughts of sin the souls discover their true freedom within the structure of the church.

Taylor's adept use of imagery in these poems is also quite successful. From the Canticles in “The Soule Seeking …” he adapts the image of the hortus conclusus as the allegorical base on which the Church is established, with walls and “Allies … Laid out by line,” well wed and watered, and protected from external intrusion by “Just Watchmen … / And Porters at each Gate. …” It is truly the Edenic garden set apart from the thornpatch of this world. The following poem shifts the image to the Holy City of the Apocalypse, which is also protected from external assaults, and here, finally, the souls' last reservations are removed and they pledge themselves to their Bridegroom:

They now enCovenant With God: and His:
          They thus indent.
The Charters Seals belonging unto this
          The Sacrament. …

(331)

These two poems are relatively abstract, even with the basic metaphors of garden/city. In “The Glory of and Grace in the Church set out,” however, the imagery shifts to the vivid sensuousness of the souls-now-saints as flowers in the knot/garden/Church and the richest of these last poetic forms reflects this glory and grace: the poem is still a six-line form (a b a b c c) but here the richness within the form and the variety of line length and rhyme are the most extensive. Each stanza begins with a two-foot line and ends with a five-foot line, reflecting the different stages of spiritual growth (2/4/2/4/5/5) to be found in the church: “All flourish not at once. …” And here the unity and harmony of the called-out ones is reflected in the refrain (“Yet that's not all”) and the interlocking c rhyme (shall/all, shall/all, fall/all, call/all, shall/all).

The final two poems, then, are spoken by the souls now encoached for heaven,²⁹ and though, as in the earlier poem, they cannot sufficiently praise God for his mercy and its fullness can only be realized in the archetype of the Church (the heavenly home), “Yet if thou wilt thou Can'st me raise / With Angels bright to sing thy Praise.” In the last poem, the saints have apparently been raised: “In Heaven soaring up, I dropt an Eare / On Earth: and oh! sweet Melody. …” Dominating both these poems is the image of the saints as a harp, informed by the passage in the Profession of Faith, an almost direct gloss on these last two stanzas:

God having made the Soule Such a glorious Musicall Instrument of his praises, & the holy Ghost having so gloriously Strung it with the golden wyer of grace, & heavenly Glory having Skrew'd up the Strings to Sound forth the Songs of Zions King, the pouring forth of the Influence of Glory play upon the Soule Eternall praises unto God.

(80)

These final verses are highly successful and sophisticated poems and, unlike a number of places in Gods Determinations, the quality is sustained throughout the final lyrics. To put it another way, they are the product of a highly conscious and controlled poet, whatever weaknesses may flaw other parts of the poem. Taylor has simply found his stride. And by casting the imagery of the verse in the framework of the Canticles and the Apocalypse, he has provided a thematic motif that underlies the movement of the complete poem: the family/Church before the Fall to the Canticles' garden of the Church/soul to the Church triumphant where in the heavenly city Christ and his elect “live for aye.” It is neither a poem justifying God's ways to man (they do not need justifying), nor solely congregational church poetry. It is, however, a poem that insists that God's determinations touching his elect issue—and have throughout human history—upon his chosen at a particular place and at a specific time.³⁰

Finally, for any reading of Edward Taylor, Gods Determinations is significant in three ways—quite apart from the kind of poem it is, the traditions that inform it, and the quality (good or bad) of the verse. First, Taylor's meditative voice emerges throughout the poem. He is, early on, the omniscient narrator and then the stage manager and manipulator of action; following the second “Preface,” however, the pastoral, public, first-person voice of the Saint emerges in both dialogue (such as the three poems touching the souls' doubts) and monologue (“Some of Satans Sophestry” and “Difficulties arising from Uncharitable Cariages of Christians”). But in the final section of the poem, though there is some confusion, and though Taylor speaks again in the voice of pastor/coach (in the three poems dealing with the garden, city and flowers), in the last two poems the first person could be the Soul-now-Saint or the pastoral voice, or Taylor himself. The ambiguity is most evident in the final poem:

In Heaven soaring up, I dropt an Eare
          On Earth: and oh! sweet Melody:
And listening, found it was the Saints who were
          Encoacht for Heaven that sang for Joy.

In the preceding “Souls Admiration” the voice is clearly that of the Soul/Saint, and the last poem begins with what seems to be the same voice, but there is now a shift from the saints to an observer standing somehow, somewhere above them. This voice addresses the saints in the second person (“Will not your inward fire of Joy …”) and the third (“they / With Hymns do offer up their Heart”). As Hall says: “As the poem shifts to focus on personal praise to God, the tone changes, the narrator disappears, and Taylor no longer speaks indirectly through a persona. The final lyrics are concerned with his personal relationship to God and he speaks in his own authentic poetic voice for the first time in his career” (206). Some of this confusion in voice also seems to inform the first of the Meditations; but at least Taylor has moved here from the general audience of halfway members to a personal address to God.

Further, and this is only implicit in the Foundation Day sermon and not in the early part of Gods Determinations, the glory and grace shared by those who are members of the body of Christ lead naturally, almost inevitably, to the desire of the Chosen to praise God, however ineffectual their praise may be: “Though what we can is but a Lisp, We pray / Accept thereof. We have no better pay” (329).³¹ The saints, of course, may praise God by their lives: “It lives a Life indeed / A Life! as if it Liv'd for Life. / … It trims the same with Graces rife. …” And they praise God by the proper observances of “Each Ordinance and Instrument of Grace” (329). But the final two lyrics are almost insistent on the centrality of the first person (Saint or poet) to sing praises to God. This praise, as the conclusion to Psalm 19 has it, is both public and private: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, My Strength and my redeemer” (v. 14). Or as Taylor puts it:

In all their Acts, publick, and private, nay
          And secret too, they praise impart.
But in their Acts Divine and Worship, they
          With Hymns do offer up their Heart.

It is not difficult to see how the public words of the congregational minister and the private/secret words of the meditator/poet are foreshadowed in the final lyrics and shifting stance of Gods Determinations.

Finally, Gods Determinations is significant not only for what Taylor has accomplished in the poetry, but also for what he fails to do with much of this accomplishment. The poem could not be predicted from the early poetry; but from the proficiency of the verse and the movement from versifier to poet, from all this, after Gods Determinations and its successful experimentation one could reasonably predict more from Taylor as a poet than the single stanzaic form of the Preparatory Meditations. This is not to denigrate the Meditations in any way. It is, however, to suggest that there is a radical limiting of the range and scope of his poetry (at least until the “Metrical History of Christianity”) and a substantial narrowing of his concerns. Why this is so is the concern of the next chapter.

Notes

1. Cf. a typical passage: “June 28, Winde South by West; we saild West by North. I exercised from these words: for the reward of their hands shall be given him. Isiah 3, ii,” The Diary of Edward Taylor, ed. Francis X. Murphy (Springfield, Mass.: Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, 1964), 34.

2. See Walter Powell's discussion of these events in “Edward Taylor's Westfield: An Edition of the Westfield ‘Town Records’” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1982), 30ff.; cf. also the notes to Edward Taylor's “Church Records” and Related Sermons, ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 449ff.; hereafter cited as CR. I depend on Powell's edition of the Town Records and his excellent introduction.

3. See CR, 476 n. 102.

4. See my discussion of the relevant evidence in “Edward Taylor's ‘Occasional Meditations’” (EAL [Early American Literature] 5 [Winter 1971]), and chap. 2 below.

5. MP [Minor Poetry, ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981)], 42. I use this edition for all poems, except Gods Determinations, the Preparatory Meditations, and the “Metrical History of Christianity.”

6. Cf. Dean Hall, “Edward Taylor: The Evolution of a Poet” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1977), 188ff. I am indebted, here and throughout, to Hall's comprehensive study of Taylor's early poetry and Gods Determinations. See also Norman S. Grabo, “Accomplishment: The Nondevotional Poems,” in Edward Taylor, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 71-80.

7. Barbara Lewalski's discussion of the role of the Book of Psalms in her chapter “Biblical Genre Theory: Precepts and Models for the Religious Lyric” is an extensive analysis of the Psalter's importance (Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979]). She comments in relation to Taylor, however, that though he “occasionally alludes to instruments or tunes mentioned in the Book of Psalms in petitioning Christ or the Holy Spirit to play upon him as a passive instrument, he wrote no Psalm paraphrases … or New Covenant psalms in creative imitation of David …” (395).

   Rosemary Fithian's study “The Influence of The Psalm Tradition on the Meditative Poetry of Edward Taylor” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1979), however, takes into account the recent discovery of Taylor's psalm paraphrases and is a fuller discussion of the direct influence of the Book of Psalms on his Meditations. Unless noted, my citations are to the more complete dissertation, but see also Fithian's “‘Words of My Mouth, Meditations of My Heart’: Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations and the Book of Psalms,” EAL 20 (Fall 1985): 89-119.

8. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1963), 1:xxxviii.

9. Powell, Town Records, 17ff.

10. Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1960), 328.

11. I discuss this development more completely in my introduction to Edward Taylor vs. Solomon Stoddard: The Nature of the Lord's Supper (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981; hereafter cited as ETvsSS), 8ff.

12. It is a misreading of the context in which the church was organized and of Taylor's subsequent development to confuse the two versions of the Foundation Sermon. Only in the second version, revised some ten years later, does Taylor include any attacks on Stoddard's view of the Supper as a converting ordinance. See, in this context, Dean Hall and Thomas M. Davis's “The Two Versions of Edward Taylor's Foundation Day Sermon” (Resources for American Literary Study 5 [Autumn 1975]: 199-216), particularly the appendix, which contrasts in outline form the two versions.

13. John Gatta, Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 101. J. Daniel Patterson also gives a useful analysis of the varying critical responses to the poem in “A Critical Edition of Edward Taylor's ‘Gods Determinations’” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1985), xlff. Grabo's recent suggestion that the poem may profitably be compared to musical models is an intriguing one (Edward Taylor, 100ff.).

14. Michael Colacurcio, “Gods Determinations Touching Half-Way Membership: Occasion and Audience in Edward Taylor,” American Literature 39 (November 1967): 299.

15. Hall, “Evolution,” 146ff.

16. There is as yet no holograph calendar of Taylor's manuscripts, although the materials—if used with some caution—exist to create a fairly accurate one. My work with the manuscripts, ranging from the early fragment of the Richard Mather elegy (c. 1669) to the late versions of the valedictory verses and other late poems, has established a fair sense of the characteristics of Taylor's hand. My identification of this date for the manuscript of Gods Determinations is also based in part on the corresponding script in the Church Records and in the first version of the psalm paraphrases. Further, as I develop throughout this reading, substantial evidence apart from the script also points to this terminus ad quem.

17. Church Records and Related Sermons, 138.

18. One of the most detailed analyses of this type of dependence is James Barbour's “The Prose Context of Edward Taylor's Anti-Stoddard Meditations,” EAL 10 (Fall 1975): 144-57.

19. I am not referring here to Taylor's usual pattern of the juxtaposition of the common and divine, the insertion of the most mundane domestic image into matters of high style—in short, to the decorum of his poetry. I am suggesting that his ability to present verse appropriate to the dramatic framework he himself develops is not always under control.

20. For a different view see Gatta, “The Comic Design of Gods Determinations touching his Elect,” EAL 10 (Fall 1975): 126. In Gracious Laughter (101ff.) Gatta provides an excellent analysis of the poem, though from a different viewpoint than mine.

21. Cf. Robert D. Arner, “Proverbs in Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 37 (March 1973): 1-13.

22. See also the soul's final response to Satan: “Well, Satan, well: with thee I'le parle no more. / But do adjure thee hence: begone therefore” (289), and most of “A Threnodiall Dialogue between The Second and Third Ranks.”

23. I am aware that I continue to speak of the poem's structure as having two parts. Other divisions that have been proposed are often persuasive, but it is hard not to think of a poem that has two “Prefaces” as not having two parts.

24. Hall's chapter on this point, “Gods Determinations as a Transitional Poem,” is an excellent discussion of this aspect of the poem (“Evolution,” 175ff.).

25. In this context, see William J. Scheick's fine discussion of “The Jawbones Schema of Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations,” in Puritan Influences in American Literature, ed. Emory Elliott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 38-54.

26. Cf. the later passage in Grabo's edition of the Christographia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962):

    [The crooked paths of the wicked] … have So many turns and Cross intricacies, that persons are bewildered therein. There are more Cross, and Secret anglings, and Windings backward, and forward, to and fro than ever were in Dedalus his Labarynth. … For he that would indeed have the best Copy to write after must take Christs life, for an Example. Here is no blot, nor blux in it, no trip, nor Stumble, no fret nor gaule in this Web.

    (167)

27. Church Records and Related Sermons, p. 80.

28. Nathalia Wright in the first critic to call these poems the “choral epilogue” in “The Morality Tradition in the Poetry of Edward Taylor,” AL [American Literature] 18 (March 1946): 18-26. Grabo (Edward Taylor, 105) also uses this division, as does Gatta (Gracious Laughter, 133). Arner (“Proverbs,” 28) and Mindele Black (“Edward Taylor: Heavens Sugar Cake,” New England Quarterly 29 [June 1956]: 171) view the last seven lyrics as a unit, while Colacurcio (“Occasion and Audience,” 309) and Keller (Example, 136) consider the final five poems as the epilogue. See also Patterson's discussion of the differing views of what constitutes the epilogue (“Critical Edition,” cxxii n. 71).

29. Peter Nicolaisen, in Die Bildlichkeit in der Dichtung Edward Taylors (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1966), comments on the confusion in persona in these last lyrics:

    The speaker of the closing hymns is sometimes a collective “we,” sometimes a new “soul,” and finally an “I,” not distinguished any more precisely. The division of the roles is not entirely clear; one may nevertheless assume that the poems are thought of as a reaction of all the elect to conversion.

    (141)

    Hall also discusses the confusion over the persona in these last lyrics (“Evolution,” 205ff.).

30. A paraphrase of Colacurcio's comment in “Occasion and Audience,” 229.

31. Cf. the last stanza of the last Meditation, dated some forty-five years later:

    Had I but better thou shouldst better have.
              I nought withold from thee through nigerdliness,
    But better than my best I cannot save
              From any one, but bring my best to thee.
              If thou acceptst my sick Loves gift I bring
              Thy it accepting makes my sick Love sing.

    (165.2)

Abbreviations

CG: Edward Taylor's “Christographia”

CR: Edward Taylor's “Church Records” and Related Sermons

Diary: The Diary of Edward Taylor

EAL: Early American Literature

HG: Harmony of the Gospels

MP: Edward Taylor's Minor Poetry

Poems: The Poems of Edward Taylor∗

ETvsSS: Edward Taylor vs. Solomon Stoddard: The Nature of the Lord's Supper

UTOT: Upon the Types of the Old Testament

∗Unless otherwise noted I cite from the University of North Carolina Press edition of The Poems of Edward Taylor, edited by Donald E. Stanford (1989). The Meditations I refer to that are not in the North Carolina edition (Series 2, Meditations 80, 83, 84, 116, 127, 130, 133, 135-38, 141, 149, 151-53, 159, 163, and 165) are cited from Stanford's Yale edition (1960).