The Book of Deuteronomy, particularly its closing chapters, had an irresistible appeal for the first generation of New England Puritans because of the parallels they recognized between their own situation and that of the Children of Israel, poised upon the borders of the Promised Land. All of the Old Testament had typological significance, of course, and the New Testament was the source that the leaders of the emigrants would consult for guidance in shaping their communal institutions. But it was to Deuteronomy that John Winthrop turned when he sought a forceful conclusion for the discourse on Christian charity that he delivered at sea as the Arbella and her consort ships sailed west toward Massachusetts Bay.

The passage Winthrop chose partly to quote and partly to paraphrase was from Moses' "last farewell" to his people, after he had at length restored their laws and was preparing to die. This wonderfully dramatic moment was deservedly familiar to readers, playgoers, and congregations long before Winthrop singled it out. The medieval compilers of the Gesta Romanorum were influenced by Moses' words of farewell as they assembled their popular collection of monastic and chivalric tales. The same passage that Winthrop chose, and the chapter or two immediately following it, served as the source for some of the dialogue in the Exodus plays of the English Corpus Christi cycle, and William Shakespeare, drawing perhaps on all these sources, had incorporated elements of Moses' farewell into several scenes from The Merchant of Venice—most notably into Portia's memorable lines on the quality of mercy. But Winthrop's treatment of his text is much more direct and, in its way, momentous than that of these literary predecessors. He uses it to capture in the form of a single choice the challenge facing the new colonists:

And to shutt upp this discourse with that exhortation of Moses that faithfull servant of the Lord in his last farewell to Israell Deut. 30. Beloved there is now sett before us life, and good, deathe and evill in that wee are Commaunded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another to walke in his wayes and to keepe his Commaundements and his Ordinance, and his lawes, and the Articles of our Covenant with him that wee may live and be multiplyed, and that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whether wee goe to possesse it: But if our heartes shall turne away soe that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced and worshipp other Gods our pleasures, and proffitts, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, wee shall surely perishe out of the good Land whether wee passe over this vast Sea to possesse it:

The images of a city on a hill and of a "speciall Commission" or covenant are the traditional metaphors that modern scholarship has focused on as the heart of Winthrop's speech, but the emphases of Winthrop's text itself suggest that this Mosaic choice was a central part of his message, the condensation of what he believed the Puritan errand signified. The idea of a special covenant was vital to the emigrants' sense of density, but in "A Modell of Christian Charity" Winthrop devotes only a paragraph to the implications of this contract, subordinating it (as he does in the passage above) as just one metaphor among others. Even the vision of a "Citty upon a Hill" is, in many respects, only a kind of conspicuous predicament in which, according to Winthrop, the emigrants simply find themselves. "[T]he eies of all people are uppon us," he observes in an interesting modification of the Sermon on the Mount, implying that New England will be exposed to considerable scrutiny, like it or not. The choice between life and death, however, is at the center of what it means to be a deliberate participant in this dangerous enterprise. This is the master "modell" of Winthrop's title, and he set out in his discourse to identify the Puritan errand as closely as he could with the powerful appeal of life.

It may seem especially curious, then, that Winthrop chose to begin what he considered to be the "preface" of his speech with an explanation of the reasons why God had ordained that "in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjection". Where, one wonders, is the charity in this? Winthrop undertakes at the outset to explain to us nothing less than the reasons why such social divisions should exist. Perry Miller [in Errand into the Wilderness, 1956] mistakenly identified this apparently complacent—and from Winthrop's point of view wholly traditional—acceptance of social stratification as Winthrop's main text and thought it called for "incessant brooding" on the part of all students of American history. For Winthrop, however, these opening comments are not so much a bulwark for the rights of property, or a rehearsal of familiar aristocratic platitudes, but the beginnings of an assault upon ordinary notions of worldly ownership and worldly duty. His antagonist, in conformity with a rich tradition of Puritan thought, was the self, and he began "A Modell of Christian Charity" by boldly addressing the chief incitement to selfishness among his economically vulnerable listeners.

God, quite simply, reserves all earthly property to himself. Its uneven distribution among men is no more than another manifestation of the familiar renaissance concept of plenitude. God multiplies his "Stewards counting himself more honored in dispenceing his guifts to man by man, than if hee did it by his owne immediate hand". Winthrop reinforces the implications of this idea by examining the two primary rules that are to guide the lives of the emigrants, justice and mercy, and the two kinds of law to which they are subject, that of nature and that of grace. The import of these principles and laws is that "community of perills calls for extraordinary liberallity". It was quite clear to Winthrop's audience—even before Winthrop himself explicitly confirmed it—that the voyagers in the Arbella stood to one another as in a community of perils and that, regardless of the objections of prudent self-interest (with which instinct Winthrop holds a small debate in the text of his speech), they must all conduct their affairs "with more enlargement towardes others and lesse respect towards ourselves".

With Levitican scrupulousness, Winthrop is careful to discuss the various contingencies involved in lending, giving outright, and forgiving debts, but it is clear that he does not have in mind as the guiding virtue of his new community simply ordinary generosity:

It is to be observed that both in Scriptures and latter stories of the Churches that such as have beene most bountifull to the poore Saintes especially in these extraordinary times and occasions god hath left them highly Commended to posterity … observe againe that the scripture gives noe causion to restraine any from being over liberall this way; but to all men to the liberall and cherefull practise hereof by the sweetest promises as to instance one for many, Isaiah 58.6: Is not this the fast that I have chosen to loose the bonds of wickednes, to take off the heavy burdens to lett the oppressed goe free and to breake every Yoake, to deale thy bread to the hungry and to bring the poore that wander into thy house, when thou seest the naked to cover them etc. then shall thy light breake forthe as the morneing, and thy healthe shall growe speedily, thy righteousnes shall goe before thee, and the glory of the lord shall embrace thee, then thou shalt call and the lord shall Answer thee.

"A Modell of Christian Charity" in fact moves steadily toward a vision of communal unity that is founded upon two "patterns," as Winthrop would have called them, taken not from covenant legality but from apocalyptic vision and private life: the body and marriage. Both are traditional images, but that is precisely why Winthrop adopts them. He can draw upon the familiar associations of the body of Christ and the marriage of Christ with his church to enhance the authority of his appeal for community and his argument against the self.

For though he was in fact making a kind of argument, Winthrop knew (as Shakespeare's Portia came to recognize) that people could not be argued into "workes of mercy" toward one another. Mercy had to emerge from within, and that emergence required a psychological and spiritual transformation on the part of those who would found a new community upon a spiritually regenerate basis. Winthrop concluded that the "first mover or maine wheele" of mercy and justice in human life was love, the "bond or ligament" that knits together human beings as firmly as the parts of a single body are knit together in mutual dependence. In conformity with the taste of his age, Winthrop was prepared to extend this bodily conceit just as far as it could go in the service of his point, delving into some of the particulars of digestion, for example, in order to show that just as the mouth may "mince the food" for the whole body and yet receive "a due proporcion" of nourishment in return, so affection is always perfectly reciprocal in the kind of society he envisions for America. This conceit, however, unlike those in the more strictly secular verse of Winthrop's contemporaries, does not succed or fail purely on poetic grounds. Winthrop derives its authority from passages in I Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, and John. Nor is such a literal and spiritual view of their social "constitution" simply one desirable alternative among many. Winthrop is not discussing possible social options but necessities. The extraordinary nature of the colonizing enterprise demanded that "wee must not content our selves with usual ordinary meanes":

Whatsoever wee did or ought to have done when wee lived in England, the same must wee doe and more allsoe where wee goe: That which the most in theire Churches maineteine as a truthe in profession onely, wee must bring into familiar and constant practise, and in this duty of love wee must love brotherly without dissimulation, wee must love one another with a pure hearte fervently wee must beare one anothers burthens, wee must not looke onely on our owne things, but allsoe on the things of our brethren, neither must wee think that the lord will beare with such faileings at our hands as hee dothe from those among whome we have lived.

In its rhythmic sequence of binding exhortations ("wee must love … wee must beare …") this passage anticipates by a few paragraphs the culminating vision of Winthrop's speech, toward which he is building with both musical and argumentative care. The nature of Winthrop's message requires such orchestration, for in opposition to the stubborn claims of the self, Winthrop pits a social ideal more demanding and more rewarding (he suggests) than marriage. Yet it is to marriage, and to its extension in family, that he appeals as a model for how this binding love operates upon the inward lives of those who choose to "exercise" it.

The loyalty of David and Jonathan is the second of the instructive instances of social beauty upon which Winthrop calls to give his ideal a dramatic life, but his chief example of the self-effacing power of human affection is Eve. And just as Milton has Eve recite the most beautiful hymn to human love in Paradise Lost (4, 635-56), so Winthrop elects to describe the psychological impact of love solely through an elaborate characterization of its effects on her. Strikingly—and it would certainly have seemed striking to Winthrop's biblically sophisticated listeners—he departs from scriptural authority and assigns to Eve the "fleshe of my fleshe" acknowledgment that Genesis attributes to Adam:

Now when the soule which is of a sociable nature finds any thing like to it selfe, it is like Adam when Eve was brought to him, shee must have it one with herselfe this is fleshe of my fleshe (saith shee) and bone of my bone shee conceives a great delightc in it, therefore shee desires nearenes and familiarity with it: shee hath a greate propensity to doe it good and receives such content in it, as feareing the miscarriage of her beloved shee bestowes it in the inmost closett of her heart, shee will not endure that it shall want any good which shee can give it, if by occasion shee be withdrawne from the Company of it, shee is still lookeing towardes the place where shee left her beloved, if shee heare it groane shee is with it presently, if shee finde it sadd and disconsolate shee sighes and mournes with it, shee hath noe such joy, as to see her beloved merry and thrivcing, if shee see it wronged, shee cannot beare it without passion, shee setts noe boundes of her affecttions, nor hath any thought of reward, shee findes recompence enoughe in the exercise of her love towardes it.

It is no simple matter to describe the uses to which Winthrop has put gender in this extraordinary passage. Despite the neuter pronouns with which he has referred to the "soule" in his opening sentence, it is possible to treat the insistent use of "shee" thereafter as a conventional gesture on the part of any properly educated English gentleman who wished his usage to conform to the gender of the Latin anima for soul. Even two centuries later Emerson will continue to treat the mind, the intellect, and the Reason as feminine, all the while insisting that living by the light of Reason is "manly." Such a reassuringly traditional reading of Winthrop's usage, however, does not square comfortably with the abruptness with which Eve's appearance in his initial main clause immediately transforms the pronouns. Nor can it account for the intensely sexual nature of the soul's commitment, the conception of delight, the fear of miscarriage, the maternal devotion to her "merry and thriveing" beloved. Winthrop's purposes in fact seem quite complex: He undertakes both to feminize Adam and to exalt Eve as the primary example of everyone who seeks the well-being of others above that of themselves. Eve is his model citizen, not his model wife, and she represents for Winthrop the conflation of the ideas of election and good citizenship that Amy Lang has identified [in Prophetic Woman] as one of the critical accomplishments of "A Modell of Christian Charity."

Part of the reason for Winthrop's uncharacteristic freedom with the language of Genesis in this instance may well be his desire to impress even more vividly upon his audience the revolutionary nature of their undertaking. If the demands of the self must yield to the force of communal love, then the demands of sexual primacy cannot be entirely inviolable. If we must maintain as a truth what others merely profess, then our domestic as well as our political relations call for careful examination. Eve's devotion in Winthrop's passage, after all, is both an acknowledgment of her exemplary power and a celebration of its domestic singlemindedness. At the same time Winthrop is drawing on an old exegetical tradition that identifies the figure of Eve both with her typological successor, Mary, and with the church. Adam's typological associations are with the inward process of election itself and with Christ, the Second Adam, whose apocalyptic return to earth marks the climactic "marriage" of Christian history but who is not readily available as a social presence in human life until the end of time. The typological network of Eve, Mary, and the church are, as Winthrop recognizes, "of a sociable nature," available in a way that Adam is not as a model for the operations of the human "church" understood both exclusively and inclusively. The Eve of Winthrop's passage is not occupied in distinguishing between the regenerate and the unregenerate in the objects of her affection; she is in pursuit of a "beloved" whose status seems to fluctuate between the confident joy of election and the disconsolate sorrow of doubt. She is capable of uniting the complete community of Massachusetts Bay, not simply (as Stephen Foster has suggested) those who "commune," in a network of affection that challenges the power of selfishness with a dramatic model of human, and female, generosity. This extraordinary capacity in Eve and in the typological network she embodies forms the connecting link between Milton's epics of the lost and regained Paradise. And … the range of Eve's appeal gave Emily Dickinson a model of female heroism upon which to shape the monologues of some of her boldest poems. This important modification of the hierarchal tradition is at the heart of Winthrop's model for the American community. The abrupt shift in focus from Adam to Eve with which his passage begins is only a condensed form of the shift in social focus that Winthrop proposes throughout "A Modell of Christian Charity": the shift from self to self-lessness, the shift from death to life.

It is, moreover, not only Eve's marital devotion but also her maternal zeal that Winthrop presents as images of the larger social union of community. She is simultaneously both terms in her typological identity, both Eve and Mary, spouse and mother. The neutral pronouns of the passage that celebrate her impassioned devotion generalize her self-lessness and blur the distinction between spousal and parental love. The "beloved" over whom she solicitously hovers in Winthrop's description might as readily be her "merry and thriveing" child as her husband. The result of this fusion of images is a far more complex and powerful presentation of the sociable nature, for Winthrop has not only employed his biblical figures in traditional typological ways, he has compressed the typological relationship into an extraordinarily rich and suggestive network of familial affection.

Winthrop's personal sense of the potency of the marital bond is perhaps one index of the meaning with which he, and no doubt many of his audience, invested the analogy between community and marriage. He was separated from his wife on the Arbella's momentous voyage. She remained in England and planned to follow on a later ship. Winthrop's letters to her as he prepared to sail are a lively mixture of the latest news on his sailing arrangements, pious consolations for their separation, and domestic tenderness. "Mine owne, mine onely, my best beloved," he addresses her on March 10, 1630, and on March 28 writes in part to remind her of the pact that they had apparently made (in cheerful ignorance of the effect of distance upon time) to "meet in spiritt" on Mondays and Fridays "at 5: of the clocke at night" until they would be able to meet again in fact. For Winthrop, then, it meant a great deal to describe the emigrants' relationship to one another and their relationship to God as a "more neare bond of marriage".

The closing allusion in "A Modell of Christian Charity" to Moses and the choice of life emerges naturally from this discussion of the communal marriage and the communal body. If the bonds of contract alone were involved in the sanctifying of Massachusetts Bay, then it would be difficult to understand, except perhaps in a technical sense, why Winthrop and his companions found their enterprise so urgent and so moving. It would be particularly difficult to see how Winthrop intended to appeal to the always significant percentage of the emigrant population who were not literally covenanted, or contracted, to church membership. A sense of "contract" is deeply embedded in the origins of Puritan colonization, but even in the case of Winthrop's colleagues in the business-like Agreement at Cambridge, it was not contractual sanctity but a vision of life that urged them forward.

Like the Agreement at Cambridge, the Mayflower Compact, shaped by practical necessity though it was, shows evidence of the appeal of a similar visionary union. Its signers bound themselves into a "civil body politic" the very nature of which they had yet to agree upon and the laws of which they had yet to frame, even as they engaged themselves in advance to obey them. Such confidence looks more than a little imprudent from a modern standpoint, until we recall the sorts of implications that Winthrop would later draw from the traditional metaphor of the body as applied to human communities. Indeed, perhaps even more deeply than did Winthrop, William Bradford identified the founding of Plymouth and the trials of the separatists with the plight of a family. Bradford expressed the anguish of their original escape to Leyden by emphasizing the suffering of the husbands who were hurried away to sea by their Dutch captain as they watched their wives and children taken into custody on shore by a "great company, both horse and foot, with bills and guns and other weapons." The separatists' determination to leave Holland for America was motivated in some measure by their desire "for the propagating and advancing of the Gospel," but the reasons that seemed to carry the greatest weight with them—and that prompted the most moving prose from Bradford—were the strains of European exile upon their families: "As necessity was a taskmaster over them, so they were forced to be such, not only to their servants but in a sort to their dearest children, the which as it did not a little wound the tender hearts of many a loving father and mother, so it produced likewise sundry sad and sorrowful effects."

The escape from this sadness and sorrow brought with it the terrible conditions of their first New England winter. But even in the grimmest circumstances, Brad-ford identified the devoted nursing of Miles Standish and William Brewster as a dramatic instance of the sort of selfless tenderness that Winthrop was to invoke on behalf of his own community ten years later. Standish and Brewster, among others, "spared no pains night nor day" in their devotion to the sick.

but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat, made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them. In a word, did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least, showing herein their true love unto their friends and brethren; a rare example and worthy to be remembered … And what I have said of these I may say of many others who died in this general visitation, and others yet living; that whilst they had health, yea, or any strength continuing, they were not wanting to any that had need of them. And I doubt not but their recompense is with the Lord.

Some of the same fluidity of gender and sensitivity to typology that Winthrop skillfully employs in "A Modell of Christian Charity" is present in the example of these maternal Pilgrim Fathers. Bradford had begun writing Of Plymouth Plantation just at the moment when the larger and better-financed expedition to Massachusetts Bay was about to supersede Plymouth in colonial history. But the shift in center of gravity from Plymouth to Boston involved virtually no charge at all in the relation that leaders in both colonies hoped to maintain between the claims of the self and the claims of the community. Winthrop gave that relation its definitive expression in the closing sentences of "A Modell of Christian Charity," drawing on the commanding image of the body and on the verbal complexity of his portrait of Eve's restless devotion in order to suggest the kind of vitality that he felt in his social ideal:

For this end, wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brotherly Affection, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekenes, gentlenes, patience and liberality, wee must delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne rejoyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body, soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord wil be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his owne people and will commaund a blessing upon us in all our wayes, soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdome power goodness and truthe then formerly wee have beene acquainted with, wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions; the lord make it like that of New England.

Within a moment or two of this ringing forecast, Winthrop is quoting Moses on the choice of life. To his listeners it must have seemed a completely appropriate text with which to close, on metaphorical as well as on typological grounds.

Winthrop's accomplishment in "A Modell of Christian Charity" is the extraordinary degree of concentration with which he was able to express a wide range of hopes and fears shared by his colleagues. Perry Miller was among the first to recognize this representative property of Winthrop's discourse and to employ the speech in The New England Mind: From Colony To Province as a fixed point of reference from which to measure the dissolution of the Puritan errand as the eighteenth century progressed. Miller's influential treatment, however, has tended to obscure the degree to which Winthrop's initial vision of the emigrants' plight not only anticipated decline but absorbed the pattern of great promise and great peril—a pattern inherited from the Puritan vision of the plight of the individual soul and from their reading of the cyclical history of the people of Israel—and accepted it not as a unique and temporary predicament but as the ongoing condition of life. The Mosaic choice that Winthrop describes seems resonant with finality, but in fact, as he makes clear, it renews its terms constantly in the private, daily labor of life, in the intimate bonds of marriage, in the obligations of a parent and a neighbor.

The heroic, public work of Joshua or even of Nehemiah, the wall builder, with whom Cotton Mather was much later to identify Winthrop, is not the sphere of activity that Winthrop himself evokes as central to his new, American experience. He evokes instead a deeply domestic and familal set of values, and he offers a wonderfully assertive and commanding vision of Eve as the most comprehensive embodiment of those qualities necessary to avoid the figurative shipwreck that was all too vividly present to the imaginations of his seaborne listeners.

The image of Moses and the choice of life with which Winthrop closes is grand enough in its own right, but it has its roots in, and draws its authority from, unusually modest sources in human experience. Nor is it by any means clear that Winthrop saw this authority as the exclusive property of one sex. Indeed, though "A Modell of Christian Charity" begins in an apparent justification of the traditional structures of authority within the English community, that justification proves to be the preamble to a description of communal authority that is both more and less stable than the familiar three-way alliance of wealth, place, and masculinity. The comforting implications of the concept of divine plenitude give way to the necessity that people comfort one another, nurture one another, and delight in one another. Those are the values of the household, not of the Great Chain of Being, and authority is grounded in them much as the stature of Eve is grounded both in her typological identities and her power of affection, or that of William Brewster and Miles Standish is grounded in their nurturing strength during the first winter at Plymouth.

These are the central features, then, of the vision of life that Winthrop presents: the sense of the ongoing predicament of choice, the domestic center of meaning within which that choice takes place, the necessary identification of communal authority—of power—with the bonds and obligations of the family. It does not follow from the presence of these features in Winthrop's speech that he was binding himself always to act under their guidance. They simply represent his best description of those professed truths that the residents of Massachusetts Bay must strive to put into action in daily life. Like any good Puritan, Winthrop must have expected a great measure of failure on his own part as well as on that of others. The twin perceptions of impending failure and exhilarating opportunity are the definitive properties of Moses' choice, and these along with the other critical elements of Winthrop's discourse provide the context for the poetic achievements of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor.

Anne Bradstreet—newly married and sailing to New England with a father and a husband each of whom would in turn succeed to Winthrop's position as governor—was among the listeners whom Winthrop addressed on the Arbella in 1630. Under the circumstances it would have been next to impossible for her to avoid feeling the pertinence of Winthrop's appeal to the models of the body and the family. Indeed her domestic life was so intimately involved with the political life of the colony that she comes quite close to being a historical equivalent to the figure of Eve that Winthrop uses in his speech: the wife whose marital devotion is indistinguishable from a political act, and whose love transforms the remote relationships of power.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to trace the character of Bradstreet's work to the social vision that "A Modell of Christian Charity" embodies. Her loving, verse letters to her absent husband, for example, present themselves as expressions of a private affection that is peripheral to the serious masculine business of the state. In the context of Winthrop's model, however, Bradstreet's private affections and her celebration of them have public stature. Her own family appeared to recognize this fact and treat her poetry much like a public resource. Bradstreet does, to be sure, complain in "The Prologue" to The Tenth Muse that men are prone to patronize her work, but men were also prone to conspire to publish it without the author's consent, and Nathaniel Ward wrote some cheerful introductory verses to Bradstreet's book in which he mocks the myopic incompetence of a sexist Apollo, "the old Don":

Good sooth quoth the old Don, tell ye me so,
I muse whither at length these girls will go;
It half revives my chill frost-bitten blood,
To see a woman once do ought that's good;
And shod by Chaucer's boots, and Homer's furs,
Let men look to't, lest women wear the spurs.

Bradstreet apparently engaged in poetic exchanges with her father that Emily Dickinson would have found marvelous, and Simon Bradstreet, her son, wished particularly that his mother would leave him some written record from which he could continue to take counsel after her death.

Like Emily Dickinson, Bradstreet assembled private books of her poetry, but unlike Dickinson, she had clearly in mind an ultimate purpose for them, as she indicates in the six lines with which she prefaced the brief spiritual autobiography that she wrote for her children:

This book by any yet unread,
I leave for you when I am dead,
That being gone, here you may find
What was your living mother's mind.
Make use of what I leave in love,
And God shall bless you from above.

These are characteristically simple couplets. Bradstreet obviously had no poetic aspirations for them. But even so they capture the sense of affectionate seriousness that she brought to her work. She leaves this book in "love," but she makes sure her children know that she does not intend it for reverent neglect. There is just enough of the benevolent, maternal taskmaster in her admonitory "make use" to leave the unmistakable impression of an authoritative, parental voice. Much of Bradstreet's most memorable poetry is tied, directly or indirectly, to this sense of her domestic role and to the events of domestic life. She and those around her, however, would not have considered this fact as evidence of a purely personal or limited sensibility.

The extraordinary stature that Bradstreet was willing to claim for her domestic posture is generally couched in language that is, at least apparently, self-effacing. But this is much the same kind of self-effacement that Winthrop understands to be the central achievement of Christian charity. It does not happen in us naturally but must be actively sought and struggled for. As often as not, in Bradstreet's case, the struggle seldom achieves even a temporary resolution. Nor is the reader always perfectly certain of the relative merits of the antagonists. This sense of struggle is present even in a poem like "The Author to Her Book," which seems merely conventional in its modesty and resignation. Bradstreet adopts in these dedicatory lines the stance of a mother embrassed by the flaws in her poetic child. She does her best to correct her offspring's "blemishes," but her own lack of skill and her child's stubborn imperfections defeat her best intentions. She finally dismisses her hobbling "work" with some cautious advice about avoiding critics and pleading the lowliness of one's parentage.

There seems, at first, little struggle here. Bradstreet solicits a bit of tenderness for her "rambling brat" and concocts one or two clever (if disturbing) puns on printing "rags" and on her offspring's crippled "feet," but only in the closing lines does she suggest the striking model for her creative zeal:

In this array, 'mongst vulgars mayst thou roam;
In critics' hands, beware thou dost not come.
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother—she, alas, is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

These poems, Bradstreet claims, are perhaps imperfect, but they are also unfathered, created out of nothing but the author's "feeble brain," harshly judged for their failings yet forgiven by a mother whose nurturing hand seems at once affectionate and heavy with nearly an excess of formative power:

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.

Bradstreet is both a chagrined parent and an analogue for God in these seemingly modest lines. She is apologizing for her artistic inadequacies and asserting an extraordinary potency all at once—a potency that both evokes and dismisses the figure of the absent father. At the same time, Bradstreet's omnipotent motherhood is marked by the typological network that Winthrop exploited in his portrait of an equally affectionate and powerful Eve. Like Eve, Bradstreet the author is implicated in the "defects" of her crippled verse. She, after all, has made it. But she is also a mother strangely independent of earthly fathers—like Eve's typological descendant—and prophetically sensitive to the fate she envisions her child will suffer once it falls into the hands of critics. The fusion of the tradition of authorial modesty with typological ambition in these lines is both unsettling and invigorating. It represents the "willed resignation" that Robert Daly has described [in God's Altar, 1978] as the characteristic mark of Bradstreet's best verse, and at the same time asserts the kind of communal authority that Winthrop identified with his sociable and selfless Eve.

Bradstreet was capable of evoking Winthrop's metaphors quite directly, often in contexts that strike a modern reader as almost inconceivably unsophisticated. "In Reference to Her Children, 23 June 1659" is a fine example of such an exaltation of the domestic posture, working out of conditions that are less poetically promising than the witty conceits of "The Author to Her Book." Like most of Bradstreet's work, "In Reference to Her Children" is metaphorically and structurally straightforward, ninety-four lines in more or less regular couplets, built on the commonplace fiction of a mother bird reminiscing about her chicks: "I had eight birds hatched in one nest," the poem begins, "Four cocks there were, and hens the rest." The earthy savor of such language would have seemed quite familiar to contemporary readers. John Cotton had preached a farewell sermon to some of the earliest emigrants to Massachusetts Bay in which he urged his listeners to "forget not the wombe that bore you and the breasts that gave you sucke. Even ducklings hatched under an henne, though they take the water, yet will still have recourse to the wing that hatched them: how much more should chickens of the same feather, and yolke?" Cotton's purpose was to encourage his listeners to remember England and it did not strike him as unseemly to do so in this simple way.

Bradstreet's metaphor is equally simple and traditional. She comments on each of her hatchlings in turn, from the eldest, who has now flown to "regions far," to the three youngest, who "still with me nest" but whose flight she already anticipates. The departure of her "brood" fills her with fear both because of the dangers of the world—fowlers, hawks, and untoward boys—and because her children are in want of wisdom. "O to your safety have an eye," she urges them, and after describing how she intends to pass her old age, singing "my weak lays" in a shady wood, she offers them her last piece of advice:

When each of you shall in your nest
Among your young ones take your rest,
In chirping language, oft them tell,
You had a dam that loved you well,
That did what could be done for young,
And nursed you up till you were strong,
And 'fore she once would let you fly,
She showed you joy and misery;
Taught what was good, and what was ill,
What would save life, and what would kill.
Thus gone, amongst you I may live,
And dead, yet speak, and counsel give:
Farewell, my birds, farewell adieu,
I happy am, if well with you.

What is most interesting, and most characteristic, about these concluding lines is the way in which Bradstreet is able to infuse her almost insistently naive conceit with a surprising, and moving, degree of seriousness. The change is anything but heavy-handed, but if we are alert, then the three pairs of antonyms—joy and misery, good and ill, life and "kill"—seem unmistakably to echo the structure of Moses' farewell injunctions on "life and good, death and evil" to which Winthrop had attached such significance nearly thirty years earlier. Bradstreet certainly does not force the association upon us, but there is a great deal of difference between the distressed mother bird who had cried "O to your safety have an eye" just a few lines earlier and the quality of calm and stately wisdom that suddenly settles upon the poem's close. The shift in tone that occurs in these final lines suggests Bradstreet's desire to entice us along into a delightful and striking contrast. But even without such a formal hint, it is clear that one of the chief advantages of Bradstreet's childlike conceit of birds, chicks, and nests is what we might call its inherent poetic humility.

As the rich fusion of tones in "The Author to Her Book" suggests, Bradstreet is engaged in a more or less steady struggle with the self. "The finest bread hath the least bran," she wrote in "Meditation 6," "the purest honey the least wax, and the sincerest Christian the least self-love". The vocation of a poet, however, is almost inevitably an assertion of the individual sensibility, particularly as Bradstreet practiced it. She was the family elegist and spiritual counselor, the family solicitor with God in many of her verse prayers. Unless we are devoted antiquarians, we know very little indeed about those "public employments" for which Bradstreet's husband was so often absent, but Bradstreet's amorous verse letters to him are familiar to many modern readers. At some level she sensed the potential incitement to egotism that such power over feelings and over human memory could represent. Taking counsel with the chastened peacock of her "Meditation 5," she appears to have focused her own literary efforts not on the dramatic display of poetical "gay feathers," but rather upon a considered exposure of those embarrassing black feet: "So he that glories in his gifts and adornings should look upon his corruptions, and that will damp his high thoughts". Bradstreet took some care to damp her own.

It is equally clear that accompanying this conventional, or corrective, humility of Bradstreet's is a genuinely religious sense of unworthiness, expressed most directly in the private verse laments that she left to her children, in which a succession of fainting fits, sicknesses, and periods of bodily weakness all conspire to remind her of her utter dependence upon God:

My thankful heart with glorying tongue
Shall celebrate Thy name,
Who hath restored, redeemed, recured
From Sickness, death, and pain.

I cried, Thou seem'st to make some stay,
I sought more earnestly
And in due time Thou succor'st me
And sent'st me help from high.

Lord, whilst my fleeting time shall last,
Thy goodness let me tell,
And new experience I have gained
My future doubts repel.

An humble, faithful life, O Lord,
Forever let me walk;
Let my obedience testify
My praise lies not in talk.

Accept, O Lord, my simple mite,
For more I cannot give.
What Thou bestow'st I shall restore,
For of thine alms I live.

When Bradstreet's powers are fully engaged, her poetry manages to sustain an unusually effective balance between the genuine humility of these private laments and the kind of forthright self-confidence ("My praise lies not in talk") that conventional humility disguises. Even in these lines from a "thankful heart," Bradstreet cannot resist reminding God that his succor was something less than prompt, and she does indeed expect to encounter future doubts. Her gratitude and obedience are not inconsistent with an essential, human assertiveness, just as her authorial modesty is not inconsistent with a willingness to hint at her own, God-like powers of composition—of judgment and amendment. For Bradstreet (as Robert Daly has again noted) man's relation to God was "familial," but that relation implied a degree of antagonism as well as intimacy that Bradstreet's own domestic roles permitted her to appreciate and dramatize.

The brief dedicatory verses to her father that appeared in the posthumous, 1678 edition of her poems clearly overstate her modesty in the conventional manner when she characterizes her offered work as "this crumb." But other elements of the poem—the allusion to the parable of the talents, in particular, and to the necessity for "forgiving" debts that Winthrop emphasizes in parts of "A Modell of Christian Charity"—establish just as clearly both a sense of dependence and a sense of Bradstreet's own personal adequacy. Both the indebtedness and the stubbornness are deeply felt:

Most truly honoured, and as truly dear,
If worth in me or ought I do appear,
Who can of right better demand the same
Than may your worthy self from whom it came?
The principal might yield a greater sum,
Yet handled ill, amounts but to this crumb;
My stock's so small I know not how to pay,

My bond remains in force unto this day;
Yet for part payment take this simple mite,
Where nothing's to be had, kings loose their right.
Such is my debt I may not say forgive,
But as I can, I'll pay it while I live;
Such is my bond, none can discharge but I,
Yet paying is not paid until I die.

The similarity between the language of Bradstreet's private lament (also a "simple mite") and this more public poem is another index of the complex interplay in her work between genuine and conventional selflessness, between self-effacement and self-confidence. "In Reference to Her Children" is built around a similar balance, offering at the same instant two versions of Bradstreet's maternal solicitude: one the implicitly patronizing view of the fretful mother bird, the other quite boldly identifying her parental concern with that of Moses for his people.

Bradstreet's apparently simple "Meditation 6" on self-love is in some measure a general admission of this characteristic mixture of boldness and modesty: "The finest bread hath the least bran, the purest honey the least wax, and the sincerest Christian the least self-love." The best bread may well have the least bran, but at the same time Bradstreet implies that all bread has some. Bees' wax may be an unwelcome intruder in one's honey, but its presence there is anything but unnatural. Accordingly, though the best Christian may have the least self-love, Bradstreet is more than prepared to take a forgiving attitude toward that residue of egotism, provided that it does not try to assert itself too openly. Like many of her best meditations, the analogies in this one have a benevolently corrective effect upon its dogmatic basis. Just as Winthrop recognized in his closing exhortations to "A Modell of Christian Charity," it is clearly desirable to struggle against the self, but it is entirely natural that the struggle should be at least a partial failure. "In Reference to Her Children" virtually enacts this struggle and dramatizes its fortunate failure. Without some sense of self there would, of course, be no poem at all. Without some potent restraint upon the self, the nature of the poem would change. The delicate allusion to Moses might harden into an unacceptably self-aggrandizing view of the speaker's role. Bradstreet intends that the emphasis fall where the title suggests: upon her children, not upon herself. She hopes simultaneously to enjoin "life" upon them and to embody the meaning of that injunction in her carefully balanced manner of giving it.

Not even the convention of poetic humility or a calculated simplicity, however, could disguise Bradstreet's immense satisfaction in her domestic roles. The images from "In Reference to Her Children," for example, are in one sense unsophisticated, but in the context of the whole poem—its seriousness of purpose as well as its simplicity of means—they are fondly playful. The innocence of its primary metaphor does not trivialize the emotions expressed but serves instead as a constant, gentle reminder of a parent's vulnerability through her children:

O would my young, ye saw my breast,
And knew what thoughts there sadly rest,
Great was my pain when I you bred,
Great was my care when I you fed,
Long did I keep you soft and warm,
And with my wings kept off all harm,
My cares are more and fears than ever,
My throbs such now as 'fore were never.
Alas, my birds, you wisdom want,
Of perils you are ignorant;
Oft times in grass, on trees, in flight,
Sore accidents on you may light.
O to your safety have an eye,
So happy may you live and die.

These lines are solicitous and at the same time surprisingly blunt. Much as in the case of the typologically double identity of the speaker in "The Author to Her Book," Bradstreet assumes the role of a fussing mother bird, but she is also a demanding judge of her children's insufficient wisdom. It is clear that her sense of a mother's role (and voice) is anything but stereotypically simple. This same sort of complexity is present as well in the poems that reflect her status as wife.

The verse letters to her husband are among the most memorable of Brandstreet's poems, not only because of the enthusiasm with which they celebrate married love, but because of the nature of the love that they celebrate. Bradstreet always writes from the perspective of the homebound wife who wants her busy partner to return; yet just as the vulnerability of "In Reference to Her Children" is mutual, so the dependence between husband and wife is mutual in Bradstreet's love poems. "I have a loving peer," she writes in one verse letter, making rather skillful use of the two meanings of "peer" to establish the double assertion: I have a loving lord, and I have a loving equal. Bradstreet's love poems take what appears to be unrestrained delight in acknowledging her dependence upon her husband, but the terms in which she expresses that delight almost always affirm, directly or indirectly, that the dependence is mutual—the perfect model for the mutual dependence of society at large that Winthrop envisioned for America.

Bradstreet's reference to her "loving peer," for example, comes in the midst of a poem that seems particularly extravagant in its images of wifely dependence:

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.

Bradstreet goes on to compare herself to a "pensive dove" mourning the absence of her "turtle true," and to "the loving mullet, that true fish" that leaps onto the bank to die with "her captive husband" rather than lead a lonely life. The poem draws to a close by heaping up these three identities in a way that draws attention to their hyperbolic nature but also discloses in the parallelism of the first two lines of the following passage the differences among them:

Return my dear, my joy, my only love,
Unto thy hind, thy mullet, and thy dove,
Who neither joys in pasture, house, nor streams,
The substance gone, O me, these are but dreams.

Of these three images of wifely desolation, only one is stereotypically passive and helpless: the dove, with whose "uncouth" moanings for "my only love" even Bradstreet herself is a bit impatient earlier in the poem. The loving hind is a restless, energetic searcher, as nimble as the puns that characterize her, and the mullet is "true" with a nearly fierce joy in self-sacrifice. It is a chivalric rather than a "feminine" loyalty, and it produces exhilaration rather than despair. The love in this poem is a complex passion that asserts its power as much as it laments its incompleteness.

"A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment" explores the same kind of complexity. It is a scolding, witty, erotic poem, that may also acknowledge an indirect debt to the memorable portrait of Eve in "A Modell of Christian Charity." Bradstreet closes her "letter" with an allusion to Genesis that is a bit truer to the biblical text than Winthrop's but which is nevertheless a stern reminder that the bonds of marriage are not dependent upon metaphysical conceits for their power and ought not to be subjected to strain for routine causes:

But when thou northward to me shall return,
I wish my Sun may never set, but burn
Within the Cancer of my glowing breast,
The welcome house of him my dearest guest.
Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence,
Till nature's sad decree shall call thee hence;
Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,
I here, thou there, yet both but one.

There is nothing merely "public" about Bradstreet's claim upon her husband. She openly reminds him, as Winthrop's Eve served to remind his listeners, of the relationship between marital devotion and the kind of apocalyptic imagery that these lines evoke: a loving "sun" united with his bride and forming a single being.

"To My Dear and Loving Husband" brings this same, sobering force to bear even more directly, for though the title seems to express Bradstreet's confidence in her husband's affections, the text of the poem itself is more tentative in its claims of confidence and at the same time more emphatic about the momentous consequences of domestic loyalty:

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.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Bradstreet is "happy" in her husband and prizes his love, but these assertions fall ever so slightly short of confirming that his love equals the resistless force of hers, and her direct address to the community of wives establishes that masculine affection is in general less satisfactory than it might be. The poem is a celebration of the Bradstreets' particular relationship and at the same time a plea for recompense and a reminder that earthly love and loyalty are the critical symbols of "covenanted" love, the basis upon which John Winthrop had established the Puritan community. They exert a momentous claim upon human attention. These messages are potentially so antagonistic to one another that their mixture in thirteen lines of poetry is an unusual achievement. Bradstreet's sense of the psychological richness and import of domestic life called for both extraordinarily exuberant and extraordinarily politic expression.

She is similarly politic and tender with her children. The "Meditations" that she prepared for her son Simon are, as we have seen, both reflections of sound doctrine and ameliorations of that doctrine to accommodate Bradstreet's sense of human limitation. Indeed, some of the most beautiful of these "Meditations" cast God in the role of a "prudent mother" who has a fund of good sense to draw upon in rearing her children. "Meditation 39" is the finest example of this domestic analogy. No wise mother, Bradstreet observes, will give her little child "a long and cumbersome garment," for that would only result in falls, bruises, or worse. Similarly, God recognizes that generous earthly endowments are likely to prove too cumbersome for weak Christians: "Therefore God cuts their garments short to keep them in such a trim that they might run the ways of His Commandment". The message of this meditation is both reassuring and discouraging. We might have preferred that God be more generous with earthly wealth and honor and let us take our chances with stumbling. But Bradstreet's understanding of maternal solicitude is not sentimental. Her sense of the role has a priestly quality to it that is both fond and stern. Her dedication of the "Meditations," for example, displays at once her care for Simon's well-being, her desire to respond to his request for something in writing by which to remember her, and her gently expressed suspicion that he might, after all, need just this sort of guidance and spiritual support. "I could think of nothing more fit for you nor of more ease to myself," writes Bradstreet, than these incitements to spiritual thinking. That motherly observation itself might well serve as Simon's first topic of meditation.

The prose memorial that she left to her children is similarly solicitous and stern. Bradstreet wished to share with her children a generous record of her own struggle with doubt and of her own assurance of God's ultimate provision for "this great household upon the earth". At the same time she casts these reflections as a deathbed speech—not unlike Moses' last farewell—which she hopes will "sink deepest" and give useful guidance: "I have not studied in this you read to show my skill, but to declare the truth, not to set forth myself, but the glory of God". This document is personal—Bradstreet meant it to remain private—but its voice is also public and, in its way, remote:

I knowing by experience that the exhortations of parents take most effect when the speakers leave to speak, and those especially sink deepest which are spoken latest, and being ignorant whether on my death bed I shall have opportunity to speak to any of you, much less to all, thought it the best, whilst I was able, to compose some short matters (for what else to call them I know not) and bequeath to you, that when I am no more with you, yet I may be daily in your remembrance (although that is the least in my aim in what I now do), but that you may gain some spiritual advantage by my experience. I have not studied in this you read to show my skill, but to declare the truth, not to set forth myself, but the glory of God. If I had minded the former, it had been perhaps better pleasing to you, but seeing the last is the best, let it be best pleasing to you.

The same mixture of maternal solicitude and power that gave such richness to the texture of "The Author to Her Book" is responsible for the interplay of confidence and doubt, authority and affection in this striking paragraph. It is probably inadvisable to place too much emphasis upon the artful significance of seventeenth-century syntax. But Bradstreet's long first sentence in this passage—twice interrupted by dramatically contrasting asides—captures in a single unit of expression the complexity and importance of the domestic role as Bradstreet understood it. She captures as well the characteristic alternation between security and insecurity that Winthrop identified so deeply with the predicament of the Arbella emigrants. "Downy beds make drowsy persons," Bradstreet wrote in "Meditation 8," "but hard lodging keeps the eyes open; a prosperous state makes a secure Christian, but adversity makes him consider" (273). It was precisely to foster such considered living in her children that Bradstreet took on her authoritative role, but it was an authority that she naturally derived from the roles linking her to Winthrop's emblematic Eve and to the potent, mediating figure of Mary, whose sorrows Bradstreet also took up in the elegies she wrote for three of her grandchildren and for a daughter-in-law who died in childbirth.

Bradstreet's power as an elegist consists in her ability to dramatize what Robert Daly names the "weaning" process by which a Puritan learns to be resigned to the loss of earthly beauty. But in the best of these poems it is not entirely as an earthly speaker that Bradstreet presents herself anymore than she presents herself in the memorial to her children as an earthly presence or defends her poetic children in "The Author to Her Book" as an earthly creator. Her command over the powers of consolation does not really seem to derived from the traditional, natural metaphors of which the poems are composed. These, in fact, are curiously out of harmony with the deaths of children, as Bradstreet quietly shows us in "In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth":

Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content,
Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,
Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,
Then ta'en away unto eternity.
Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate,
Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate,
Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state.

2

By nature trees do rot when they are grown,
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.

The first stanza begins with three formulaic laments that the poet seems able to put aside, in the fifth line, with a serenity that makes even one lament seem superfluous. The child is "blest," and Bradstreet does not require the consolatory metaphor of fair flowers to reach her state of inward peace, as "settled" apparently as that of the infant's soul itself. Nor does the second stanza make more use of its more elaborate, natural parables of mutability. The child was neither grown nor ripe, not strong and tall. The lessons of nature simply encumber a relationship to the divine will that is direct and confident—that of a mother who recognizes that she had received her child directly from the same hand that now claims it. This is a posture that is not easy to credit in a human speaker, but neither is it easy to credit the complex posture that Bradstreet adopts in "The Author to Her Book" until one recognizes that Bradstreet is speaking (as a Puritan might put it) "typically" as well as humanly, face to face with God in a relation that Emerson would later recognize and envy as the mark of his Puritan ancestors.

In perhaps the finest of her poems envisioning her own death, Bradstreet made it clear just how deeply her imagination responded to the network of associations and images that Winthrop summoned up in his vision of Eve as the redemptive model for life in Massachusetts Bay. "As Weary Pilgrim" offers the reader a description of two figures, one the poet in a state of perplexity and glorious anticipation, the other a hypothetical traveler through life to whom the poet compares herself in the simile that the title suggests. This first pilgrim, however, is disturbingly content to die. He "hugs with delight his silent nest" in a selfish parody of Winthrop's vision of social delight, and "blesses himself to think that his earthly trials are over and the grave's "safety" awaits. Bradstreet's own earthly pilgrimage is quite different, marked by the domestic temperament, by the vitality of the image of marriage, and by the thirst for life. Her "clay house" decays, but it is an existence "among the blest" that she counts upon after death and not a self-indulgent and isolated escape. The grave is a place of preparation, of urgency, leading to an apocalyptic marriage with Christ and the replacement of human weakness and dishonor with human power:

Bradstreet clearly chooses "life" in this poem, whereas the first weary (and, not incidentally, male) pilgrim chooses death. Her last two lines are characteristically retiring and bold, insecure about her personal worthiness and at the same time startlingly confident in her own powers of appeal. Christ too is an absent spouse, with whom Anne Bradstreet is willing to assert her erotic claims. "As Weary Pilgrim" progresses, then, from a depiction of the Old Adam of selfish contentment to an embodiment of an ecstatic and visionary Eve who is, at the same time, the community as Bride, the Church welcoming her "Bridegroom." Bradstreet's poetic exploration of Winthrop's typological triad from "A Modell of Christian Charity" is in its way the artistic midpoint between Winthrop's purposeful prose of 1630 and Edward Taylor's ecstatic meditations on the Eucharist and on Canticles, in which he celebrates at the outset of the eighteenth century the same communal and individual marriage.

The relationship between Edward Taylor's proliferation of images and the handful of metaphors assembled in "A Modell of Christian Charity" is both more and less direct than Anne Bradstreet's relationship to that same, fruitful speech. Nowhere does Taylor echo Winthrop as closely as Bradstreet does, for example, in the final lines of "In Reference to Her Children." Nor does he identify as closely as Bradstreet does with the fabric of domestic metaphor that links private with public life. It would be surprising if he did so, for Taylor is nearly two generations removed from the founders of Massachusetts Bay, arriving at Boston in his early twenties almost forty years after the Arbella and almost certainly with no access to the text of Winthrop's discourse.

At the same time, however, Taylor's poetry is dominated, to a far greater extent than is Bradstreet's, by the overriding subject of the soul's journey from death to life. Taylor has dozens of ways of describing the journey and of voicing the soul's aspiration toward God. He exhorts his Maker repeatedly to blow on the coal of his smoldering faith, to feed his spirit on heavenly food, to root up his "henbain," chokewort, and ragwort and plant him with honeysuckle, sage, and savory, to dress him in the bright garments of grace, to "screw" him up, to oil his rusty lock, to sharpen his dull pencil or brighten his dim ink, to fill his earthly bottle with heavenly liquor, to redecorate the "Flesh and Blood bag" of his soul and make it a shining temple. Extravagantly conceived and extravagantly mixed metaphors are the characteristic (and traditional) expressions of Taylor's pious zeal and spiritual exuberance, but they all focus on the contrast between what he called the "lifeless Life" or "Living Death" of sin and the spiritual life of grace.

To some degree, it is a disservice to Taylor to single out only one set of images from his lively multitude, since the experience of reading him is so decisively marked by the pleasure of tumbling along a stream of figurative language. But as Karl Keller has observed [in The Example of Edward Taylor, 1975], the significance of this inventive and eclectic richness for Taylor himself was its intensively focused interest in the great Puritan drama: the soul's preparation for grace, the exchanging of death for life. In a single stanza, Taylor is quite capable of touching on four or five distinct, and to some degree competing, metaphors, all of which converge toward the central subject of life, even though that critical word itself may be present only implicitly in one or two modifiers, or in the contrast between withered and "frim" (or flourishing) fruits:

As in Winthrop's image of the mouth that minces food for all the body, Taylor's "grinders" very nearly carry the idea of a conceit too far. Like Thoreau, however, Taylor himself seems to have feared only that he would not be extravagant enough. That such metaphorical diversity could tend to such spiritual unity is an underlying subject in most of Taylor's work, particularly in the "Preparatory Meditations," which are by their very nature diverse poetic approaches to a single spiritual goal: the sacrament of communion.

From what we might call a doctrinal standpoint, then, Taylor's application of the scriptural contrast between life and death is more explicit than Bradstreet's even as his figurative language is more lavish and more daring. In many ways they scarcely seem comparable except as extreme instances of opposite tendencies within the tradition of Puritan poetry. But Bradstreet and Taylor share a number of assumptions, in addition to the devotion to spiritual "life," that govern their work, the most important and most obvious of which is the context of familial discourse within which they understood their verse to be operating:

In recent years the most acute and thorough of Taylor's readers have tended to agree that the self-deprecation expressed in stanzas such as these fairly mild ones (by Taylor's standards) reflects a genuine contempt on Taylor's part for his own poetic efforts. Anne Bradstreet's gentle dismissals of her verse seem almost vain by comparison to the depths of spiritual and artistic self-loathing to which Taylor repeatedly seems to sink, but even the most strongly stated of these depictions of human corruption-sometimes in their very extravagance—evoke the innocence of the lisping child and the image of parental solicitude that sustains the lines above. Taylor may well envision himself as a leper "all o're clag'd" with running sores and scabs, with "Stinking Breath," corrupted lungs, and a "Scurfy Skale" encrusting his entire body like the "Elephantik Mange," but the extremity of the description itself calls attention to its own conventional nature in a way that prevents the reader from taking such descriptions very seriously. The more highly wrought they get, the more childlike they seem, and the more plausible and more tender, in turn, seems the Lord's careful "springeing" and "besprinkling" that cures the leper's malady with His blood.

The personal usefulness of the "Preparatory Meditations" was, after all, to prepare and not to incapacitate. Taylor employed these poems as a means of readying himself for what he perceived as the momentous role he played administering and receiving the sacrament. The biblical quotations accompanying all but one of the meditations are the texts upon which he had chosen to preach on each communion Sunday, and all the meditations except the first one are dated. These poems are rooted just as deeply in Taylor's life as Bradstreet's domestic poems are rooted in hers, and their repetitive nature (like that of Bradstreet's laments) was from Taylor's perspective their primary meditative asset. They were meant to transform the mere repetitions of life into exalted occasions, all of the same fundamental kind to be sure but as diverse as the most heterogeneous natural imagery could make them. Collectively these poems also provide an extraordinary portrait of the ongoing interplay between security and insecurity in the Puritan imagination. William Scheick is only partly right when he states [in The Will and the Word, 1974] that the meditations nowhere depict "any sense of comfort on the poet's part." In fact the strategy of virtually every one of the poems is to enact the recovery of a degree of personal assurance sufficient to make the ceremony of communion possible both for Taylor as the priestly celebrant and for the reader. They are, as Scheick elsewhere perceptively notes, acts of preservation, however inadequate their language may have been to Taylor's vision and however incomplete the process of reassurance might remain. No orthodox Congregational sacramentalist—as Taylor was—would have felt comfortable laying claim to an absolute certainty of personal election. But the church as a social entity had to accommodate itself to irresolvable metaphysical uncertainty, and in one sense that act of accommodation is what the meditations perform, much as the figure of Eve accommodated the strict demands of election to the social necessities of Massachusetts Bay in "A Modell of Christian Charity."

The particular ways in which Taylor sought to make his poetry useful confirm his participation in the tradition of the believing self's inadequacy and at the same time suggest his own peculiar softening of that tradition. The "Preparatory Meditations" repeatedly assert the unaided soul's incapacity properly to praise or to serve God, but they do so in a remarkably homely, very nearly forgiving, fashion. One cannot escape the implication throughout Taylor's diction that even at their worst man's sins are not so serious after all. The cajoling attitude of the "Crumb of Dust" with which Taylor opens the "Prologue" to his meditational series represents the consistent tone of his poetic persona:

Taylor's posture throughout the poems that follow reflects both the humility and the assertiveness of these prefatory lines. These are clearly the words of a fallen speaker, aware of his diminished status in the universe, but aware as well of the larger typological design that makes a measure of bemusement at his own "Slips" something other than a gesture of theological impertinence. On occasion, to be sure, Taylor will revile man's corrupt condition, but it is nevertheless clear that he is prone to exercise a kind of poetic "grace" upon his human sinners, alleviating their afflictions in a way that anticipates, and to some extent symbolizes, the operations of genuine grace upon the genuinely corrupted spirit.

At times, in his joy at God's care for His erring and undeserving creatures, Taylor can approach a sort of elation in his lines that suggests both stark surprise and a kind of durable innocence on the part of the awe-struck speaker:

Stanzas like these are not particularly unusual in Taylor's work, ingenuous as they are, and it would be a mistake to ascribe their peculiar charm either to the author's lack of poetic sophistication or (as Robert Daly suggests) to an extremely sophisticated suspicion of all metaphoric speech. One indirect way of asserting the inadequacies of the self—as we noted in Bradstreet's verse—is to make certain that one's imagery reflects the "inadequacy" of human vision in general. That, in part, is the purpose of Taylor's nearly comic pursuit of preposterous images. At the same time, in Taylor's work such language has the effect of convincing us that unregenerate man is not really a very great redemptive challenge. Taylor's generic sinner does not fall into the glorious metric apostasy of Milton's Satan, but into a kind of childish "naughtiness" in which the value of human life remains very much apparent despite its temporary state of degradation:

In her recent treatment of Taylor's typological poetics, Karen Rowe [in Saint and Singer, 1986] finds in these lines a "scathing self-denunciation" of the "sin-riddled soul's empty frivolities," a point of view that seems, at best, unjustifiably sober. Barley-breaks and Coursey-park are, like Blindman's Bluff, innocent games. A state of sin that can be characterized in this manner is already well on the way toward being forgiven.

Taylor wrote, of course, from the perspective of one of the elect. In the opening poem of "God's Determinations," he makes it clear that even in the full panic of their sense of sin, such elected souls resemble a "Child that fears the Poker Clapp," who falls to earth and "lies still for fear least hee—Should by his breathing lowd discover'd bee". The errors of such children invite gentle treatment and that is precisely the sort of treatment that they receive both in the drama of "God's Determinations" and in the lines of the "Preparatory Meditations." Presumably a cycle of poems and meditations describing the inner life of the damned would be considerably more grim, but Taylor's interest in their fate is quite perfunctory, and his portrait of the elect has sufficient variety in it to allow almost any reader to identify with the saved souls rather than with the lost ones. Ezra Stiles, Taylor's grandson and a temporary custodian of his papers, once occupied himself in calculating quite seriously the numbers of resurrected souls involved at Judgment Day. How crowded would Christ's courtroom be and how might the verdicts go in proportion of saved to lost souls? Stiles estimated that about 120 billion souls would be involved altogether, of which 90 billion would be saved and 30 billion damned. These are, by strict Calvinist standards, rather good odds. More importantly, perhaps, they seem consistent with Edward Taylor's own tendency to weight the human predicament in favor of election and then to focus his imagination upon the benevolence of that process of salvation.

Taylor's depiction of the anxieties of the insecure human soul is detailed and sincere; he is by no means complacent in his vision of the operations of grace. Even the saved are filled with a sense that they "have long ago deserv'de Hells flame," that God's "abused Mercy" could only "burn and scald" them, that Justice and Vengeance "Run hotly after us our blood to spill". Such accounts of the genuine terror of human life, however, are almost always followed by descriptions of our mortal plight that subtly, but decisively, relieve the strain and imply our ultimate rescue:

Who'le with a Leaking, old Crack't Hulk assay
To brave the raging Waves of Adria?
Or who can Cross the Main Pacifick o're?
Without a Vessell Wade from shore to shore?
What! wade the mighty main from brim to brim,
As if it would not reach above the Chin?
But oh! poor wee, must wade from brinck to brinck
With such a weight as would bright Angells sink.
Or venture angry Adria, or drown
When Vengeance's sea doth break the floodgates down.
If Stay, or Go to sea, we drown. Then see
In what a wofull Pickle, Lord, we bee.

To be saved from hell's flames and from an aroused, bloodthirsty Justice seems scarcely possible. But even a deeply shaken believer might reasonably expect to escape from a "wofull Pickle." In the dialogue poems from "God's Determinations" that prepare the soul to resist Satan's temptations and to achieve church fellowship, the "Saint" assures the "Soul" that God dispenses grace to human beings only gradually, for good psychological reasons:

You think you might have more: you shall have so,
But if you'd all at once, you could not grow.
And if you could not grow, you'd grieving fall:
All would not then Content you, had you all.
Should Graces Floodgate thus at once breake down,
You most would lose, or else it you would drown.
He'l fill you but by drops, that so he may
Not drown you in't, nor cast a Drop away.

Equipped with this kind of reassurance, even the most reluctant of Taylor's elect souls, the second and third "rancks" that originally had fled God's presence and held their breath waiting for the poker-clap, are filled with "holy Raptures" and able to capture the entire heavenly strategy in a single couplet:

Sin sincks the Soul to Hell: but here is Love
Sincks Sin to Hell: and soars the Soul above.

The sense of great peril and great promise that marks Winthrop's description of the American plight is present to Taylor's imagination in this sense of a carefully nurturing God, releasing His grace with all the cautious circumspection of a mother watching over her child's slow but steady growth. Taylor never explicitly manipulates God's gender, as Bradstreet is willing to do in her "Meditation 39," for example. He takes his images from emblem books and from the Bible, with very little of the kind of provocative modification that Winthrop himself was willing to employ in his treatment of the figure of Eve. But it is equally clear that Taylor is firmly grounded in the imaginative heritage of Winthrop's "modell," and in the preeminence that model had given to domestic settings and domestic instincts.

What finally gives Taylor's work its distinctive, infectious energy is the earnestness with which he takes to heart his own poetic version of this tradition, operating in the experience of election: Even in our degraded state, we are still children; even in his inconceivable majesty, God is still our parent and takes a parent's interest in us. The household metaphor that was so formative for Anne Bradstreet is critical to the sense of intimacy that Taylor feels with his attentive and forgiving Maker. It is possible to tease, to cajole, to "tweedie" praise, to fill one's address to God with the most

An excerpt from Percival Lowell's elegy on John Winthrop (1649):

humdrum domestic metaphors, to offer Him "wagon loads" of love and glory, to dedicate one's services as a spinning wheel, an organ pipe, a liquor bottle, a writer. The fullness and to some degree the very unevenness of Taylor's poetic discourse is a substantial part of its meaning. One does not attempt to polish or revise for God's benefit, any more than the compilers of the Bay Psalm Book would have attempted to polish God's altar. One simply opens one's humanity to God, and to the greatest extent possible one celebrates it. Taylor's confidence in God's closeness is at least as critical to the shape his poetry takes as is his awe at God's power. In this sense he is in perfect agreement with Milton, whose God is strikingly at ease in Paradise and much more at home there than among His marshaled ranks of militarized angels. Taylor's own wonderfully comfortable relations with God are by no means paradisal. He remained a crumb of dust, a bag of botches, a purse of naughtiness. But in this colloquial vocabulary of degradation, the intimacy of the family thrives.