SOURCE: Adams, John C. “Alexander Richardson and the Ramist Poetics of Michael Wigglesworth.” Early American Literature 25, no. 3 (1990): 271-88.

[In this essay, a response to Alan H. Pope's 1985 essay, Adams contends that proper understanding of Wigglesworth's Day of Doom depends on an understanding of both logic and the rhetorical theory that influenced the author.]

I

In a recent essay, Alan H. Pope has written that “no other Puritan poet has suffered more negative criticism and disrespect than Michael Wigglesworth, author of America's first best-seller, The Day of Doom” (210). He provides an apt summary of the prevailing judgment of Wigglesworth as “a caricature of the grim, high-hatted Puritan, [who] sacrificed the fine art of poetry to the sterile dogmatics of religion. Typically, Wigglesworth is portrayed as a humorless man writing galloping fourteneers and doggerel ballads” (210). However, Pope believes that Wigglesworth has been misread, as twentieth-century critics are insensitive to the logical features of the Ramist poetics that structure his poetry. In Pope's view, Ramist dialectic provided contemporaries with their key criterion for judging the merit of Wigglesworth's poetry, praising the “craftsmanship” of his verse and its edifying potential (210). Specifically, in his reading of Wigglesworth, Pope takes issue with the rhetorical perspective that Robert Daly has adopted in his assessment of Wigglesworth. Although he accepts Daly's judgment that Wigglesworth's metaphoric imagery is inferior to that of his Puritan contemporaries, and that Ramist rhetorical theory had virtually no impact on Puritan poetics, he does not view Wigglesworth's imagery as the appropriate datum of analysis. He claims that Daly mistakenly views Ramus primarily as a rhetorician: “By neglecting the dialectic of Ramus, Daly ignores one practical use of Ramus for Puritan writers and the logical system that serves them as a foundation for poetic form. Ramus' influence on Wigglesworth is not rhetorical, but logical” (212).

Pope believes that the “central focus” of Day of Doom “is a careful and logical development of the religious debate between the sinners and Christ” (211-12). Focusing on the debate, Pope undertakes an illuminating analysis of Wigglesworth's verse that clearly demonstrates the influence of Ramist dialectics on its logical structure.

In his analysis, Pope draws on Alexander Richardson's Logicians School-Master, a Puritan commentary on Ramus's Dialecticae libri duo. As I have written elsewhere, the School-Master had a significant impact on the seventeenth-century New England Puritans' understanding of the discourse arts.¹ Quite rightfully, Pope uses the School-Master as a primary source in his explanation of the Ramist rationale behind the logical structure of Wigglesworth's poetry (212), as does Daly in his explanation of Puritan aesthetics (63, 96, 175).² However, Pope's acceptance of Daly's assessment of the negligible impact of Ramist rhetorical theory on Puritan poetics, his focus on Wigglesworth as a poet/dialectician, and his judgment of the merit of Wigglesworth's poetry solely on logical grounds, are not consonant with the rhetorical standards of evaluation applied by Ramist contemporaries.

Pope's decision to focus solely on the logical features of Wigglesworth's poetry may be attributable to the edition of Richardson's School-Master that he used as a source of his concept of the “Ramist influence.” Pope employed the 1629 edition, which is missing Richardson's “Grammatical Notes” and “Rhetorical Notes.” Both notes appear in the 1657 edition, wherein Richardson explicitly discusses poetry in connection with his philosophy of art and commentaries on Ramus's Dialectica, Grammatica, and Omer Talon's Ramist Rhetorica.

In this essay I shall offer a reassessment of the operative “Ramist influence” on Wigglesworth's Day of Doom. I shall place the text in connection with the aesthetic Puritans drew from Richardson's philosophy of art and his commentaries on the Ramist precepts of dialectic and speech. I shall argue that Day of Doom embodies a two-fold interest in dialectic and rhetoric that is distinctively Ramist. In addition, I shall argue that contemporary praise of Day of Doom voiced appreciation of Wigglesworth's marked attempts to craft sensuous affective imagery out of his experiences of the natural world. My overall aim is to show that Wigglesworth's poetry is not an anomaly. By linking it to the culture of Ramism and the literary values that guided the production and evaluation of effective discourse in his speech community, I shall place Day of Doom on an equal footing with other Puritan poetry written in seventeenth-century New England.

II

Jonathan Mitchell and Cotton Mather did not praise Wigglesworth's poetry for its dialectical structure. Rather, they praised it for its truthfulness and metaphorically as a mode of expression, for the beauty of its manner of dress, or its sweetness. Jonathan Mitchell, in his introduction, “On The Following Work, and It's Author,” to Wigglesworth's Day of Doom claims that “a verse may find him who a Sermon flies, / Saith Herbert well. Great Truths to dress in Meeter; / Becomes a Preacher; who mens Souls doth prize, / That Truth in Sugar roll'd may taste the sweeter” (299).³

Mitchell uses the quotation from Herbert as a vindication of sacred poetry and an invitation to yield to its pleasing “taste” so that its spiritual “truth” may be readily ingested or embraced by one's soul. Further on, Mitchell writes: “No Cost too great, no care too curious is / To set forth Truth, and win mens Souls to bliss. … / Reader, fall to; and if thy tast be good, / Thou'lt praise the Cook, & say, 'Tis choicest Food” (299).

Mitchell praises the poetry of Wigglesworth by contrasting it to prose, a verse to a sermon, as Herbert did with regard to his own poetry. Poetry is praised for its capacity of “dressing” truth in meter and “rolling” truth in sugar. These sartorial and gustatory metaphors in praise of poetry are indicative of Mitchell's criteria for evaluating a given poem and explaining how poetry differs in its function from other forms of discourse. To be sure, “truth” is its subject matter, and in this sense Pope correctly assumes that Wigglesworth's poetry may be informed by Ramist dialectic. At the same time, though, in Mitchell's view it would seem that poetry makes its distinctive contribution as a mode of discourse because it “dresses” or “sweetens” the truth in such a way as to make it what “men's Souls doth prize.” In addition, in lines 7-9 of his prefatory poem Mitchell addresses and clarifies Wigglesworth's own preface to Day of Doom, where Wigglesworth expresses his abomination at having to “call the muses” to his aid (9). Mitchell wrote: “In Costly Verse, and most laborious Rymes, / Are dish't up here Truths worthy most regard: / No toyes, nor Fables (Poets wonted Crimes) / Here be; but things of worth, with Wit prepar'd” (299).

Mitchell emphasizes the propriety of poetry for conveying weighty truths, pointing out (as Wigglesworth had) that the so-called “Poets” in their play of fabula, and allusions to false gods, misuse a means of moving the soul by moving it toward delight as an end in itself, or toward delight in nontruth. So, as he undertakes to write what he believes to be a “good” poem, Wigglesworth calls upon the sacred muses to keep his poetry steadily in sight of spiritually edifying themes: “Oh, guide me by thy sacred Sprite / So to indite, and so to write, / That I thine holy Name may praise, / And teach the Sons of Men thy wayes” (9). The fact that his intended audience is made up of “Sons of Men” further vindicates his use of sweetness as an aid in persuading their souls to scriptural “truth.”

As Pope has established, there is no doubt that Wigglesworth was a Ramist, and that he was influenced by Richardson's writings on dialectic, as were Mitchell, Thomas Hooker, and a number of other Puritans.⁴ However, given contemporaries' evaluations of Day of Doom, it would seem that, in addition to teaching them to focus their appreciation on its logical structure and consequent capacity to “set forth truth,” Richardson's Ramist School-Master taught them to focus their appreciation on its affective impact as well. That is, in Richardson's Ramist discourse theory, the role of sumptuously dressing and sweetening speech (and the truth that it may convey) is performed by rhetoric, not dialectic, and includes the study of schemes, tropes, and poetic meter. Rhetoric ornaments speech by sumptuously “dressing” and “sweetening” it, thereby making it eloquent—appealing to the affections, and therefore, persuasive. The effective discourse practitioner utilizes both rhetoric and dialectic (as well as grammar) in order to instruct the understanding and affect the will. Thus, Day of Doom has interlocking dialectical and rhetorical foci, as the following examination of the 1657 edition of Richardson's School-Master reveals.⁵

In his “Notes” and “Preface” Richardson, like Mitchell, Wigglesworth, and other contemporaries, uses sartorial and gustatory metaphors to explain the nature of rhetoric (and poetry) and the rationale of the way it functions to produce eloquence and thereby move the will. In Richardson's metaphysics, there is not only a rational aspect to Being that evidences God's Idea and Will, but there is also a name-source or linguistic aspect. Richardson calls it eponymia: “Again, there must be eponymia in every thing, because though all things at the beginning were made for one man, yet by reason of sin since his fall, one cannot see all things, therefore there must be a carrier from one man to another, that which one man sees with his eye of Logick, he may utter it to another: so that logismos [the rational structure] is actus rei ad hominem, and eponymia is actu rei ab homine ad hominem” (11). Richardson divides eponymia into loquentia (grammar) and eloquentia (rhetoric). Rhetoric is needed because of the testimonial nature of speech and the fact that listeners tend to mistrust speakers “because things that are reported, are not so easily received, as those which are seen by our eye of Logick, ergo it was requisite that there should not onely be an eponymia, whereby things might be uttered, but also a fine suggering of them with Rhetorick, for the more easie receiving of them” (11).

The difference between “rhetorical” and “poetic” eloquence is one of style and intensity of effect. In his “Preface” Richardson wrote: “Eloquentia is either more fine or more grave, that is soluta, or ligata: … Rhetorick serves to deliver the matter more soberly and gravely; and Poetry yet makes it more fine, where all things must be done by measure and sweet sounds” (12). Moreover, according to Richardson, poetry “as 'twere makes us dance to hear it, and is as the Apothecaries Box” (68).⁶

The doctrine of poetic eloquence is covered in Richardson's “Rhetorical Notes” in his commentary on Talon's Rhetorica, in the context of his discussion of figures of diction. Oratorical dimensioning or counting is distinguished from poetic dimensioning or counting:

Now this figura dictionis is either in the measure of sounds, or in the repetition of them: now the measuring of sounds is, when we give every one his true dimension, and hence Musick is therefore pleasant to the eare: and also Bells delight us much if there be good proportion … So, the Nightingale is very pleasant, both for the variety and proportion of her sounds … Now here Poetry is nothing but this Rhetorick, which is in the measuring of sounds, and this is very pleasing to the eare.

(68-69)

However, Richardson points out that “oratio,” which is speech (both loquentia and eloquentia), “is to the eare, yet also to the understanding, as it carrieth the reason with it” (35). So, although rhetoric “slips down more speedily than Grammer doth to the affections, and is more volupe,” since it is framed by reason, it informs the understanding at the same time that it appeals to the will (35). Richardson explains, as a consequence of the two-fold appeal of oratio to the affections and the understanding, there must be a balance of eloquentia and loquentia in persuasive speech. Following Cicero (who follows Plato), Richardson claims that if speech is too sweet, as Gorgias's was, people will attend to the expression (or) and not the ratio. He uses sartorial imagery to make his point: “even as if we see a Gentleman in a very fine suit, we shal so much look at the suit, that we shall not look to the properness of his person” (78).

Richardson has more to say about poetry, but the point is, that for him, as well as his Ramist contemporaries, poetry tends toward eloquence, which is a matter of “styling” and “voicing” speech so that it appeals to the affections, and hence, to the will. Eloquence is needed because all speech is testimony. Whether expressive of opinion or so-called scientia, human testimony does not compel assent, because human beings are fallible. Thus, all speech between persons who do not share opinions or common knowledge based in common experiences, must, if it is to induce auditors to believe it, evidence a persuasive dimension. In short, the persuasive dimension of speech is eloquence, which is the office of rhetoric, and is restricted to the Ciceronian canons of style and delivery. In addition, as Rosemond Tuve has pointed out, imagery of this sort of eloquent discourse is logically functional (331-53). As she notes, Richardson explains in his “Rhetorical Notes” that tropes are derived from topics of invention in dialectic: “so that they do not only set a lustre or resplendency upon the word used, but also shew the argument from whence it is drawn” (34).

The origins of Richardson's ideas relating to eloquence can be traced directly to Cicero's Orator, which he quotes almost verbatim at points in his commentary.⁷ So, like Cicero (and Ramists), the Puritans limited their understanding of eloquence to the canons of style and delivery. However, they extended their interest in persuasion to cover virtually all acts of speaking, as far as all speech is testimony. In addition, in his “Preface” Richardson connected speech to dialectic and grounded them both in Being, as means of knowing and communicating God's Idea and Will. Like rhetorical discourse, the beauty of nature embodied in Being attracts one to it to seek out God's Idea and Will. The beauty of Being is manifest in its measure and active sensuous nature—its harmony in diversity as a quantity and quality of matter. Being shadows forth a positive goodness, as Richardson wrote in his “Preface”: “Now this ens being of this scantling for quantity, and of this nature for act, must be good for Gods glory: so that every thing hath a goodness in it. Again, were all things made for man, and must he see them with his reason? Yes: ergo they are good for him: ergo he must have a will to imbrace them as bona, as well as an eye of reason to see them as vera, and so man also is made for God, as his will acts goodness” (13). In addition to the truth that it embodies, the goodness of Being is the sensuous presence of nature, as it rouses the affections and moves the will. The affective intention embodied in Being has its counterpart in rhetoric and poetry. It is the eloquence of Being that pulls the soul toward assent to its expression through its manifest variety, sensual presence, and proportion. So, rhetoric and poetry re-present the eloquence of Being. They are not simply random extrinsic functions. While they are applied to the expression of ideas, they are applied to make speech wholly represent the interacting realities of truth and affection, necessity and intention, that characterize God's created expression. As human speech seeks the same ends as God's created expression, it embodies the divine logos in eloquently wrought air, print, and gesture. Mimicking God's voice, human testimony in rhetoric and poetry, like Being itself, is intelligible to the understanding, and appealing to the will. One must understand and willfully embrace the Being of speech in order to comprehend fully its meaning, which is both felt and intuited as good and true, and therefore, believable.

III

Given that Wigglesworth's poetics are Ramist and Richardsonian, and are dominated by an interest in eloquence and affecting auditors' wills, how is it then, as Daly points out, that Wigglesworth's poetry, unlike most Puritan poetry, is apparently lacking in rich images drawn from the natural world—that his Day of Doom is “too often a collection of rhymed abstractions. … Wigglesworth seems to have rejected the sensible world and imagery drawn from it” (131). Moreover, how is it, as Pope's analysis shows, that the “Ramist influence” on Wigglesworth's poetry, and the “central focus” of Day of Doom, seems to be limited to that of dialectic, where syllogistic structures predominate, and the imagery in Day of Doom seems to be subordinated to statement and proof?

I think the answer can be drawn, not so much from the point of view of Wigglesworth's poetics, which he shared with his Puritan contemporaries, as from Wigglesworth's own painful experiences of the sensible world, which he honestly drew upon to craft vivid images of suffering in hell. In combination with the Ramist patterns of argument, the imagery he summons serves the Puritan interest in making discourse appeal to the understanding and the will. That is, Wigglesworth's aim is to produce discourse that is rational, intelligible, and persuasive. It contains both patterns of argument and vivid rhyming imagery drawn from his life experiences.

As a child, Wigglesworth learned the power of fire to eliminate sinners from the face of the earth. In his “Autobiography,” as he recounts the story of his parents' flight to New England, out of England, he recollects how after his parents fled, God burned up the “ungodly place” as just punishment for the wickedness and impiety of the remaining inhabitants. In the opening lines of his “Autobiography” he wrote: “I was born of Godly parents, that feared y^e Lord greatly, even from their youth, but in an ungodly Place, where y^e generality of y^e people rather derided then imitated their piety; in a place where, to my knowledge, their children had Learnt wickedness betimes; in a place that was consumed w^th fire in a great part of it” (10). Since he leads his autobiography off with an account of God's destructive vengeance, there is little doubt that his young mind was deeply affected by the experience of fleeing, and his parents' tale of burning death as the decree of God's judgment of sinners. That is, although he was born in 1631, his life experience begins in his “Autobiography” at the age of seven, as a witness to God's fiery justice. Later, in his Diary, he recorded another experience with fire, which he interpreted as the expression of God's judgment of sinners. He wrote of the “news of that dreadful disaster at Boston by fire; which came to pass the very night before Mr. Mitchels lecture concerning god['s] judgements, and how abused they aggravate sin. thus god seals his word with his dreadful works” (8). These experiences taught Wigglesworth that fire is the medium of God's punishment of sinners. In fact, the fire at Boston may have provided him with his inspiration to write Day of Doom, or at least to set it at night, when the unsuspecting inhabitants of the world are peacefully sleeping in their beds. Like seventeenth-century Boston before the fire, in the opening lines of Day of Doom: “Still was the night, Serene and Bright / When all Men sleeping lay; / Calm was the season, and carnal reason / Thought so 'twould last for ay” (11).

In addition to the experiences that give deeply felt conviction to his depiction of God's judgment as a punishing flame, the images of pain and suffering he summoned may have gathered some momentum from his own physical afflictions. Although his “Autobiography” is a virtual catalog of personal hardship, guilt, and suffering, before he wrote Day of Doom, in his youthful “prayse of Eloquence,” Wigglesworth celebrated the sensual glories of eloquence and the multifold ways that it may influence the will and arouse the affections: “Eloquence beguil's with such honesty, subdues with such mildness, triumphs with such sweetness: that here to be surprized is nothing dangerous, here to be subject is the best freedom, this kind of servitude is more desireable than liberty” (1: 181). However, as Wigglesworth's health declined, his experience of the world, and perhaps his capacity for enjoying sensual pleasure and delighting as a witness to nature, declined along with it.

When he wrote Day of Doom, Wigglesworth was not a robust and healthy person able to ramble outdoors to derive his imagery from the woods and fields or from intimate human contact. Rather, there was probably an element of physical discomfort that attended his experiences and put up a screen through which he interpreted them. That is, he clearly had a “natural” analog for Day of Doom from which to draw his images of hell.

As Wigglesworth wrote in his prefatory poem to Day of Doom entitled “To The Christian Reader,” part of his aim is to magnify God's glory as an inspiration to him during his illness, suffering, and the writing of Day of Doom: “Let God be magnify'd, / Whose everlasting strength / Upholds me under sufferings / Of more than ten years length. / Through whose Almighty pow'r / Although I am surrounded / With sorrows more than can be told / Yet I am not confounded” (7). Mitchell concurred with Wigglesworth in his introduction “On the Following Work, and It's Author,” that Wigglesworth “with many griefs afflicted sore, / Shut up from speaking much in sickly Cave: / Thence painful leisure hath to write the more, / And sends thee Counsels from the mouth o' th' Grave. / One foot i' th' other World long time hath been, / Read, and thou'lt say, His heart is all therein” (300). Clearly, Wigglesworth was ill for years before he wrote Day of Doom. Mitchell (as does Wigglesworth) sees his illness as an operative influence on his poetry, and an aspect of its credibility.

John Ward Dean's “Memoir of the Author” in the 1867 edition of Day of Doom reveals that it was first published at the height of Wigglesworth's suffering, in 1662, a year before he left on a voyage to Bermuda. After seven-and-a-half months he returned from Bermuda, apparently in worse condition than when he left (6). In addition, his Diary reveals that, between 1653 and 1657, a significant part of his illness, apart from colds and other ailments, was a chronic urinary tract infection. The editor of Wigglesworth's Diary, Edmund S. Morgan, speculates in his Introduction that Wigglesworth may have been infected with gonorrhea (vii). Imagine Wigglesworth's particular quality of painful suffering, its connection in his mind to his sinful condition, and the way it may have operated as a resource to deepen his convictions, and the force of his imagery relating to the pain experienced by resurrected sinners.

In Day of Doom, one can catch a glimpse of the sickbed and the hellish sense of chronic illness—of being an imprisoned subject of bodily pain. In hell, as in a sickroom, lying in chronic agony, the unsaved “goats” in “pain and grief have no relief, their anguish never endeth. / There they must ly, and never dy, / though dying every day: / There must they dying every ly, / and not consume away” (63). The monotonous anaphora, coupled with the repetitious disjunction between the process of suffering and the end of life emphasized in the play of the words “never,” “every,” and “ly,” “dy,” and “dying” enhances the impact of the image of endless bodily suffering. In hell one hopes to die, but one cannot, and this is the essence of torture, and perhaps the life experience of the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century patient who is chronically, painfully ill.

Not only do the “goats” lie roasting in the “lake of fire” forever, they have been thrown there, bound hand and foot, so they are restrained, able only to squirm and writhe in the burning liquid. Every part of their bodies makes contact with the flames. In the “pit” of hell

(That dismal place, far from Christ's face,
where Death and Darkness dwell:
Where Gods fierce Ire kindleth the fire,
and vengeance feeds the flame
With piles of Wood, and Brimstone Flood,
that none can quench the same,)
With Iron bands they bind their hands
and cursed feet together,
And cast them all, both great and small,
into that Lake for ever.
Where day and night, without respite,
they wail, and cry, and howl
For tort' ring pain which they sustain
in Body and in Soul.

(62-63)

The imagery emphasizes the torturous side of the resurrection of the body, roasting in eternal flames. His auditors'/readers' belief in the resurrection of the body, and the images of suffering summoned by Wigglesworth, cooperate to charge these lines of Day of Doom with an order of horrific intensity that is deeply enmeshed in the Puritan belief system, where on Judgment Day: “The mighty word of this great Lord / links Body and Soul together / Both of the Just, and the unjust, / to part no more for ever” (15).

In sum, Wigglesworth's own physical miseries provide a resource, drawn from his life experience, that facilitates his depiction of the painful side of the resurrection of the body. Given Wigglesworth's ethos, as set in the prefatory sections of Day of Doom, the verses read as if he is speaking with his head barely lifted from a pillow. His neck muscles are straining but concealed, with the sheets pulled up to his chin. He is rasping out the pain-filled rhythms of the Day of Doom after reading his Bible for solace in the loneliness of his room—his own analog of hell. He is frail, as his contemporaries knew him to be, as Mitchell portrayed him, and as he portrayed himself. Yet, he is still unwilling, as he portrays Christ in the judgment scene, to accept the excuses of the unelected as they are marched past the Judge, and then off to hell.

In the context of the poem, the dialectics of the judgment scene and “debates” between Christ and the unsaved, alluded to by Pope, are bracketed on either side: (1) by a fearsome depiction of the awakening of the dead; and (2) by Wigglesworth's vivid depictions of hell and the eternal burning of the damned, which come after the judgment scene. Thus, the “argument” of Day of Doom moves from pathos, to logos, to pathos—it opens with vivid imagery depicting the return of Christ and the resurrection of the dead, and then moves to a midsection comprised of courtroom dialectics, as Christ judges the assorted cases made by the “goats.” Seven stanzas from the close of the poem there is a transition filled with the final images of suffering. The images drive home the ideas of damnation anticipated in the syllogistic structures of the judgment scene. Finally, the poem closes on a positive note, as the “Saints are … / Made Kings and Priests to God through Christs / dear loves transcendency, / There to remain, and there to reign / with him Eternally” (66).

In the judgment scene, when the “goats” plead their cases, and Christ argues them down and off to hell, logos is emphasized in reason-giving. Here is where Ramus's dialectic is given fullest play, in a courtroom context. In true rhetorical form (captured in Ramism in the cryptic method), the mind of the auditor has been prepared by fearsome eloquence with the predisposition to interpret the arguments of the damned under an intensity of interest, and feeling of dread (or assurance) aroused by the preceding passages, when the dead awake.

The awakening of the dead is presaged by Wigglesworth's depiction of the return of the “Son of God most dread” in the middle of the night: “His brightness damps heav'ns glorious lamps / and makes them hide their heads, / As if afraid and quite dismay'd, / they quit their wonted steads” (12). Wigglesworth's personification animates the sky with a living presence, as if natural phenomena, affected by the return of Christ, become unlit and shroud the earth in a quality of gloomy darkness fit to highlight the flaming beams of Christ's gaze as it plays across the globe: “No hiding place can from his Face, / sinners at all conceal, / Whose flaming Eyes hid things doth 'spy, / and darkest things reveal” (14). The absolute blackness of apocalypse sets a fearsome contrastive backdrop to the fire of Christ's eyes. He nearly ignites all present as his burning gaze penetrates to all places. Even the sea, brought to life by Wigglesworth's imagery, “doth roar” and takes flight as it “forsakes the shore, / and shrinks away for fear” (14).

In the perilous courtroom context set by Wigglesworth's pathos-charged description of the return of Christ, all possible argument and character “types” are anticipated and brought before the Judge. Far from being, as Daly has claimed, “dry theological stereotypes” (131), in the context of the poem the presentation of the “cases of the damned” constitutes Wigglesworth's attempt to take the full circuit of anticipated excuses and character types into account. Each doubtful (or somewhat assured) reader/listener may find his or her personal “type” summarily rejected (or lovingly accepted). In this light, one gets the sense that Wigglesworth's catalog of arguments is part of his attempt to reach all auditors, leaving no rationalization unturned, thereby personalizing the poem. Even families stand divided on the day of doom, as an unsaved son is told that his “pious Father had now much rather / his graceless Son should ly / In Hell with Devils, for all his evils / burning eternally” (60). Once the judgment scene is complete, and the saints have been lovingly ushered into heaven, Wigglesworth moves on, once again summoning pointed fear appeals, as the “goats” are cast into hell.

One would think, as Wigglesworth continuously hovered near the end of his own life, that his own views would have softened. One would think that he would have let more sinners slip by the Judge in order to allow himself a deeper sense of inner peace and a wider latitude for his own assurance. However, this is not the case. In short, Wigglesworth is telling the “truth” as he sees it, through his experience of nature, which is through his own body, which is sick and frail, and probably filled with pain. The “truth” he tells is the same “truth” that Bradstreet, Taylor, and other Puritan poets tell in rhyme, tropes, and figures; but it is written by a near-invalid, not from sun-filled fields experienced through a sense of physical well-being, but rather from a sickroom experienced under the shadow of death. As he writes for himself, as much as for his listeners and readers, he is dying more than he is living. His poetry bears witness to the timeless universality of his Christian message. His youthful platform of experience has collapsed under the pressures of time and chronic illness, but he is still assured.

There is a difference between coping with an actual illness and, regardless of one's health, using illness as a metaphor to describe the human condition. Thus, Wigglesworth is securely anchored in this world which is for him literally, not figuratively, a source of suffering. Wigglesworth's poetry voices the interests of the class of humanity that suffers, whose material condition is such that it cannot be taken as a hint or a sign of their election, without the insight Wigglesworth's poetry provides. It poses the idea that one may use one's present affliction as an inspiration to others, as well as a pointed contrast to an eternity in heaven. That is, despite one's personal suffering, one may be assured by the spiritual (or even evangelical) use one is able to put one's pain to, as a kind of edification, and a sign of one's election. On the other hand, for those who suffer and are not assured, or for those who have not experienced painful chronic suffering in their lives (and may be living in the blissful ignorance of the Arminian or Antinomian heresies), Wigglesworth's depiction of hell may function as a “firsthand” report—the closest thing to eyewitness testimony available in this world. In this view, Wigglesworth's poetry functions as a persuasive “relation” authored by a person who, as far as possible without actually going there, has felt the pain of hell, and is able to charge his discourse with vivid sensuous imagery drawn from his experience.

If Wigglesworth were to take his physical discomfort and unpleasant experience of this world through his body as a synecdoche of eternity, then for him eternity would be hell. However, even though his poetry turns toward the abstract spiritual world, it clothes its “truths” in the habit of eloquence—in meter, figures, and tropes, and therefore, makes its persuasive pitch to the affections, while at the same time its dialectically structured doctrine carries the listener/reader to a loftier place.

As Wigglesworth wrote in his “Postscript” to Day of Doom: “There's but a step between thy Soul and Death, / Nothing remains but stopping of thy breath, / (Which may be done to morrow, or before)” (76). Whether one is healthy or chronically ill, one must be prepared to let go of this world gracefully, with assurance, if one is going to experience one's own death, or its anticipation as an inevitability, in peace. Wigglesworth's personal suffering is a reminder that old age, chronic suffering, and infirmity are not necessarily signs of God's abandonment, but may be parts of a natural teleological progression that moves toward a positive good. In fact, the structure of editions of Day of Doom mimics Wigglesworth's own movement toward a willing acceptance of death. For example, in the 1867 edition, his last two poems at the end of Day of Doom complete its progression from the penultimate “Death Expected and Welcomed” to “A Farewell to the World,” where Wigglesworth seems to be actually on his way to heaven. He seems to be looking down, and back over his disembodied “shoulder”; as he rises he says, “Farewell, Vile Body, subject to Decay, / Which art with Lingering Sickness worn away” (292). The “Farewell” is followed by Cotton Mather's graveside eulogy of Wigglesworth, and finally, his Epitaph, a fitting close to his Day of Doom.

Far from evidencing a morbid desire to eschew the material world, Wigglesworth “knows” that when his soul reinhabits his body on Judgment Day, that his body will be well, and that he will dwell in eternal comfort far away from the sulfurous flames of hell. In his “Farewell” he says to his body: “Rest in thy Grave, until the Resurrection, / Then shalt thou be Revived in Perfection: / Endow'd with wonderful Agilitie, / Cloathed with Strength and Immortalitie; / With Shining Brightness gloriously array'd, / Like to Christs glorious Body, glorious made” (292).

IV

In conclusion, Puritan poetry is a part of Puritan culture. It is best evaluated with reference to the complex of beliefs and values, and standards of beauty and effectiveness indigenous to the community of speakers, not only who authored it, but also who believed that their souls could be moved closer to God by listening to it, reading it, reciting it, and writing it. Evaluating Puritan poetry in light of linguistic values that are alien to its authors is like judging a painting such as “A Starry Night” by standards of evaluation drawn from the field of astronomy under an interest in photo-realism.

Where Puritan poetics converge on an interest in eloquence, they are influenced by Cicero's Orator, which was adapted by Richardson to his commentary on Talon's Ramist Rhetorica. However, the poetics are conjoined by Richardson with metaphysical and epistemological assumptions consistent with Puritan interests. These interests are generally Protestant insofar as they privilege experience and, consequently, the development of a personal relationship with God, which, in Richardson's view, is mediated through the eloquent Logos that He authored, which is Being—both word and world; thought and expression; logismos and eponymia. In light of Richardson's commentary, Ramist eloquence is not a random extrinsic function. Rather, it represents the affective dimension in the intention of God's concrete expression. That is, it is God who has ornamented reality, and Puritan discourse practices imitate the Divine model that expresses God's Idea and Will to people, for their benefit and God's glory.

However, Puritans realized that the personal experience of the “truth” varies according to the persons experiencing it. So, while they fashioned their poetics out of the same basic assumptions, their poetry differs. While the “truth” may be discovered in Being, it is discovered by people who differ, but whose special callings intersect with their common general calling as Christians. It is the play of general and special interests that provides them with their unique, yet harmonious and equally valuable voices. Insofar as each artifact is unique, because mediated through the affections of a particular human subject, the poems authored by seventeenth-century New England Puritans embody the Pauline insight that there is harmony in diversity—that the doing of God's will manifests itself in a variety of activities and that no two persons are called by God in exactly the same way, even in the performance of identical social roles.

Thus, so long as the activity of making a poem produces rhyme inspired by the sacred muse, sweetly winds a thread of spiritual truth out of personal experience mediated through an interest in assurance, and sincerely ministers to human needs in an attitude of love desiring to be loved, it may be woven into the literature of Puritan poetry. The difference between Wigglesworth and the other Puritan poets of seventeenth-century New England, then, is a matter of their different experiences of the same essential “truth.” Wigglesworth used his experience of suffering in a positive way to construct vivid images of pain and affliction consistent with his contemporaries' concepts of hell and the bodily resurrection. Wigglesworth's difference is one of personal style, not one of poetics, which apparently have as one of their major common sources Alexander Richardson's Ramist Logicians School-Master.

In the end, it was Richardson's commentary on Ramus that affected Puritan poetics as his precepts of rhetoric and dialectic were theologized and applied to the task of edifying and harmonizing the Christian community. The commentary is characteristic of a stream of Ramist thought bound up with Puritan interests. In sum, a new text was constituted by Richardson's commentary on the Ramist canon. In the “new” text preexisting ideas were summoned, as Ramus's precepts of rhetoric and dialectic were critiqued, adjusted, rejected, elaborated, and finally grounded in Richardson's philosophy of art, which itself is an eclectic blend of Platonic, Stoic, Ciceronian, Protestant, Humanist, and other interests.⁸

Richardson's logos doctrine characterizes Being as a rational/affective concrete expression of God's Idea and Will, addressed to people for their good and for God's glory. His Ramism holds that dialectic and speech cooperate, in practice, to produce discourse embodying and imitating the two-fold interest manifest in Being that models the Ideal Symbol as God's message, which is adapted to the two-fold interest of human beings. Ramist eloquence is expressive of the affective aspect of Being, but it conveys a “reason” as well. Ornament is intrinsic to Being, despite the fact that it may come after the embodied Idea, since it is made manifest in the materializing act of expression. It is by no means a simple afterthought.

Being, like eloquent speech, is addressed to people, who are reasoning, feeling beings. The natural world manifests a sensual presence as a Divine inducement and expression of God's desire that people learn and believe and lovingly harmonize their thoughts and their actions with His Idea and with His Will. In religious discourse, eloquence is productive of a Puritan ideal of experience, as far as it may engage one's whole being in the symbolic presence of God, as a kind of communion, like the taking of bread and the drinking of wine.

Like it or not, in the Puritan aesthetic, Wigglesworth's poetry is eloquent. To return to the gustatory imagery of his contemporaries, The Day of Doom is a course of truth cooked up in seventeenth-century New England. It is made according to Richardson's Ramist-Puritan recipe. Drawing on his painful personal experiences, his assurance of salvation, and his belief in the bodily resurrection, Wigglesworth seasoned his religious doctrine with “halting numbers” and vivid sensuous imagery fit to rouse the appetites of rural pilgrims whose daily bread, whose lifelong interest, was a continuous course of plain biblical truth, in Wigglesworth's words, “again and again … set before the same quests” (1:180). The Day of Doom is Ramist fare, fit for the rough-hewn boards of the Puritan table. It is seasoned to the tastes of the “Sons of Men” who are Wigglesworth's invited guests.

Notes

1. See my “Alexander Richardson's Puritan Theory of Discourse,” 255-74. See also Perry Miller, The New England Mind, where he claims that Richardson's School-Master is “the most important Ramist work in the background of New England thought” (500).

2. Robert Daly quotes Richardson's School-Master (from a secondary source) as an example of the metaphysics and epistemology Puritan poetics are derived from. However, Daly does not seem to be familiar with Richardson's poetics, which are included in the 1657 edition of the School-Master in his “Preface” and commentaries on Ramist dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar.

3. Mitchell's quotation of George Herbert is drawn from Herbert's Temple (1633). The quotation appears in the first stanza (lines 5-6) of Herbert's introductory poem, entitled “The Church Porch.” Together, lines 3-6 of Herbert's “The Church Porch” read: “Hearken unto a Verser, who may chance / Ryme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure. / A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into a sacrifice” (1). The first lines of “The Church Porch” can be seen as Herbert's brief attempt to introduce the reader (before he or she has “entered”) to the Temple and justify the use of poetry (inside the “Temple”) for sacred ends—the use of voluptas to achieve caritas—to “make a bait of pleasure” to “turn delight into sacrifice.”

   The pagination of references to Wigglesworth's “Autobiography” and John Ward Dean's “Memoir” is drawn from the 1867 edition of The Day of Doom. The pagination of all other references to Day of Doom, Wigglesworth's occasional verse, and Jonathan Mitchell's “On the Following Work, and It's Author” is drawn from Ronald A. Bosco's 1989 edition of Wigglesworth's poems.

4. Mitchell's contact with Richardson is evidenced in a number of places. For example, his “Compendium philosophia naturalis” is based on Richardson's “Notes of Physicks” which appears in the second part of his Logicians School-Master (1657) 87-126. Richardson's influence on Thomas Hooker, whose prose moves at points toward the erotic, is noted by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia Christi Americana (1853) 1: 335-36. In the same passage Richardson's influence on William Ames is noted. According to Mather, Richardson's influence extended into the area of divinity, as well as the arts. Apparently Richardson had a postgraduate seminary in Barking, Essex. According to George Walker's True Relation (1642), in addition to Ames and Hooker, John Yates and Charles Chauncey attended (6). If Walker is correct, Richardson took part in religious controversies, and must have died sometime in 1613. Walker claims that Richardson “did much encourage [him], and made [him] more bold to lay open the abomination of Mr. Wottons opinions publickely in my Sermons, without feare or regard of slanders and revilings of his [Wotton's] factious and furious disciples” (25).

5. While the 1657 edition postdates Wigglesworth's graduation from Harvard College in 1651, there is evidence that Richardson's “Notes” circulated in manuscript form in England, at Cambridge University, as early as the 1590s. Richardson graduated M.A. from Queens' College, Cambridge in 1587. According to “The Book-Seller to the Reader” in the 1657 edition of the School-Master, after he graduated Richardson lectured at Queen's College, where notes were taken from his lectures, transcribed, and widely circulated. In addition, given the content of some of the pre-1657 commencement theses at Harvard College, there is good reason to believe that the “Notes” were available in manuscript form when Wigglesworth was there. See for example the 1647 theses rhetoricae, which Jonathan Mitchell (who graduated in 1643) was surely familiar with. See also the 1643 theses rhetoricae, especially no. 1; and the 1653 theses grammaticae, especially no. 1 and no. 2. The commencement theses are in Samuel Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, volume 2, Appendix B. Incidentally, Wigglesworth was a student of Mitchell's at Harvard College. Moreover, Wigglesworth's college oration, entitled “The prayse of Eloquence,” reprinted in Morison's Harvard College, evidences a Ramist influence on his concept of eloquence—the ends that it achieves and the means employed to do so: “by the power of eloquence ould truth receivs a new habit … 'tis a fit bait to catch the will and affections” (1:180-81).

   Below, in quotations from Richardson's School-Master I have retained his spelling (which at times is inconsistent) and punctuation. However, I have transliterated Greek technical terms (e.g., eponymia and logismos).

6. This quotation is drawn from Richardson's “Rhetorical Notes.” The pagination is out of sequence with the “Preface” and Richardson's commentary on Ramus's Dialectica. The “Rhetorical Notes,” “Grammatical Notes,” and other notes actually make up a second section of the 1657 edition of the School-Master.

7. See, for example, Richardson's School-Master, “Rhetorical Notes” (80) where he quotes Cicero's Orator (228-29 in translation).

8. See my “Alexander Richardson's Philosophy of Art and the Sources of the Puritan Social Ethic,” 227-47. Wigglesworth's contemporaries viewed their brand of Ramism as “neoteric” philosophy. Its foremost operative principle is a kind of eclecticism that liberated its proponents from adherence to the sum of any body of secular knowledge. Increase Mather is quoted by Morison in Harvard College to this effect. Drawing upon Horace's Epistles (I.i.10-19), Mather claimed that neoterics are persons “who are wont to philosophize in a liberal spirit” and “are pledged to the words of no particular master” (1:167).

Works Cited

Adams, John. “Alexander Richardson's Philosophy of Art and the Sources of the Puritan Social Ethic.” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (April-June 1989): 227-47.

———. “Alexander Richardson's Puritan Theory of Discourse.” Rhetorica 4 (1986): 255-74.

Daly, Robert. God's Altar. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978.

Herbert, George. The Temple. Cambridge, 1633.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. 2 vols. Hartford: Silas Andrus and Son, 1853.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1939.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936.

Pope, Alan. “Petrus Ramus and Michael Wigglesworth: The Logic of Poetic Structure.” In Puritan Poets and Poetics. Ed. Peter White. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1985. 210-26.

Richardson, Alexander. The Logicians School-Master. London, 1657.

Tuve, Rosemond. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947.

Walker, George. A True Relation. London, 1642.

Wigglesworth, Michael. The Day of Doom. 1715. Reprint. New York: American News Company, 1867.

———. The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth 1653-1657: The Conscience of a Puritan. Ed. Edmund S. Morgan. 1951. Reprint. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965.

———. The Poems of Michael Wigglesworth. Ed. Ronald A. Bosco. Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 1989.

———. “The prayse of Eloquence.” Ms. Notebook. New England Historical Society. Ed. Samuel Eliot Morison. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936. 1: 179-83.