[In this excerpt, Bosco urges a re-evaluation of Wigglesworth's merits as a poet, observing that his contemporaries found his religious writings to be worth repeated readings.]

As artist and as devout Puritan, Wigglesworth, to be sure, is a figure not without qualities that tax the critical sensibility as well as the good will of the modern reader. It may be, as Donald Barlow Stauffer has said, that Wigglesworth deserves to be ranked “several rungs down the ladder” of Puritan poets. It may be too that the poetry of, say, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor reveals a better sort of Puritanism, more humane and more aesthetically and intellectually complete and acceptable to us, than does Wigglesworth's poetry, in which event Wigglesworth and his poetry might be justly ignored. In the same vein, it may be that the Puritan instinct represented by Wigglesworth is so personal or idiosyncratic that in order to find any merit in Puritan culture we must reject that instinct on whatever evidence we have of it. But such judgments, if they are ever to be persuasive and if they are ever to contribute to the ongoing, necessary revision of inherited opinion on Puritanism generally and Wigglesworth specifically, must be made critically, and made anew. Such judgments must be based on reviews of Wigglesworth's entire poetic achievement, not on reviews of individual items such as “The Day of Doom,” regardless of the currency which that poem once enjoyed. There should be no fear involved in approaching Wigglesworth this way, for even if in the end readers decide that opinions on Wigglesworth advanced by earlier critics were indeed on the mark, they can be assured that their own more recent investigation and judgment will possess an intellectual integrity and completeness heretofore missing.¹

An open-minded reading of Wigglesworth definitely has its rewards. Contrary to inherited opinion, he is not a one-poem poet. During the decades of his primary poetic activity, he composed more than seventy poems, which should impress those whose attitude toward him has been shaped by a reading of only “The Day of Doom.” In these poems Wigglesworth frequently departed from the often-cited “stampeding fourteeners” of ballad verse and wrote in a number of different poetic forms, which offer variety that should sustain a reader's interest. For instance in Song IX of the “Light in Darkness” sequence of Meat Out of the Eater and in his “Song of Praise” on the return of William Foster, he experimented with the lyric form. As stanzas in “The Day of Doom,” God's Controversy with New-England, Song X of “Light in Darkness,” Song IV of “Sick mens Health,” and Song III of “In Solitude Good Company” (all from Meat Out of the Eater) show, he dealt with both dramatic monologue and dramatic debate. “The Day of Doom,” God's Controversy with New-England, the elegy on Benjamin Bunker, and “A Farewel to the World” reveal him seriously engaged in the devices of narrative and descriptive writing. Finally, as might be expected, a didactic and hortatory pulpit style is in evidence throughout the span of Wigglesworth's career and is especially noticeable in “A Postscript unto the Reader” (from The Day of Doom), the closing lines of both God's Controversy with New-England and the elegy on Bunker, “When as the wayes of Jesus Christ,” and Song V of “Heavenly Crowns for Thorny Wreaths” (from Meat Out of the Eater).

Apart from noticing the progressive development of his talent and the development of his various poetic subjects and forms, how else might one read Wigglesworth? What attitude should one have when he first approaches this collection of Wigglesworth's verse? It seems only reasonable and fair that one approach Wigglesworth fresh, that is, that one approach him without many of the assumptions and claims passed down from previous generations of critics. In many ways Wigglesworth was himself aware of what scholars today uncritically accept as the limitations of his poetry; the difference between Wigglesworth and today's scholars is, however, that Wigglesworth never regarded the aesthetic and moral “limits” he placed on his poetry as “limitations.” From Wigglesworth's point of view and from that of several generations of colonials raised on his verse, the intentional didactic or sermonic aspect, orthodox content, and plain style of his poetry were its very strengths. These were, for the seventeenth-century New England Puritan, a measure of the quality of verse, just as they were a measure of the quality of historical and theological writing. So it might be illuminating to read with Wigglesworth's limits in mind, to allow him his aesthetic and moral bias, which was fashioned out of an appreciation of the Puritan plain style and a conviction of the rightness of New England's brand of Calvinism. Once a serious reading is completed, one will be in a position to stand back from the bias and assess for himself Wigglesworth's “limits” or “limitations.”

Of course, some early assumptions and claims about Wigglesworth have merit and are worth preserving. The comments that follow are intended to put several inherited commonplaces and some original assumptions into a perspective that will help readers to understand the occasion for Wigglesworth's poetry as well as Wigglesworth's position on the role of the poet in society, his sense of poetic style and of the purpose of poetry, and his treatment of important native New England topics. In this connection, one point is indisputable: the principal occasion for Wigglesworth's poetry, New England's apparent decline from the piety and ideals of the first Puritan settlers, coincided with his own physical and periodic psychological distress. That distress rendered the preacher incapable of performing those duties for which the Malden congregation had ordained him and forced him to seek out somewhat unconventional means to fulfill his ministerial charge.

Ill, depressed, lonely, and subject to fits of doubt and anxiety over his own spiritual condition, Wigglesworth was unable to discharge the principal responsibilities of his ministry between the late 1650s and the mid-1680s. Yet as he and most other Puritan ministers believed, this was a period in which New England desperately needed powerful and persuasive voices in her pulpits. The years 1660 to 1690 encompass a period commonly referred to today as the time of New England's great “declension.” (Declension is usually defined as the loss among New Englanders of the original purpose for which the colonies had been established in the 1620s and 1630s.) Evidence was then everywhere to be found that the “plantation religious” contracted for by God in his Covenant with New England's founders was on the verge of collapse. Helped by the observations of Puritan historians and preachers, scholars have produced a near-endless checklist of the signs and presumed effects of declension. However, to appreciate fully the occasion for Wigglesworth's poetry, only a few of the signs and effects need be mentioned. For instance, by the early 1660s, New England's civil and ecclesiastic leaders were shocked to find that “inordinate worldliness,” self-serving pride, “carnal security,” and hypocrisy had taken hold among the people who were entrusted by the founders to preserve a strong sense of communal piety at all cost. For many, the heritage of the founders was further insulted by the Half-Way Covenant, which, in 1662, relaxed old standards governing church membership and discipline. To make matters worse, day-by-day the few remaining original saints were passing away, leaving their children as well as newcomers to assume to civil and ecclesiastic power that the strict founders once held. As the Half-Way Covenant seemed to prove, the generation coming to power was either disinterested in or unequal to the challenge of preserving and promoting the old ways.²

Believing that God spoke to his people through events, believing that God's will or disposition toward his people was discernible in everything from the weather to the state of New England's economy, New England's orthodox leaders put their symbolic imaginations to work. They were horrified by what they discovered. Droughts, storms, pestilence, a high mortality rate, political tensions between the authorities of old England and New, a rising crime rate, and, by the end of the century, the presence of witches all suggested to them that God was not ignorant of New England's backsliding. Something of a vicious cycle ensued, for phenomena such as these were seen variously as warnings from God against any further backsliding by his people and as judgments or punishments from God for his people's neglect of the Covenant. To remedy the situation, preachers took to their pulpits, and through jeremiads, a then newly fashioned sermonic form, they told the people that God's patience with them was at an end. Indeed, the time to repent and reform had come. With the cooperation of civil leaders, who were as distressed as the preachers by New England's decline in piety, the churches of New England called one-hundred-seventy-one days of fast and humiliation between 1660 and 1679. Though the process of fast and humiliation did not originate in New England (it originated in the practices outlined in Deuteronomy, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Jeremiah, and Micah—books of the Old Testament in which a sinful and falling Israel was instructed in the means to win restoration of God's favor), the New English Israelites put the process to extensive use, hoping that humiliation for sin and a return to the ideals of the founders would be sufficient to achieve the restoration of God's favor toward them.³

At his ordination in 1657, Wigglesworth was named Malden's teacher. “Pastor” and “teacher” were the technical terms used in seventeenth-century New England to define a minister's position in his church. According to the Platform adopted in Cambridge in 1648 by the Congregational churches of New England, the pastor's “special work [was] to attend to exhortation, and therein to administer a word of wisdom.” The teacher was “to attend to doctrine, and therein to administer a word of knowledge.” Beyond these distinctions, both were expected to “administer the seals of [their] covenant,” “execute censures,” and preach.⁴ Large congregations usually could afford both a pastor and a teacher; small congregations, like the one in Malden, usually had to settle for one or the other. In making their choice between pastor and teacher, small congregations often called ministers to their pulpit according to the talent the congregation felt was most needed. Thus, from the time Wigglesworth began his formal association with the Malden congregation, all parties understood that he was to provide instruction in morals and church discipline, direction and advice in matters of doctrine, and practical motivation for his people to pursue the right and good. During the period of declension the work of teachers was crucial to the successful outcome of any campaign waged by the clergy against New England's backsliding. Wigglesworth's ministerial colleagues understood this; the people of Malden understood this; Wigglesworth too understood this.

That he was not serving the purpose for which his congregation had called him undoubtedly added to Wigglesworth's psychological distress in the early 1660s. This was the time that his congregation needed him most. No longer able to preach and too weak, apparently, to lend even his presence before the congregation as a sign of support for their effort to rid themselves of declension's taint, Wigglesworth turned to poetry. Lest this scenario be misread, the Wigglesworth who turned to poetry was not exactly the “little feeble shadow of a man” that critics like Matthiessen would have us see. Poetry demands intellectual and spiritual vigor; didactic poetry, particularly the sort Wigglesworth frequently wrote, demands, additionally, conviction, a firm control of ideas, an understanding of the power of language, an appreciation of the dimensions and value of emotion, and a talent for persuasion. In the early 1660s, when he first turned to poetry, Wigglesworth possessed all these traits. Whatever figure he cut in the neighborhoods of Malden, the figure he cut in his study was charged with a Puritan teacher's brand of energy and power.

This positive view of the occasion for Wigglesworth's poetry and of the origins of Wigglesworth's poetic career is supported by two contemporary accounts as well as by comments by Wigglesworth in several poems. In A Faithful Man, Cotton Mather observed, “that he might … Faithfully set himself to Do Good, when he could not Preach, [Wigglesworth] Wrote several Composures, wherein he proposed the edification of such Readers as are for plain Truths, dressed up in a Plain Meeter. These Composures have had their Acceptance and Advantage … and one of them, the Day of Doom … may find our Children till the Day itself arrive.”⁵ It is in the same vein that Jonathan Mitchell, who as his spiritual mentor for more than ten years knew and understood Wigglesworth better than most, treated Wigglesworth's character and the value of his poetry in “On the following Work, and It's Author.” Although Mitchell portrayed him as one “… with many griefs afflicted sore, / Shut up from speaking much in sickly Cave” (ll. 19-20), he did not believe that in his “sickly Cave” Wigglesworth wallowed in self-pity or neglected the charge of his ministry. Instead, Wigglesworth accepted the cave as a “happy Cave” and was transformed thereby into a “happy Pris'ner that's at liberty” through “painful leisure … to write the more” (ll. 25-26; 21). From his cave, Mitchell told readers, the poet-teacher “sends thee Counsels” and shares with all the fires that have freed him to write from the soul. Those fires, as reported in Wigglesworth's verse, deserved notice by readers, for they provided practical instruction in how at least one saint pursued the right and good despite all personal adversity. As far as Mitchell was concerned, in writing poetry, Wigglesworth more than satisfactorily fulfilled his ministerial obligation:

A Verse may find him who a Sermon flies,
… Great Truths to dress in Meeter;
Becomes a Preacher; who mens Souls doth prize,
That Truth in Sugar roll'd may taste the sweeter.
                    No Cost too great, no Care too curious is
                    To set forth Truth, and win mens Souls to bliss.

(ll. 1-6)

From 1661 to 1669, the years of his most intense literary activity, Wigglesworth viewed his writing of poetry as a useful, valid, and honorable means of service as Malden's, indeed, as all New England's, teacher. Like his fellow Puritan poets Bradstreet and Taylor, he understood the purpose of poetry to be instruction and the role of the poet to be illustrator and interpreter of man's relation to the right and good. Unlike them, however, Wigglesworth saw the poet as principally a public figure, and he believed that the poet's creations belonged to the public, regardless of the personal motives that inspired them or the insights into the poet's private character and belief that they might reveal. In fact, Wigglesworth was quite open about his poetry and himself. For instance, in lines such as these from his address “To the Christian Reader” in The Day of Doom, he acknowledged that he intended his poetry to serve a dual purpose: to compensate those for whom he had no pulpit messages and to relieve himself of personal “grief” for not being able otherwise to serve Christ and Christ's people:

                    Thou wonderest perhaps
That I in Print appear,
Who in the Pulpit dwell so nigh,
Yet come so seldome there:
The God of Heaven knows
What grief to me it is,
To be with-held from Serving Christ:
No sorrow like to this. …
                    For his dear sake have I
This service undertaken,
For I am bound to honour Him,
Who hath not me forsaken.
I am a Debtor too,
Unto the sons of men;
Whom wanting other means, I would
Advantage with my Pen.

(ll. 9-16; 89-96)

As the remarkable public response to Wigglesworth's poetic activity suggests, colonial readers fully accepted the public and private motives out of which Wigglesworth had turned to poetry. Certainly, they must have appreciated the honesty with which he exposed himself as subject or example in his verse, for by the time he began to write and collect pieces for Meat Out of the Eater, he had no qualms about admitting that the content of the volume had its origin in personal experience:

                    It is my daily Prayer,
                    Lord let me never teach,
That unto others which my self
                    Have little care to reach.
                    I have not told thee Tales,
                    Of things unseen, unfelt,
But speak them from Experience:
                    Believe it how thou wilt.

(“A Conclusion Hortatory,” ll. 33-40)

Later in Meat Out of the Eater, Wigglesworth returned to personal experience as a means to edify his audience. Alluding to the period when he first turned to poetry, he advised all who have had public careers cut short to acquiesce cheerfully to the will of God and not harbor anger or indulge in self-pity:

                    If Christ hath call'd thee off,
                    After a short assay,
From Publick Service; cease dispute,
                    And cheerfully obey.

(“Strength in Weakness,” Song III, ll. 25-28)

Acquiescence to the will of God, Wigglesworth argued, is not a sign of weakness or ineffectuality. Despite the loss of talent, friends, position, or health, man, who cannot always fathom God's final intentions, must nevertheless strive to serve God and the good of his people through whatever means God leaves to him. Out of his own experience this poet had learned that one can always turn weakness to advantage, find strength in apparent ineffectuality. As the following lines reveal, Wigglesworth believed that as poet he was serving the will of God and advancing the good of God's people more effectively than if he had remained in the pulpit. Further, they reveal that he believed he was garnering more than adequate compensation for his poetic effort in this world, a prelude to the final compensation he would receive in the next.

                    If Christ disable thee
                    From doing as before,
He calls thee to some other work
                    That he approveth more.
                    Passive Obedience
                    More hard then Active is:
And Christ will own and honour that,
                    Who owns and crowneth this.

(“Strength in Weakness,” Song III, ll. 9-16)

A misconception that some entertain today about the Puritan preacher in general may influence adversely their reading of Wigglesworth's poetry. Some would see the Puritan preacher as the original “pulpit thumper.” Despite considerable recent scholarship which proves that the image results from a misreading of the style, tone, and content of popular Puritan preaching, the image, largely a holdover from uncomplimentary reviews of Puritan preachers by nineteenth-century critics, has persisted. Today it is found in media representations of the Puritan preacher, and it receives support from the bias created out of imbalanced representations of “typical” Puritan sermonic prose in popular anthologies of American literature. Yet there is no primary evidence to support this exclusive view of the Puritan preacher. As the record of their published sermons shows, New England preachers of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often spoke to their people out of the voice of the sympathetic spiritual father or the voice of the calm mediator between God's expressed will toward man and man's own expressed desires and needs. Only when one of these voices proved inadequate to move sinful, backsliding people to repent and reform would preachers resort to another voice. This third voice is, indeed, the haranguing, vitriolic voice of the Puritan conscience. A highly effective voice, it received its fullest expression in Puritan jeremiads. The model for this voice was that of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah: the prophet and priest warning God's people for the last time that their backsliding, transgressions, and defilement of the “plantation religious” had to be checked and reformed.

This correction of the way some view the typical Puritan preacher has significant implications for the way one ought to view Wigglesworth. As poet-preacher, Wigglesworth believed that the end of his poetry was instruction. He knew that in order to instruct effectively he had to appear sincere and be persuasive and his messages, dressed in whatever aesthetic trappings they might be, had to be both practical and sympathetically delivered. Thus, in a majority of his poems Wigglesworth adopted variously the voice of the spiritual father and the voice of the mediator between God and man. These voices were no less suited to the verse he wrote than they were to the pulpit he would otherwise have occupied. In the calm, understanding voice of the spiritual father, for instance, he could move his audience to a sense of their failure or support and advise them in their effort to check, say, declension in their own lives. Similarly, the voice of mediator allowed Wigglesworth to suggest practical means to reconcile one's personal desires and needs to the larger purpose for which God had set man on earth.

Of these two voices, Wigglesworth used the second more extensively and effectively, perhaps because the instruction he often conveyed in his verse was personally tested before it went into print. As the examples from Meat Out of the Eater which were cited above suggest, Wigglesworth's own anguish was the starting point for many meditations and songs in that volume, yet the volume as a whole reveals that Wigglesworth was able to transform his anguish and his sense of failure into resolutions to improve himself, through his art, for the good of God's people. That in mind, it should be apparent that at least as mediator, Wigglesworth was confident that his messages were practical and useful and that the verse in which he expressed them could offer to others some therapeutic benefit which he had himself once enjoyed. Further, with the subject for much of his poetry obviously drawn from personal experience and with the tensions which that experience once held resolved, as mediator and as spiritual father Wigglesworth knew that he had the distinct advantage of speaking to his people under the authority of having been through it all himself. The sheer volume of personal reference in his poetry and Wigglesworth's frequent pauses to speak in his own voice indicate that he never lost sight of that advantage. He believed (and the popular reception of his poetry in colonial times shows that he was correct) that the authority of having been through it all was sufficient to persuade people to consider seriously whatever observations or suggestions he might make concerning their own condition. Also, with a preacher's talent for understanding audience psychology, Wigglesworth knew that as he spoke under such authority no one could doubt either his sincerity or the sympathy he extended to all in comparable circumstances.

Examples of Wigglesworth speaking as spiritual father and as mediator abound in his verse and offer fair illustrations of his tone, language, and imagery. Whether as spiritual father or as mediator, Wigglesworth, like most seventeenth-century New England authors, always followed the prescriptions of Puritan plain style in his compositions. Typically, he related his personal experience or advice through homely language and commonplace events; he alluded to accessible biblical figures and stories for authority higher than his own to underscore both the universality of his experience and the value of such advice as he might offer; and he appealed directly to the common sense and faith of his audience for final verification of his point of view. In “A Postscript unto the Reader” from The Day of Doom, for instance, he used the spiritual father voice on several occasions in order to ameliorate the harsh emotive impact of events elaborated on in the title poem of that volume. Justifying the shock that he knew readers probably still felt from their reading of “The Day of Doom,” Wigglesworth wrote:

Nor speak I this, good Reader to torment thee
Before the time, but rather to prevent thee
From running head-long to thine own decay,
In such a perillous and deadly way.
We, who have known and felt Jehovah's terrours,
Perswade men to repent them of their errours,
And turn to God in time, e're his Decree
Bring forth, and then there be no Remedee!
If in the night, when thou art fast asleep,
Some friend of thine, that better watch doth keep,
Should see thy house all on a burning flame,
And thee almost inclosed with the same:
If such a friend should break thy door & wake thee,
Or else by force out of the peril take thee:
What? wouldst thou take his kindness in ill part?
Or frown upon him for his good desert?

(ll. 199-216)

Many important, typical elements of Wigglesworth's style and tone are represented in this passage. Concerning style, for instance, it is suggestive that here the terror of burning for eternity in hell, which earlier in The Day of Doom is documented through elaborate biblical evidence, is related to the imagined but commonplace terror of burning to death while asleep in one's own house. That image is not at all inappropriate, for in colonial times fire (along with storm or pestilence) was a common experience, with whole settlements reduced to ashes over night. Of course, Wigglesworth's readers would know this and so now would naturally relate the spiritual peril that Wigglesworth develops here and earlier to the physical peril they realized always threatened them. In this particular passage, he uses both the spiritual father pose and the mediator pose. Neither takes precedence over the other here; instead, they are developed as literary and psychological complements. On the one hand, the poet as spiritual father is a friend, who seeing his friend's house on fire, wakes the friend and so saves his life. In this instance, the spiritual father-friend is especially noteworthy for his interest and kindness, for the fires that threaten the spiritual lives of those in his flock are infinitely more destructive than the fires that someday may threaten their houses and bodies. On the other hand, the poet as mediator is a friend, but with the important difference that as mediator the poet has known “Jehovah's terrours” and writes in order to spare his friends from having to know them too. Finally, there is a purposeful consistency between the language of this passage and the language of poems that appear earlier in the volume. Words such as “torment,” “decay,” “perillous,” “Remedee,” and “desert” were quite familiar to readers at this juncture and may, in fact, have revived in some the terror and fear conveyed by their former use. However, here such words are significantly less threatening than before and serve the speaker's purpose by expressing his ultimate sincerity and concern. Whereas, for example, “desert” took on a distinctly negative tone whenever Christ or the narrator used it in “The Day of Doom” (as in, hell is the “just desert” of the wicked), here “desert” has a distinctly positive connotation, for it represents a gesture of kindness from a friend.

But perhaps the best examples of Wigglesworth speaking as spiritual father and mediator are to be found in God's Controversy with New-England and Meat Out of the Eater. In both works he uses the voices to great advantage as means to motivate people to follow his suggestions for reviving religion in both their communities and their individual lives. God's Controversy with New-England is a poetic jeremiad. For much of the poem Wigglesworth's voice is that of an angry Jehovah, who is on the verge of returning New England (“a fruitfull paradeis”) to its original state (“an howling wildernes,” possessed only by “bruits and salvage wights” [ll. 191-192; 176]). Jehovah reminds Puritan readers that they come from godly stock (“folk … from the brittish Iles,” who “prized libertee” and wished “To serve and worship … with all their might” [ll. 169; 163; 166]), a stock which he has personally nourished and preserved in times of adversity. However, Jehovah is now angry because New Englanders have squandered their inheritance, and the litany of complaints he raises against his people more than sufficiently shows that his patience is at an end. Wigglesworth allows Jehovah 185 lines (ll. 157-342) in which to elaborate his case against this “stiff-neckt race” (1. 313), and then has the narrator, “a lover of New-England's Prosperity,” who opens the poem, return and, as mediator, report on the warnings and judgments Jehovah has displayed to prove New England's situation is desperate and summarize New England's options. Then, Wigglesworth steps in. In his own voice, a voice filled with sentiments such as sincerity and love, a voice that underscores the affirmative, positive tone that this particular poet-teacher wishes to convey, Wigglesworth speaks to a falling New England. There is no rancor, sulphur, or spleen here, only the genuine concern of the spiritual father for his flock. Rancor, sulphur, and spleen may move some people, but as far as Wigglesworth is personally concerned, positive shows of affection finally outweigh all negative shows as means to edify an audience and, in this case, move them to reform.

Ah dear New England! dearest land to me:
Which unto God hast hitherto been dear,
And mayst be still more dear than formerlie,
If to his voice thou wilt incline thine ear.
Consider wel & wisely what the rod,
Wherewith thou art from yeer to yeer chastized,
Instructeth thee: Repent, and turn to God,
Who wil not have his nurture be despized. …
Cheer on, sweet souls, my heart is with you all,
And shall be with you, maugre Sathan's might:
And whereso'ere this body be a Thrall,
Still in New-England shall be my delight.

(ll. 431-438, 443-446)

These are among the most genuinely personal expressions that Wigglesworth ever wrote. As such, they reveal a depth of character and concern that most previous critics have elected to ignore. Various songs and meditations in Meat Out of the Eater produce a comparable effect. There, however, as in the sample provided above from “A Postscript unto the Reader,” Wigglesworth relies on homely details to support his observations, substantiate his advice, and convey his sincerity. Speaking from personal experience in the meditation that opens the volume, he had this to say to Christians who thought they could evade the “Cross”:

                    The Christian that expects
                    An Earthly Paradise
When Christ bids him take up the cross
                    And bear it, is unwise.
                    We must not on the knee
                    Be alway dandled,
Nor must we think to ride to Heaven
                    Upon a Feather-bed.

(“Tolle Crucem,” Meditation I, ll. 17-24)

On another occasion he likened bodily and spiritual affliction to a ship's ballast and man's sins and lust to weeds that must be plowed under. For seventeenth-century readers of Wigglesworth's poems, such imagery was immediately comprehensible, and they likely found that they did not have to stretch their imagination too far in order to appreciate the implications that lines such as these held for them:

                    Afflictions are like Ballast
                    I'th' Bottom of a Ship;
For tho perhaps without the same
                    We might more lightly Skip:
                    Yet every little puff
                    Would quickly set us over,
And sink us in the Ocean Sea
                    No more for to Recover.
                    Our hearts are over-run
                    Much like a Fallow-field.
Which must be broke and plowed up
                    Before it Fruit can yeild:
                    Afflictions are God's Plough
                    Where-with He breaketh us,
Tears up our lusts those noisome weeds
                    And fitteth us for Use.

(“Tolle Crucem,” Meditation III, ll. 65-80)

Featherbeds, ballast, and weeds typify the level of homely images that Wigglesworth often developed in Meat Out of the Eater. Not only would they be immediately knowable to the reader, but as with their frequent appearance in sermons from this period, such images would also remind the reader that the poet (in this case, poet-teacher) was one of them, that he understood and appreciated their daily cares and concerns, and that no matter how abstract the concept, he wished to make religion relevant to their lives. In effect, such images reduced the distance between preachers or poets and their audience, and as Wigglesworth's success suggests, they made a poet-teacher's message more appealing and convincing than it might otherwise have been. In a volume like Meat Out of the Eater, where man's necessary acceptance of adversity or affliction as a fact of life is a primary theme, such images could make palatable even the most distasteful observations on the human condition. For instance, one problem that Wigglesworth had to deal with in Meat Out of the Eater was the problem often represented by the plight of the biblical Job: God's faithful servant, suffering adversity and affliction, wondering why, and wondering too whether continued service to an ideal was worth the effort. Job's was not, of course, a unique experience, and as numerous diaries, autobiographies, and histories written in colonial New England show, in the New England wilderness there were many Puritan Jobs who too painfully understood and sympathized with that Old Testament figure's plight. In order to appeal to them and show he understood the emotional and spiritual turmoil of their lives, Wigglesworth produced passages such as these as preludes to statements about the final rewards all true, enduring saints eventually might enjoy. Speaking of those who despite their outward wickedness prosper, sometimes at the unfortunate expense of saints, he wrote:

                    They flourish like a tree,
                    They have the word at will:
Their Breasts are flowing-full of Milk,
                    Marrow their bones doth fill.
                    They have no sorrows great
                    Their vigour to decay:
Nor is their moisture radical
                    Consum'd and sweal'd away.
                    While better men are sick,
                    Their bodies are in health,
Whil'st others are distrest with wants,
                    They flow in worldly wealth.
                    They have their time of peace,
                    While others are in trouble.
If other men have plenty too,
                    They have it more then double.

(“Tolle Crucem,” Meditation VII, ll. 25-40)

The voices of the spiritual father and the mediator are, then, the voices that Wigglesworth extensively and effectively developed in his verse. However, when neither voice seemed appropriate to his subject or when New England's people seemed to require harsher language to awaken them to the truth, he could effectively use another voice: the haranguing, vitriolic voice of the Puritan conscience. In the majority of Wigglesworth scholarship to date, this voice has been emphasized at the expense of his other poetic voices, and this fact alone may be responsible for the generally unflattering view today's readers and critics hold of Wigglesworth and his art.

Along with preachers Increase Mather, William Stoughton, and Thomas Shepard (the younger), Wigglesworth wrote just at the time that this voice achieved currency in New England in the sermonic form known as the jeremiad. “The Day of Doom,” contrary to inherited opinion, does not develop as a jeremiad. However, in poems such as God's Controversy with New-England Wigglesworth wrote within the emerging jeremiad tradition and in Jehovah's speech in that poem expressed his position through a distinctly vitriolic voice. (In fact, in God's Controversy with New-England Wigglesworth anticipates many of the features of the jeremiad which did not achieve wide currency until the 1670s, but because the poem was not published at the time, he cannot be claimed to have influenced the jeremiad's rise to respectability.) In jeremiads the voice gave credibility to the invariably long lists of punishments for and warnings against the backsliding of New England's people, and it accentuated a preacher's dire predictions about the plantation's eventual fall lest God's latest chosen people repent and reform.

When necessary, Wigglesworth could use this voice with great facility. Sometimes he developed it subtly, as in this brief, sarcastic allusion to the Half-Way Covenant in “When as the wayes of Jesus Christ”:

When some within, and some without,
                    Kick down the Churches wall
Because the doore is found to be
                    Too strait to let in all:
The best can then nought else expect
                    But to be turned out,
Or to be trampled under foot
                    By the unruly rout.

(ll. 9-16)

More often, however, he was quite open about his use of the voice and the effect he intended it to elicit. In God's Controversy with New-England Jehovah has the primary responsibility for unleashing invective upon New England. After specifying his complaints against New England in terms that leave nothing to the reader's imagination, Jehovah concludes his speech with this dread-inspiring, tightly-worded statement:

                    Now therefore hearken and encline your ear,
                    In judgement I will henceforth with you plead;
                    And if by that you will not learn to fear,
                    But still go on a sensuall life to lead:
                    I'le strike at once an All-Consuming stroke;
Nor cries nor tears shall then my fierce intent revoke.

(ll. 337-342)

And just in case Jehovah's point has been missed, Wigglesworth has his narrator, that lover of New England's prosperity, conclude his review of New England's options with this straight-forward restatement of Jehovah's position:

Beware, O sinful-Land, beware;
                    And do not think it strange
That sorer judgements are at hand,
                    Unless thou quickly change.
Or God, or thou, must quickly change;
                    Or else thou art undon:
Wrath cannot cease, if sin remain,
                    Where judgement is begun.

(ll. 423-430)

At times, Wigglesworth developed the vitriolic voice as his own, expressing thereby the poet-teacher's personal conviction of the extremity of New England's situation. He found room for the voice in Meat Out of the Eater, where one might least expect to find it. In “A Conclusion Hortatory,” which completes the opening “Tolle Crucem” sequence of the volume, Wigglesworth predicted this result for people who did not properly improve upon affliction and adversity as God's gentle warnings against sin:

                    Oh let New-England turn,
                    When gentler Warning's given:
Lest by our sins the Lord to use
                    Severity be driven.

(ll. 97-100)

When Benjamin Bunker, his associate in the Malden church, died in 1670, Wigglesworth read Malden's loss as yet another “stroke” from God for his people's decline and decay. In itself, this was not an extreme gesture on Wigglesworth's part, for in the popular election, execution, and humiliation jeremiads of the 1670s and 1680s the loss of godly men was a familiar item in the long lists of God's warnings and judgments. What was unusual in this case, however, was Wigglesworth's method of elaborating on that stroke in an elegy.

Realizing, perhaps, that a vitriolic voice was inappropriate to an elegy, Wigglesworth devoted the first fifty-six lines of “Upon the much Lamented Death of that Precious servant … Benjamin Buncker” to a sympathetic, consolatory description of Bunker's character. Bunker, he wrote, was “another Timothie,” “a true Nathaniel,” “A down-right honest Teacher,” “A zealous, painfull Preacher” (ll. 1, 9, 18, 20). Such language and description was, of course, appropriate to this particular poetic form and would have been expected by the audience. But the audience would not expect Wigglesworth's sudden shift in line 57 to the vitriolic voice and to what became, in effect, a fifty-five line poetic jeremiad. Wigglesworth opened the second section of the poem thus:

O Maldon, Maldon thou hast long
                    Enjoy'd a day of Grace;
Thou hast a precious man of God
                    Possessed in this place:
But for thy sin, thou art bereft
                    Of what thou did'st possess;
Oh let thy sins afflict thee more
                    Then do thy wants thee press.

(ll. 57-64)

In the six stanzas that follow this, Wigglesworth assumed the posture of Jeremiah. For the first three of those stanzas he reminded the people of Malden that “Great strokes, Great Anger do proclaime, / Great Anger, Greater sins” (ll. 65-66), and he counseled them, “Awake, awake,” “Repent, Repent” (ll. 73, 81). For the last three stanzas he advanced several dire predictions about the future of God's latest chosen people and said that all would come to pass unless those people repent and reform. Speaking in terms that all could understand, he surmised,

If that the founder melts in vain
                    (Thy lusts do not decay)
God will account thee worthless Dross,
                    Fit to be cast away.

(ll. 89-92)

Finally, in a tone reminiscent of that expressed by Jehovah and the narrator in God's Controversy with New-England, Wigglesworth, in his own voice, concluded the elegy with this, the worst prediction of all for a “plantation religious”:

If this, and such like awfull strokes
                    Do not our hearts awaken,
Doubtless the Gospel will ere long
                    Be wholly from us taken.

(ll. 105-108)

With the occasion, motivation, compensation, style, and voice of his poems supplied by a combination of external and personal influences on his life, the principal challenge remaining for poet Wigglesworth was to supply appropriate and readable topics for his verse. Except for the few Latin and English lines that he wrote sometime between 1659 and 1661, there is no evidence that he faced this challenge before mid-to-late-1661, when he began to compose poems for The Day of Doom. At that time he appears to have had little difficulty in finding specific topics to illustrate the message that as teacher he wanted to deliver. In the case of The Day of Doom, the title poem was likely composed first, its subject evolving out of an experience he recorded in his diary for 1653: “in my sleep I dream'd of the approach of the great and dreadful day of judgment; and was thereby exceedingly awakned in spirit … to follow god with teares and crys until he gave me some hopes of his gracious good wil toward me.”⁶ The other poems that comprise the volume were likely composed in no particular order, save for the last in the volume, “A Song of Emptiness,” which, according to its subtitle (“To fill up the Empty Pages following”), may have been composed as late as when the volume was in press. As a sign of Wigglesworth's artistic competency at this early stage of his career, it is important to notice that all poems in The Day of Doom serve as topical and thematic complements to “The Day of Doom,” elaborating and clarifying for the edification of the reader concepts such as “judgment,” “eternity,” and “emptiness,” which are first introduced in the volume's title poem.

As suggested above, principal topics for the songs and meditations collected in Meat Out of the Eater evolved exclusively out of Wigglesworth's personal experience with affliction and adversity. In that, the volume offers a unique measure of his character, a feature of the volume which only biographers have appreciated. Wigglesworth's intention for the volume was obviously that it console and edify all “enduring” saints by providing them with meaningful, universal lessons tested by the poet himself. Except for Song III of the “In Solitude Good Company” sequence, which Wigglesworth acknowledged in the volume was written about eight years before the other songs and meditations, the volume was composed in a rush of intense poetic activity in 1669. In his manuscript commonplace-book, now preserved at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Wigglesworth recorded some details of the volume's composition. Without stating exactly how far along he was, on September 17, 1669, he wrote, “I have been long imployed in a great work composing poems about the cross.” Though what Wigglesworth meant by “long imployed” is anyone's guess, in some entries he indicated that on a good day he could compose as many as twenty stanzas. During the last weeks of September and the first week of October he worked steadily on the volume, pausing only to address this brief supplication to his “muse”: “[October 4,] And now do I seriously & honestly begg thy help & assistance for I am deeply sensible that without thee I can do nothing, & for thee I desire to do all. Oh guide my head, heart, hand, & all my might this day for thy sake & for the honour of thy name Amen.” On October 15, he reported, “I am now upon the last Head (Heav'ly Crowns & c).” Finally, on October 18, 1669, he celebrated his birthday and “the birthday of this Book it being finished this morning,” and he offered this prayer of thanks: “And now through thy grace & daily assistance, I have done composing. Laus Deo.”

Topics for the remainder of his poems clearly evolved out of events in a world that Wigglesworth scrutinized with a poet-teacher's eye. Unlike the poems collected in Meat Out of the Eater, the poems in The Day of Doom as well as God's Controversy with New-England and the eight pieces collected in this edition as “occasional verse” all possess topical immediacy. Of these last pieces, the three sets of Latin and English verse composed about 1660 are highly personal and anticipate the personal content of Meat Out of the Eater. Wigglesworth wrote them as personal expressions of loneliness (brought on by the death of his first wife) and of depression and guilt (produced by his inability to fulfill the requirements of his ministry). In them, he achieved a level of consolation comparable to that which he eventually offered his public in Meat Out of the Eater. These verses were not published during Wigglesworth's life, and because of their highly personal content, there may be reason to believe he never intended for them to appear in print.

The remaining five pieces of occasional verse are essentially public statements. Though none were published during his life, there is no reason to suspect that Wigglesworth purposely suppressed any of them. Each addressed events that his audience would have been aware of and interested in and concerning which they might have appreciated a word from their poet-teacher. The elegy on Benjamin Bunker, for instance, addressed an event very close to the heart of the Malden community, while the “Song of Praise,” composed on William Foster's return from captivity in 1673, spoke to an issue in which many New Englanders had an emotional, personal investment. In “When as the wayes of Jesus Christ” (about 1665), Wigglesworth provided a report on the status of New England's effort to check declension, and as his comments in that poem on the Half-Way Covenant, which are cited above, suggest, he, along with the popular preachers of the day, thought the effort had not gone far enough.

Finally, even “Death Expected and Welcomed” and “A Farewel to the World” are public statements. As the record of sermons published in New England between 1660 and 1750 indicates, a preacher traditionally presented his congregation with some final sermonic testimony concerning their association with each other. Such sermons typically addressed the close relation that had been established between the minister and his congregation, provided a first-hand assessment of both what the minister thought he had accomplished and what he thought the congregation had to improve on after he was gone, and offered the congregation this consolation: despite the pleasure he and the congregation had taken in each other's company, the minister advised that, finally, he was about to enter that world for which he was destined from the start. In “Death Expected and Welcomed” and “A Farewel to the World,” Wigglesworth, the poet-teacher, presented his audience with a minister's “swan song,” using the medium in which he had addressed them during so much of his career.

Notes

1. Recently, a number of important articles have appeared which employ this strategy and may well contribute to a revival of scholarship on Wigglesworth; see Jeffrey A. Hammond, “‘Ladders of Your Own’: The Day of Doom and the Repudiation of ‘Carnal Reason,’” Early American Literature, 19, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 42-67, and Alan H. Pope, “Petrus Ramus and Michael Wigglesworth: The Logic of Poetic Structure,” in Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, ed. Peter White (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), pp. 210-26. In Puritan Poets and Poetics, see also the following essays, which incorporate considered discussion of Wigglesworth into their larger contexts: Karen E. Rowe, “Prophetic Visions, Typology and Colonial American Poetry,” pp. 47-66, and Ursula Brumm, “Meditative Poetry in New England,” pp. 318-36.

2. For recent, accessible accounts of Puritan covenant theory and of declension, see Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and the editors' introductions to The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, ed. Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), and The Puritan Sermon in America, 1630-1750, ed. Ronald A. Bosco, 4 vols. (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, Inc., 1978).

   Although all scholars agree that an understanding of covenant theology is essential to an understanding of the Puritan experience in the New World, scholars are divided with respect to the reality of declension, with some holding the position that declension was an actual, measurable fact of experience in Puritan times and others holding the position that declension was only a rhetorical conviction used primarily by the ministry to keep New Englanders on the straight and narrow path of righteousness. For illuminating discussions by those holding the first position, see Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (1965: rpt. New York, 1972). For evidence supportive of the second position, see Robert G. Pope, “New England Versus the New England Mind: The Myth of Declension,” Journal of Social History, 3 (1969): 95-108, and Philip J. Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977). As will be apparent throughout the “Introduction,” the present writer takes the position that declension was a very definite reality in Puritan New England and that Wigglesworth's poetry was, in large part, a magisterial attempt to curb the progress of declension among New England's third and fourth generations.

3. For details of fast and humiliation observances in New England, see Ronald A. Bosco, ed., The Puritan Sermon in America, 1630-1750, 1:xxi-l; for the frequency of fast and humiliation observance in New England, see William de Loss Love, “Fast and Thanksgiving Day Calendar,” The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895), pp. 465-514.

4. From the Cambridge Platform (1648) as quoted in John Ward Dean, Memoir of Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, [Author of The Day of Doom, 2nd ed. (Albany, N.Y.: Joel Munsell, 1871)] p. 52.

5. Cotton Mather, A Faithful Man, Described and Rewarded, [(Boston, 1705)] pp. 24-25.

6. Edmund S. Morgan, ed., The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657: [The Conscience of a Puritan, (1951, 1965; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970)] p. 51.