A History of American Literature

The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 43

Upon what Base was fixed the Lath, wherein

He turn’d this Globe, and riggalld it so trim?

Who blew the Bellows of his Furnace Vast?

Or held the Mould wherein the world was Cast?

“Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?” he asks a few lines later. That question

is typical of a poet who habitually uses wit to address serious matters and the

mundane to anchor the mysterious.

Some years after beginning Gods Determinations, in 1682, Taylor turned to what

is his finest longer work, Preparatory Meditations before My Approach to the Lords

Supper. Usually composed after he had prepared a sermon or preaching notes, the

217 poems comprising this sequence are personal meditations “Chiefly upon the

Doctrine preached upon the Day of administration.” In them, Taylor tries to learn

lessons gathered from the sacrament day’s biblical text, which also acts as the poem’s

title. They are at once a form of spiritual discipline, with the poet subjecting himself

to rigorous self-examination; petitions to God to prepare him for the immediate

task of preaching and administering the Lord’s Supper; and a private diary or

confession of faith. And, as in so many of his poems, Taylor uses an intricate verse

form, elaborate word-play and imagery to organize his meditations and release his

emotions. In the eighth meditation, for example, on Job. 6.51. I am the Living Bread,

Taylor weaves together a series of different biblical texts and themes: Christ’s flesh

and blood as elements of the Lord’s Supper, the manna that God provided daily for

the Israelites, Christ’s miracle of feeding the five thousand with loaves and fishes.

Christ is “the Bread of Life,” Taylor intimates, the only way of meeting a “Celestiall

Famine sore.” “The Creatures field no food for Souls e’re gave”; the soul requires

“soul bread” not “the Worlds White Loaf,” the “Bread of Heaven” ground from “The

Purest Wheate in Heaven” and then “Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands.” “Yee

Angells, help,” Taylor implores, “This fill would to the brim / Heav’ns whelm’d-down

Chrystall meete Bowle, yea and higher.” In an image at once homely and apocalyptic,

the new heavens promised by God are envisioned as an inverted crystal bowl, eter-

nally radiant. And that triumphant vision leads naturally back to the dominant

image of the poem, another object on the table “Disht ... up by Angells Hands.”

“This Bread of Life,” Taylor announces, “dropt in thy mouth, doth Cry / Eate, Eate,

Soul, and thou shall never dy.” Characteristically, the meditation is resolved in

understanding and joy.

Taylor belongs in a great tradition of meditative writing, certainly, one that

includes the English poets George Herbert and John Donne, and an equally great

tradition of New England writing: one in which the imaginative anticipation of

dying becomes a means of understanding how to live. So it is perhaps not surprising

that, after suffering a severe illness in 1720, he wrote three versions of “A Valediction

to all the World preparatory for Death 3d of the 11th 1720” and two versions of

“A Fig for thee Oh! Death.” What perhaps is surprising, and moving, is how these

poems acknowledge the loveliness of the world while bidding it farewell. The

strength of his feeling for the things of the earth, and even more for family and

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