Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?
Who made it always when it rises set
To go at once both down, and up to get?
Who the Curtain rods made for this Tapistry?
Who hung the twinckling Lanthorns in the
Sky?
Who? who did this? or who is he? Why, know
Its Onely Might Almighty this did doe.
His hand hath made this noble worke which
Stands
His Glorious Handywork not made by
hands....
Here, in his longest, most ambitious work,
Taylor begins literally in the beginning, with his
own version of the Creation story. But since God’s
precise means of creating have never yet been
vouchsafed to mankind (and are not even specified
by Genesis), the poet is quickly troubled by the
same dilemma he confronted in ‘‘Meditation 8.’’
How, short of compromising his purpose, shall he
undertake to state the unstateable? His method for
trying consists in part ofparadoxes, which under-
score the sheer mystery of Creation, and in part of
the constant questions, which are expressive of
man’s awe and sense of wonder in the face of the
mystery. Chiefly, however, it is the allegorical
mode that lets Taylor make headway against his
impossible subject.
He opens with a tacit concession: no merely
human wit can hope to say what happened when,
without reference to tools or blueprints, God
decided to build all things out of nothingness.
Nevertheless, this fetching from the void can
be represented approximately, or told through
symbols. Beginning in line three, therefore, the
gestures of God, as He shapes the raw materials
of the universe, are likened to gestures per-
formed by the human artisan: the builder, the
sempstress, the embroiderer, the dressmaker,
the carpenter, and so on. Hidden Deity is thus
revealed through the same strategy—and,
indeed, through much the same pattern of proc-
ess-and-product metaphors—that existed in
both ‘‘Meditation 8’’ and ‘‘Huswifery.’’
And yet, the more one reads the ‘‘Preface,’’
the more one senses that after a while God and
God’s workmanship are not really the concern
of the metaphors. The first noticeable break
occurs with the simile in lines 9–10. Before the
wordlike, the actions come from God, who, in
the role of semptress has ‘‘Lacde and Fillitted’’
the earth with rivers. But not so the material
afterlike. It tells how the poet contemplates
God’s rivers and—acting entirely on his own—
converts them into green and bejewelled (or
sparkling) ribbons. At this point, no real damage
is done, since God’s actions in making the rivers
remain more interesting poetically than the
poet’s somewhat stereotyped image of what has
been made. With the simile in the next two lines,
however, a different effect is achieved.
Once again, God acts first, so that it is He, as
a combination builder and embroiderer, who
scoops out the ocean bed, fills it with water,
and then embellishes the scene with a landed
trim. But next comes the poet to observe this
same shore line, and to be reminded that, for
him, it resembles a ‘‘Quilt Ball’’ (a solid sub-
stance with a shaggy edge) set down amidst a
‘‘Silver (i. e., shimmering and watery-appearing)
Box,’’ in which it will not fray away. This time,
the poet seems almost as ingenious as God; and
now, without further recourse to simile, the suc-
ceeding lines go on to dramatize the possibility
that human inventiveness can actually be supe-
rior to Heaven’s. All that God devises is the
world everyone sees. He is responsible only for
the sky and gravity, for the stars and sun. On the
other hand, it is the feat of the poet that he can
survey this spectacle, proceed to refurbish each
detail in the light of his special sensitivity, and
out of the refurbishment bring into existence a
new and daringly different order of reality. In his
hands, the sky we all know has been transformed
into a canopy with curtains; our familiar sun
becomes a bowling ball; the laws that suspend
us are turned into curtain rods; and the stars that
have been around too long to be very surprising
are re-cast as those ‘‘twinckling Lanthorns’’
which do astonish mightily.
The upshot, it seems to me, is a curious
blurring of Taylor’s intentions. Though he sets
out (as a penitent) to celebrate God’s creativity,
he ends (as creator) by paying lavish tribute to
his own. At the outset, he may struggle to find
symbols that will adequately express how God
wrought the universe. Even as he does so, how-
ever, the symbols come to reflect what he sees
when he looks at the universe; and, in their fresh-
ness and novelty, they are images which allow for
some striking innovations in God’s original. As in
‘‘Meditation 8,’’ then, metaphor liberates Taylor,
only to involve him in what, for the Puritan, was
the most serious offense that the artist could com-
mit. In effect, two worlds are brought together
in the ‘‘Preface’’: the world God made, and the
one which is re-shaped by the poet. And not only
does this arrangement endow the poet with the
divine prerogative of creating; it likewise turnsHuswifery