of a poem. In a kind of greeting-card verse sent to
one of his English schoolmates, Taylor wrote:
What though my muse be not addornd so rare
As Ovids golden verses to declare
My love: yet it is in the loome tyed
Where golden quills of love weave on the web
Which web I take out of my loome and send
It, as a present unto you my friende
But though I send the web I keepe the thrum
To draw an other web up in my loome.
These lines were almost certainly written
before 1668; apart from their occasional nature,
crudeness, and forced sentiment, they evince
Taylor’s full appreciation of the usefulness of
the weaving conceit long before he began his
major poetic endeavors—hisPreparatory Medi-
tations—in 1682.
When at Harvard in 1671 he declaimed pub-
licly upon the nature of the English language, he
called upon the conceit again. The ‘‘Declama-
tion’’ introduces approriate, but rather general,
religious implications. Addressing an audience at
once intellectual and religious, Taylor presents
the commonplace argument that speech is the
mind’s clothing, or, more particularly, that the
god-like particle in man, his intellectual faculty,
as Taylor elsewhere calls it, communicates with
other ‘‘Sparks Divine’’ in its very best attire:
Speech therefore is their Holy dayes attire.
Now that Speech Wealthi’st is, whose Curi-
ous Web
Of finest twine is wrought, not Cumbered
With Knots, Galls, Ends, or Thrums, but
doth obtain
All Golden Rhetorick to trim the same,
With which our English is as richly dresst
As those last Oracles crackt o’re this Desk,
Whose Web is of the Purest-finest Twine.
(ll. 48–55)
Other languages come from ill-twisted,
knotty, and broken threads, impaired by elabo-
rate inflections, while the twine of English, like
the yarn of ‘‘Huswifery,’’ is fine.
Taylor does not maintain the stages of cloth
processing in this poem as clearly as in ‘‘Huswif-
ery.’’ In line 103, punning on the parts of speech
and the technical vocabulary of grammar, Tay-
lor writes: ‘‘But time Declines, I must Declen-
tions leave, / And step into the Loom the Web to
weave’’ (ll. 103–104). Eleven lines later his con-
cern is still with the spinning process, and not the
weaving, but by line 141 ‘‘Oratories noble Web’’
is ready to deck the ‘‘English Muse in Poetry.’’
By line 170, Taylor’s garment is so encrusted and
‘‘Spruc’t up’’ with pearls, lace, ‘‘Silver Chits,’’ and
ribbons, that it could only suit Cotton Mather’s
‘‘Russian ambassador.’’ The curious thing is that
Taylor should at this point describe the mind as
clothed in ‘‘English Huswifry’’ (l. 172), ready ‘‘to
set / Forth Majesty in e’ry single jet.’’ The majesty
Taylor’s ‘‘English Satten’’ here sets forth may well
refer to man’s most majestic thoughts—his con-
siderations of the mysteries of Christ—but Taylor
carefully points out that English is not ‘‘Sacred
Web,’’ and abandons the weaving image in the
conclusion of his ‘‘Declamation.’’
Such labored wit did not keep the weaving
image from acquiring a new dimension of
personal significance for the poet. In 1674 Tay-
lor and his betrothed, Elizabeth Fitch, were
exchanging verses. Those written by Mistress
Fitch no longer exist, but Taylor’s response to
one of them, dated 27 October 1674, turns once
more to poetic huswifery:
Were but my Muse an Huswife Good and
could
Spin out a Phansy fine and Weave it Would
In Sapphick Web and Cloath my Love
therein,
I’de Carde the rowls; She should the Phansy
spin.
But I no Rowling Phansy have to run,
Nor she such silken Huswifry ere spun.
While the finished garment here promises
to be, as in the other two poems, the language
or poem itself, it quickly shifts to become ‘‘That
long’d for Web of new Relation, gay, / That must
be wove upon our Wedden Day’’ (ll. 13–14),
and Taylor’s attention focuses upon the decora-
tions woven into or applied to the fabric—hearts,
crosses, harps, threads of heart-strings, and an
emblematic device of a pillar of prayer rising to a
sun of glory whose golden threads ‘‘dart’’ the
entire garment.
With this introduction of the wordglory,
Taylor moves in the direction of his most signifi-
cant use of the weaving image. Here the finished
garment is both the living state of marriage, a
‘‘Web of new Relation’’ between persons, and the
poem expressing that longed-for state. Matri-
mony was not technically a sacrament according
to the Westminster Confession, but it was not
without spiritual implications for Puritans, and
Taylor concluded his lines to the girl he marriedHuswifery