332 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers
Edward Taylor’s personal situation brightened considerably with his November 5, 1674, marriage to Elizabeth (called Elisa) Fitch of Norwich, Connecticut. The daughter of the Reverend James Fitch, Elizabeth appears to have been the object of Taylor’s deep devotion. In fact, their love may well rival the other famous Puritan attachment between Anne and Simon Bradstreet immortalized in poems such as “To My Dear and Loving Husband” and “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment.” Taylor’s love for Elizabeth specifically prompted two poems. The fi rst, a courtship poem in an elaborate alphabet acrostic form, was titled “This Dove & Olive Branch to You.” The intensity of their affection can be seen in his wrenching elegy after her death on July 7, 1689, at age 39. This poem, one of a series of elegies Taylor composed, holds the distinction with his elegy for Samuel Hooker (d. 1697) of being Taylor’s most mature and well-crafted examples of the genre. Elizabeth’s elegy, “Funerall Poem upon the Death of My Ever Endeared, and Tender Wife,” imagines the dead Puritan wife and mother scolding her husband for excessive mourning: “My dear, dear love, reflect thou no such thing, / will grief permit you not my grave to sing?” By the end of this three-part elegy; the poet’s grief has been tempered by his gratitude for her memory and his conviction of her salvation. In addition to his elegies, representative of 17th-century elegies and comparable to those by Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, John Danforth, and Thomas Shepard, Taylor began to write a series of paraphrases of the Hebrew Psalms in 1674. This project was instigated by his practical need to convey complex theological doctrine to his largely uneducated congregation as well as an admiration of the biblical poet David. This same motive may have instigated a series of occasional poems in the early 1680s. One of these poems, “Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children,” was one of only two poems published in his lifetime; the other was the 1712 elegy for David Dewey of Westfield. Two stanzas of “Upon Wedlock” were included in Cotton Mather’s Right Thoughts in Sad
Hours (1689). Its topic is sadly obvious. From 1675 to 1688, Elizabeth and Edward Taylor had eight children (Samuel, b. August 27, 1675; Elizabeth, b. December 27, 1676; James, b. October 12, 1678; Abigail, b. August 6, 1681; Bathshuah, b. January 17, 1684; Elizabeth, b. February 5, 1685; Mary, b. July 3, 1686; and Hezekiah, b. February 10 or 18, 1688). All of the daughters, except Bathshuah, died in infancy. In “Upon Wedlock” (1682) Taylor celebrates their earthly beauty but protests their painful deaths. Yet the preacher-poet speaker ends the poem with cheerful resignation: “Grief o’er doth flow: and nature fault would fi nd, / Were not thy will my spell, charm, joy, and gem, / That as I said, I say, take, Lord, they’re thine.” Other occasional poems dated to this era include “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly,” “Upon the Sweeping Flood,” and “Huswifery.” “Huswifery,” one of Taylor’s most frequently anthologized poems, is organized around a unifying conceit of the spinning wheel and weaving. His familiarity with this craft may be the result of working in this trade before leaving England. In the poem Taylor parallels the parts of a 17th-century spinning wheel with the physical and spiritual components of a man. The persona pleads with God, “Make me, O Lord, Thy spinning wheel complete.” The simple, earthy imagery of these occasional poems may indicate that Taylor read all or parts of these works to his congregation, incorporating them into his sermons to these rural farmers. Taylor’s occasional poems, including the much later “A Fig for Thee Oh! Death” (ca. 1721), raise an interesting question of influence. The scholars who fi rst had the task of integrating Taylor into existing conceptions of Puritan literature most frequently referred to him as the last metaphysical or baroque poet. There are connections between Taylor’s verse—his extended metaphors and allusions to the emblem tradition—and the poetry of such British poets as John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne. For example, Taylor’s “A Fig for Thee Oh! Death” might be read alongside Donne’s “Death, Be Not Proud.” Death, the apostrophe of