His Wayes Disgrac'd Are Grac'd: Edward Taylor's Metrical History of Christianity as Puritan Narrative

And thus we see how Truth doth clearely shine,     When Smootherd out in these darke times,     By her Pole Star to Steer our line       The Skies fogd with thick Rimes.

And now I pass having thus come to Spie     The Shine of Grace allthough but dim     Of Patience bright, and Justice high       That doth adorn our king.

And of Efficiency in Sparkling Rayes     And Blessed Truth, when truths defac'de.     Unto our Lords erelasting praise     His Wayes disgrac'd are grac'd.

-Edward Taylor, Metrical History

Among the many paradoxes associated with Edward Taylor is that his most ambitious work is also the least available, least read, and least admired of his known poetic productions. A Metrical History of Christianity, with its approximately 20,000 lines, equals in volume Gods Determinations Touching His Elect, the Preparatory Meditations, and all his occasional and minor verse combined, and Taylor evidently felt pleased enough with his manuscript to bind it in book form. According to Donald Stanford, it "was carefully prepared with ruled margins and stoutly bound, probably by the poet himself. The handwriting is precise and neat. Notes in the margin give legible readings of some illegible corrections," and Stanford concluded from this evidence of authorial attentiveness that the poet "attempted to preserve this poem as carefully as he did his other work" ("Edward" 280). Taylor probably anticipated a wider audience for this poem than others, judging from textual evidence I will discuss later and because its usefulness need not be restricted to particular categories of anxious souls as was the case with Gods Determinations, his other major project with significant narrative qualities. Yet for twenty-first-century readers encountering A Metrical History, there is a sense of cavernous distance between its author and us that confirms Jeffrey Hammond's wise observation that "there was a Puritan way of reading and it was not like ours" (x).

Questions I set for myself in this essay are those that confront today's readers trying to make sense of this puzzling and often aggravating text: What is this poem, and what does it tell us about Edward Taylor's sense of poetic vocation and Puritan poetics more generally? Beyond that, an ongoing interest in early American narrative poems impels me to wonder how this massive specimen (more than twice the length of Anne Bradstreet's "The Four Monarchies") relates to Puritan storytelling approaches in prose as well as verse. I am guided in this effort by Hammond's advice that "in order to make Puritan poetry come alive in a manner that conventional ways of reading simply do not permit, the modern reader must make an effort to recover a sense of how Puritans felt when they wrote and read verse" (ix).

That work of recovery begins with the text, for which we have Stanford to thank for deciphering Taylor's notoriously difficult penmanship and preparing the typescript that makes this book modestly available. Stored originally with family papers, Taylor's manuscript has reposed in the Redwood Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, since 1933. Stanford introduced it to the world with a 1961 American Literature article. Since then, brief excerpts have appeared in print-one passage even gracing the cover of Early American Literature's special Taylor issue in winter 1970. Ten pages of excerpts conclude the Yale edition of The Poems of Edward Taylor. As Taylor left his manuscript untitled (or his title disappeared with the opening pages), Stanford directed attention to its genre, content, and scope by calling it A Metrical History of Christianity although Karl Keller later proposed the more sensationalistic Taylor's Book of Christian Horrors; or, New England's Legacy (Example 141). Keller thought Taylor could have begun this project in the early 1680s, judging from sermon references at that time to its chief source (Example 143). Thomas Davis places its composition roughly between 1690 and 1705 (Taylor, Minor, 115), and Stanford dated the actual binding of the manuscript to "the first years of the eighteenth century" ("Edward" 279). Much remains uncertain about this work...