Works
"The Joy of Church Fellowship Rightly Attended" speaks of feelings of joyful acceptance as expressed in the singing of passengers riding in a coach on the way to heaven, accompnied by others, not yet members of the church, on foot.
In "Huswifery," possibly his best known poem, Taylor speaks of the Christian faith in terms of a spinning wheel and its various components, asking, in the first verse,
Make me, O Lord, thy spinning wheel complete. Thy Holy Word my distaff make for me. Make mine affections thy swift flyers neat And make my soul thy holy spool to be. My conversation make to be thy reel And reel the yarn thereon spun of thy wheel."Meditation Eight" is centered around the concept of God's being the living bread.
"The Preface to God's Determination" speaks of the Creation, when God "filleted the earth so fine" and "in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun."
"Upon a Spider Catching a Fly" depicts Satan as a spider weaving a web to entangle man, who is saved by the mercy of God.
Read more about this topic: Edward Taylor
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)