1671 They had set out from Cambridge, Massachusetts the day before, ‘not without much apprehension of a tedious and hazardous journey’, as Taylor wrote in his diary, ‘the snow being about Mid-leg deepe, the way unbeaten … over rocks and mountains’. Now, on day two of the 100-mile trek, ‘we lost our way in the snow and woods, which hindered us some 3 or 4 miles: but finding it again by the markt trees, on we went’, until they ‘came in, through mercy, in health, to our Lodgen [lodging]’.
And so America’s most gifted and prolific poet until Emily Dickinson came along nearly 200 years later made his arduous winter way to Westfield, a small farming town in the Connecticut River Valley, where he would serve as the community’s pastor and physician until his retirement in 1725, four years before his death.
The decision to go can’t have been easy. Born the son of a Leicestershire yeoman farmer, and grammar school-educated, Taylor may even have matriculated at the English Cambridge before emigrating to New England following the Act of Uniformity of 1662. At Harvard College he entered with advanced status and graduated with distinction, after which he was offered a college fellowship. Yet when the call came from the beleaguered community on the frontier, he saw it as his Christian duty to answer it.
Every three months or so, Taylor’s congregation would celebrate Holy Communion – or what they called the Lord’s Supper. This called for a special sermon and – the night before – a meditation on the text to be preached on. Taylor’s ‘sacrificial meditations’ were in verse, following the model of George Herbert, whose work he had known and loved since his school days. So America’s only metaphysical poet was still writing in the 1720s, when England had moved on into the age of wit and elegance, of Dryden and Shadwell, and verse satire in decasyllabic couplets. There’s something very New England about Taylor’s story.