Michael Wigglesworth. The Day of Doom. Edward Taylor. Meditation 8.
Doom was easier for me to read. It may be 8 pages front and back of hellfire and brimstone, but it was still easier to read. I could understand it; I could follow the flow of the words. Meditation 8 was trickier to decipher. I cracked open my book this morning to read his work for class, and I was quite bamboozled by the first sentence. "I kenning through Astronomy Divine/ The World's bright Battlement, wherein I spy/ A Golden Path my Pencil cannot line,/ From that bright Throne unto my Threshold lie." (Taylor)
HUH?
I guess it is not a good idea to read Taylor first thing in the morning. Upon further explication and thorough re-reading, I can usually find the beauty, the meaning, the message in poetry. Edward Taylor is making me work for my understanding in this poem, though! Luckily Meditation 8 is annotated, but I can't help but wonder, is he just making up words? What on earth does "kenning" mean?
Dictionary.com says the word "ken" means to have knowledge of or to understand something.The annotation for the first phrase "translates it" as "discerning, by means of 'divine astronomy,' the tower of heaven." Well, okay. We'll go with that.
See, I can figure things out if I take the time to detassle the poem. I think I had a bad attitude about Taylor's pieces because he is so much more...Renaissance than Wigglesworth or any of the other colonial poets thus far. I was attempting to write this blog earlier but words just would not come to me. I was so frustrated by the way he writes that I vented into a different blog something along the lines of: "Taylor is all frilly Biblical references and Shakespearian linguistics." Yet to say I do not enjoy such poems would be a lie, and so I dug into his Meditation 8 a little more. Edward Taylor is not quite so frustrating and intimidating as I first thought him to be. And yes, I deep down know that I can appreciate his style of Biblical writing because we all need a little Taylor in the midst of Wigglesworths and Bradfords.
Yes, I also felt Edward Taylor was more difficult to understand. I simply got frustrated at first as well. Then I began to wonder do you feel he wrote in this style to show is superiority? That he was smarter than the average person? Or do you think his personality was to write as you put it more Renaissance style since that was who he was?
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