"Day of Doom"

The Puritans' Favorite Poem

Ancestor #1 in the American family I am writing about was Michael Wigglesworth (1631 – 1705), a sickly and fretful Puritan minister who was, most famously, the author of the book-length poem “Day of Doom.”

Published in 1662, “Day of Doom” details the tortures of the damned with a sadistic fascination that gives even Spanish Catholic imagery a run for its money. The Spanish may have fetishized the crucified Christ pouring blood from head and body. But in Wigglesworth’s poem of Calvinist imagination, just about everyone in Christendom writhes in hell for eternity.

“Day of Doom” was outsold only by the Bible  in late 17^th and early 18^th century New England. One in twelve New Englanders owned a copy, according to the Norton Anthology of Literature. There are almost no copies remaining, only because they were so well thumbed by repeated readings that they’ve all disintegrated.

What was the appeal?  With our 21^st century sensibilities, it’s almost impossible to understand the lure of wrathful judgment.  But I could definitely understand someone rejecting that worldview. . So I started there.

The main character in my historical novel, Thomas Wigglesworth, was Michael’s great-grandson. When I started to puzzle out what drove Thomas to defy his father, go to sea, seek wealth and turn his back on his family’s Puritan traditions, “Day of Doom” really just stood in for the entire explanation.

The opening lines, which all of us 19 cousins on my mother’s side can recite from memory, sends a clarion-call warning to any who might mistakenly believe the world could be beautiful or kind:

“Wallowing in all kinds of sin, vile wretches lay secure.”

It goes on for another 224 stanzas. For example:

To lie in woe and undergo
  the direful pains of Hell,
And know withal, that there they shall
  for aye and ever dwell;
And that they are from rest as far
  when fifty thousand year,
Twice told, are spent in punishment,
  as when they first came there;

This, oh! this makes Hell’s fiery flakes
  much more intolerable;
This makes frail wights and damnéd sprites
  to bear their plagues unable.
This makes men bite, for fell despite,
  their very tongues in twain;
This makes them roar for great horror,
  and trebleth all their pain.

You get the idea.

Michael Wigglesworth and his Puritan contemporaries at Harvard, where he was a professor, were consumed by human sinfulness and preached incessantly of its punishment. But tellingly, according to his diary, Michael was most horrified by his own "unnatural filthy lust." That lust was inspired by "my fond affection for my students while in their presence." He turned down the presidency of Harvard because he believed these feelings made him unworthy. He had three wives—the first two died—and eight children, but coded entries in his diary show he never shed his strong attraction to young men.  

Puritanism, of course, was not the only theology to preach hell and damnation. Many patriarchal religions do the same, finding sin in artistic expression, homosexuality, female independence, or liberal ideas. What seems to mark them all, though, is that they engender in some of their followers an equally forceful rejection of those values.  

It was such a  rejection that helped me find some keys to Thomas’s character. An intelligent boy, he could not accept the creed that was the source of his great-grandfather’s misery. His grandfather and father were also Puritan ministers, and it’s likely that when his older brother died, he was expected to take up the family calling. Instead, he turned his face from them, and pursued mercantile wealth, adventure and beautiful things.  Pretty understandable.

I do hope that when Michael Wigglesworth died he was received by a heavenly choir instead of the flames of hell. Or, at least, that he now rests in peace.