UTOPIAN PROMISE - Annenberg Media

[4433] Michael Wigglesworth, The Day
of Doom. Or, A Short Description of the
Great and Last Judgment. With a Short
Discourse about Eternity. By Michael
Wigglesworth. The Seventh Edition,
Enlarged. With a Recommendatory
Epistle (in Verse) By the Rev. Mr. John
Mitchel (1715), courtesy of the Tracy W.
McGregor Library of American History,
University of Virginia.
34 UNIT 3, UTOPIAN PROMISE
of scriptural predictions in order to pinpoint the exact day that New
England would herald the Apocalypse, the time at which Christ
would return and reign for a thousand years. According to the
Puritans, this millennium would usher in the end of history: the earth
would be destroyed, the elect would be ushered into heaven, and all
others would be cast into hell.
The centrality of millennial apocalyptic beliefs to Puritan culture
can be indexed by the extraordinary popularity of Michael
Wigglesworth’s poem “The Day of Doom.” With its terrifying images of
hellfire and damnation and its stern accounts of God’s wrathfulness,
the poem might seem grim and unappealing to modern readers. But
Wigglesworth’s lengthy verse description of the Apocalypse was a bestseller
among seventeenth-century Puritans; scholars estimate that
after its publication in 1662, one copy existed for every twenty-five
New Englanders. Many Puritans were apparently moved to learn its
224 eight-line stanzas by heart. As the title indicates, the action takes
place on Judgment Day, when a vengeful Christ divides humanity into
two groups: the righteous sheep at his right hand and the sinful goats
at his left. The goats’ wickedness and religious heresy are exposed, and
they are condemned to a burning lake in hell. The poem graphically
describes the horrific punishments awaiting the non-elect:
With iron bands they bind their hands,
and cursed feet together,
And cast them all, both great and small,
into that lake forever.
Where day and night, without respite,
they wail, and cry, and howl,
For tort’ring pain, which they sustain
in body and in soul.
With its plain language and catchy rhyme scheme, “The Day of
Doom” functioned for Puritans as a kind of “verse catechism,” useful
for teaching basic theological tenets. It frequently was employed to
instruct children, who would thus grow up with a thorough understanding—however
terrifying such knowledge might have been to
them—of the coming Apocalypse.
In this cultural climate, death was approached with both fear and
ecstatic expectancy, for it could bring either eternal torment or admittance
to everlasting paradise. Only upon death could Puritans finally
resolve the spiritual uncertainty that dominated their lives: death
offered final and incontrovertible proof of their spiritual identity as
either sheep or goats. The importance of death within Puritan culture
is signaled by the attention they gave to funerary customs, including
the carving of tombstones. Prior to the mid-1650s, Puritans usually
left graves unmarked or indicated them only by simple wooden markers.
Such non-decorative practices accorded with Puritans’ rejection
of all religious imagery as idolatrous “graven images” such as the Bible
forbade. But by the 1660s, Puritans’ preoccupation with death led
them to erect elaborately carved gravestones decorated with symbolic
images and engraved with language that both commemorated the