Pain, Philip (1647–1667) Works   hu en

Biography

Philip Pain (c.1647- c.1667) So little is known about Philip Pain that even his first name is in doubt. Among the many Pain[e]s in seventeenth-century New England there appears no Philip on any registry, leaving the possibility that a printer's error is responsible for the initial "P". It appears that in 1667 or 1668 Pain, "suffering Shipwreck was drowned," probably in his twentieth year. Beyond these sparse data, Pain's brief life remains a mystery.

Pain's choice of the meditative poem was altogether consistent with seventeenth-century poetic usage and with the particularly Puritan adaptation of it. Previous to and throughout the first half of the seventeenth century a meditative poetic tradition gradually was formed of which Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, Quarles, and, later, Edward Taylor were part. Their poems grew from a broad cultural acceptance of the individual's duty to make spiritual meditation a part of his daily life.

In general the meditative process followed a consistent pattern. It began with an intellectual consideration of the relationship of an individual to his God. Aided by memory, the individual's faculty of understanding brought him closer to God, whereupon his will be-gan to work on his affections until, at length, every part of him was involved in the meditation. This was not just recitation of prayer, or emotional rhapsodizing, or cold theological speculation. Rather, in meditation, all of the individual's faculties co-ordinated to give him a better understanding of his man-God relationship.

(Editor of this page: P. T.)