Meditations

Several seventeenth-century poets explored ways to compose verse meditations that showed readers how to use scriptural poems like Devine Weekes as a devotional aid. Joseph Hall and Francis Quarles advocated new forms of non-lyric meditation, a literary mode especially practised by women writers. As such poems offered a greater role to the self as an interpretive agent, scriptural poets like Anne Southwell and Edward Browne stretched Du Bartas’ models in ways that responded to their personal, political, and social circumstances. Even though historical and meditative verse forms blended into each other, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse distinguishes sharply between the two modes in order to cast her as a conservative historical poet writing under Du Bartas’ shadow.

‘By moste sweete and comfortable allegories’

The Song of Songs, as a poetic dialogue between two lovers, presented literally minded biblical commentators with a thorny exegetical dilemma: either accept the presence of a purely erotic text in scripture, or make the case for a literal reading that was figurative. Like early modern exegesis of the Song, poetic recapitulations of this biblical book, such as those by William Baldwin, Francis Quarles, and Robert Aylett, rely on complex figural reading practices to substantiate a spiritual meaning not directly implied by the biblical text. But this dependence on human words to secure the relationship between sign and spiritually signified exposes reformed anxieties about the inherently fallen nature of the human mind, and the broader inadequacy of language to articulate spiritual truth.