Edward Taylor's poem "Meditation 150 (Second Series)" contradicts much of what we believe that we know about Puritan belief and worship. The images that American schoolchildren grow up with of dour men and obedient wives is hard to square with the sensuous - and highly feminine - imagery that we are presented with in this poem, one of the many works that Taylor wrote as a way to explore his own faith or as "Preparatory Meditations Before My Approach to the Lord's Supper."
Taylor was born in England but emigrated to America where he would be freer to follow his Congregationalist beliefs. He attended Harvard and afterward became a minister in what was then the frontier of Westfield, Massachusetts, where he married twice, fathered 13 children, and produced 400 pages of poetry on the grace of God and the drama of redemption.
This mediation is typical of his poetry (and indeed typical of his age) in its metaphysical extravagance and the extended use of metaphor in the form of a conceit. That conceit is between the life-giving nourishment provided to an infant and the soul-giving spiritual milk that comes to each person from God. This was actually a common image in much of Puritan devotional work, although it sounds odd indeed to us. We are accustomed to the concepts of transubstantiation in which bread and wine are transformed into the divine, but breast milk is of all things most absolutely human - as well as essentially sensual and female. What has such a feminine image to do such a male-dominated church?
The use of this image of a suckling child was meant to conjure up a sense of even the most mature adult as nothing but an infant before God - who was both masculine but also nurturing. Just so was the Puritan minister supposed to be both mother and father:
Less moderate preachers could take the gender reversal possibilities a little further. Some could go so far as to present the ministers as breast-feeding mothers. For one, ...