The Day of Doom

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"The Day of Doom" was a religious poem by clergyman Michael Wigglesworth that became a best-selling classic in Puritan New England for a century after it was published in 1662.

The Day of Doom or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment describes the Day of Judgment and the sentencing to punishment in hell of sinners and of infants who died before baptism. So popular was the work that no first or second editions exist because they were thumbed to shreds.

The poem is a "doggerel epitome of Calvinistic theology", according to the anthology, Colonial Prose and Poetry (1903), that "attained immediately a phenomenal popularity. Eighteen hundred copies were sold within a year, and for the next century it held a secure place in New England Puritan households". According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature (Volume 1), "about one out of every twenty persons in New England bought it". As late as 1828 it was stated that many aged persons were still alive who could repeat it, as it had been taught them with their catechism; and the more widely one reads in the voluminous sermons of that generation, the more fair will its representation of prevailing theology in New England appear.".^[1]

An excerpt from the poem:

They cry, they roar for the anguish sore,
and gnaw their tongues for horrour.
But get away without delay,
Christ Pitties not your cry:
Depart to Hell, there may you yell
and roar Eternally

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Trent, William P. and Wells, Benjamin W., Colonial Prose and Poetry: The Beginnings of Americanism 1650-1710, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1903 single-volume edition, pp 47-48