'Me Thinks It Is No News'

In his final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), the dying Yvor Winters briefly mentions the allegorically named poet Philip Pain: “Of Pain nothing is known beyond what we learn from his Daily Meditations. It was begun in July of 1666 and was published in Massachusetts in 1668, and was written ‘By Pain: Who, lately, suffering Shipwrack, was drowned.’” “Meditation 8”: 

“Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear

Some one or other’s dead; and to my ear

Me thinks it is no news: but Oh! did I

Think deeply on it, what it is to die,

My Pulses all would bear, I should not be

Drown’d in this Deluge of Securitie.”

 

Winters admired the poem enough to include it in Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), the posthumously published collection he co-edited with Kenneth Fields. We know little about Pain with much certainty, even his nationality and place and date of birth (usually given as “c. 1647-c. 1667”). In 1936, the Henry E. Huntington Library published a 36-page facsimile edition with an introduction by Leon Howard, the Melville scholar. Howard calls Pain a “lost” author. He is unable to substantiate claims that his little book, Daily Meditations, is the first original American verse published in the English Colonies. Here is “Meditation 54”:

 

“The sons of men are prone to forget Death,

And put it farre away from them, till breath

Begins to tell them they must to the grave,

And then, Oh what would they give but to have

 

“One year of respite? Help me, Lord, to know

As I move here, so my time moves also.”

 

Winters writes: “He was obviously influenced by George Herbert, and there are traces of other metaphysical influences. The poems are very devout and fairly well executed . . . [“Meditation 8”] conveys a profound insight into the human predicament, whether Christian or other, and it should be retained in our literature.”

 

Pain’s poems remind me of the work of another death-haunted poet, Stevie Smith. Both emphasize the evanescence of life. Here is “Some Are Born” (The Frog Prince and Other Poems, 1966):

 

“Some are born to peace and joy

And some are born to sorrow

But only for a day as we

Shall not be here tomorrow.”

 

In an almost too-clever epigram from her first collection, A Good Time Was Had by All (1937), Smith writes:

 

“All things pass

Love and mankind is grass.”

From the King James Bible, 1 Peter 1:24: “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”