Heaven and Heavenly Piety in Colonial American Elegies

Abstract

When the Massachusetts schoolteacher Benjamin Tompson pictured his unmarried sister Elizabeth in heaven, he saw her in a palace-like ‘nunnerye’ where ‘Chast virgins have faire entertainment free’. Elizabeth and the other virgins in heaven ‘Enjoy their purest love in sacred mirth’ as ‘Great Jesus daily steps of his bright throne/And gives them hart embraces every one.’ Colonial Puritan elegies such as this one challenge our inherited scholarly categories, which contrast a spiritualized Christian heaven with a corporeal Muslim one and set ‘a distant, majestic [Protestant] God’ in opposition to the intimate afterlife of medieval Catholic mystics. The most interesting part about Elizabeth Tompson’s elegy, however, is that she narrates it herself. Benjamin imagined her speaking to him from the bosom of Christ, saying ‘I Dare not tell what hear in heart i find’, and then going on to describe her experience of the afterlife in the first person. Christ leads her to the top of a ‘mount of pleasure’ where, she says, ‘i [have] all [the] flowers of paradice to Crop.’ A Protestant saint embracing a physical Jesus, picking flowers to her heart’s content, and telling her brother about it – these are all images which challenge our notions of early modern views of heaven and demonstrate the fruitfulness of elegies, or funeral poems, for opening up the imaginative worlds of early modern belief.