John Fiske, schoolmaster, physician, and minister, has only recently emerged as an important Puritan poet. Baptized at St. James' parish in South Elmham, Suffolk, England, on 20 March 1608, the son of John and Anne Fiske, he graduated from Peterhouse College, Cambridge, in 1628 and preached for several years before persecution for nonconformity led him to turn to the practice of medicine.
Fiske sailed for New England in 1637. On board ship he and John Allin preached so zealously that one passenger claimed "That he did not known when the Lord's Day was; he thought every Day was a Sabbath Day; for," he said, "they did nothing but pray and preach all the Week long." Fiske's faith was undaunted by the death of his mother during the voyage and the loss of his infant soon after landing. His wife, Anne, was disinherited by her parents, who disapproved of her emigration, but Fiske farmed, practiced medicine, and taught at Salem, Massachusetts, where he also assisted the Reverend Hugh Peter. And in 1641 Fiske removed to Wenham, Massachusetts, where on 8 October 1644 he was ordained pastor of the newly gathered church and began the valuable notebook on matters of church discipline and ecclesiastical affairs which he kept almost to the end of his career.
Fiske's extant verse, written from 1652 to 1655, was discovered in a neglected commonplace book at Brown University and published by Harold Jantz in 1943. The verses, most of them funeral elegies, are anagrammatic. No mere acrostics, Fiske's anagrams rearrange the letters of his subject's name into phrases or paired nouns that, through rich metaphorical associations, reveal the person's godly qualities, which in turn reinforce the values of the Puritan community. Fiske's finest poem is generally considered to be his elegy on John Cotton, "O, Honie knott." He praises Cotton as an epitome of the Puritan leader, "A gurdeon knot of sweetest graces as / He who set fast to Truths so clossly knitt / as loosen him could ne're the keenest witt," a divine "who the knotts of Truth, of Mysteries / sacred, most cleerely did ope' fore our eyes." Cotton is depicted as tough-minded yet meek ("as in a honi-comb a knott / of Hony sweete"), harmonizing in his life the seeming contradictions of experience that Fiske yokes and reconciles in his verse. Though strange to the modern sensibility, Fiske's verse has won critical praise for its "contrapuntal," "polyphonic technique," which places it in the Baroque tradition.
In 1655 Fiske, along with the majority of his Wenham congregation, removed to Chelmsford, Massachusetts, where he served as minister until his death. Cotton Mather recorded that in Chelmsford "none of [Fiske's] Labours were more Considerable than his Catechetical." New England was becoming increasingly concerned about what to do with children of baptized parents who could not give the profession of saving grace necessary for full church membership. Concerned with nurturing the children of these "half-way members" long before the Bay Colony ministers institutionalized the Half-Way Covenant in 1662, Fiske wrote his own catechism for the children of his church, The Watering of the Olive Plant in Christs Garden (1657). In later years afflicted by "the Stone, and then the Gout," he had himself "carried unto the Church in a Chair, and preached ... sitting." Though Fiske's ministerial labors have long been forgotten, his recently published notebook gives a rare full record of the daily affairs of a seventeenth-century church. And his verse, never intended for wide distribution, has established his reputation as a skillful poet.
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