Michael Wigglesworth was a Puritan minister. This specific, extremely rigid version of Christianity is clearly present in his poetry. At first glance, one can clearly see that all of his poems are about the Christian way of life, how sinful most human action is and what awaits us in the afterlife. A perfect child of his generation, Wigglesworth takes the literal meaning of the bible as fact and includes it, with quotations, into his poetry. His main concern is how to reach heaven and how to spend eternity there.
His poetry has a sombre, mostly admonishing tone, warning the audience of what is to come. He uses a very interesting method to convince the reader to follow the Puritan rules, namely the direct comparison between the length of the human life with the heavenly eternity. It is clear from his writings and the Puritan codex that only those that are without any blemish of sin can make it to heaven, if they are chosen. Considering this stringent context, his poetry starts to seem less alien to the modern reader. Wigglesworth seems truly concerned with the souls of his flock and tries to make them understand what is at stake. His poems discuss the end of times, i.e. judgement day, the ephemeral quality of human existence and the daily struggles of a true Christian. To exemplify this, "A short discourse on eternity" is a good example of his poetry. It is full of references to the bible and tries to make the common man understand what eternity truly means. He uses the biblical age of the world, 5600 years in his version, as a point of comparison. This number is already huge and seems eternal to the reader, but Wigglesworth ensures them that it is just a short moment in eternity. This strong focus on the concept of the afterlife shows an underlying fear in Wigglesworth's society, namely to end up in hell.
Wigglesworth's poetry, from "The Day of Doom" to "To the Christian Reader," mostly deals with how a Puritan can reach the afterlife, the good one. This end goal is, in the mind of this Puritan minster worth sacrificing everything else, as human life is comparatively misery anyway.
