A Prayer for Charity

A devotional lyric from the seventeenth-century Anglican divine best known for Holy Living and Holy Dying, composed in the rhymed octosyllabic couplets favored by the devotional poets of his generation. Taylor, who preached through the upheavals of the English Civil War and lost three sons in quick succession, here catalogues the healing miracles of the Gospels, the blind, the lame, the leper, the mute, the demoniac, and turns each into an argument for fraternal forgiveness. The poem belongs to the same Caroline tradition of meditative verse that produced Herbert and Vaughan, where doctrine is worked out in measured rhyme rather than argued in prose. Read it slowly, as a prayer rehearsed aloud: the petition does not arrive until the final lines, and everything before is preparation.