The Dying words of a young man, together with Wiggleworth's [sic] dream

The Dying Words of a Young Man is a deathbed hymn, here in the form of a Sapphic ode (see The American Hero). As in the old ballad, “Dialogue Between Death and a Lady” (see A Dialogue Between Death and a Lady), the speaker tries to bargain with death for a bit more time in the last verse. The descriptions of the agonies of pain are terrifying and the final warning to “shun my example” speaks directly to the listener. This text titled as “A Warning to the Gay and Thoughtless Youth” appeared in the Herald of Gospel Liberty on May, 10, 1811 (284). As “The Young Man’s Sick-bed Reflections,” it appeared in Scriptural and Experimental Songs for Those Who Wish to Praise God (20-22). A variant in The Pilgrim’s Songster identifies the author’s home in its headnote: “Hymn 14. A Warning to the Gay and Thoughtless Youth: or, Death-bed Reflections of a Young Man, Who Died in Despair, in the Western Part of Vermont” (19-21). This text also appears on Brother Sailor.

Wigglesworth’s Dream is a shortened version of a song in the Pepys broadside collection entitled A Comfortable New Ballad of a Dreame of a Sinner, Being Very Sore Troubled with the Assaults of Sathan. To the Tune of Rogero. The song was licensed on December 14, 1624, seven years before Michael Wigglesworth was born. Most of the Coverly text is very close to the original, but the Pepys version has nineteen verses, while the Coverly version uses verses 1-2, 6-7, and 9-17. Also, the final paean to the king is omitted and the text ends with a prayer to God (Rollins, Pepysian Garland 176-78). The longer song’s opening line, “In Slumbering Sleep I Lay,” became a new name for the tune “Rogero” after 1624 (Simpson 614).

Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) was born in Yorkshire, England, into a nonconformist family. In 1638 his family immigrated to New England. He attended Harvard for medical training and while there he had a “mighty dream” of judgment day. This convinced him to become a preacher and after graduating, he moved to Malden, Massachusetts, where he worked as a physician and a clergyman. During one of his long periods of bad health, Wigglesworth turned his dream into a Puritan epic of 224 eight-line stanzas, The Day of Doom. First published in 1662, it was a great success and had many editions. For more than a century, the poem was used as a theological guide and confirmation of Puritan dogma. Only the Bibleand the New England Primer were more influential with colonial American readers (McMichael and Leonard, ch. 1).

However, a review of Wigglesworth’s works reveals no poem like this one and the tune of “Rogero” passed out of fashion by the middle of the seventeenth century. It appears that the connection between Wigglesworth and this text was a marketing decision. Coverly may have simply renamed an old ballad with a new, saleable title. In 1783 Joseph Ritson published the old ballad of “The Children in the Wood” with a tune indication of “Rogero” (see Children in the Wood) (Select Collection 2:249-55). Unlike the original ballad, the Coverly text has an uneven meter and does not fit the Ritson tune particularly well. By this time, it may have been religious rhetoric rather than a song. Samuel Bayard reported in a personal communication that he had collected an oral version of the text in Pennsylvania in the 1930s.