A crown of righteousness, a righteous head,                           25

Oh naughty man! My brain pan turret is

Where swallows build and hatch: sins black and red.

My head and heart do ache, and throb at this.

Lord were my turret cleansed made by thee

The grace’s dovehouse turret much might be.                        30

Notes

The gap between what the poet hopes to become and the life he now inhabits opens as he meditates upon this crown.

A crown of righteousness would be most fitting upon a righteous. It is as if he is musing on this:

A crown of righteousness, a righteous head,

And then struck by the incongruence between his head and that crown:

Oh naughty man!

The connotations of the word “naughty” are only serious for Taylor. The modern diminishment of this particular word as denoting serious wrongdoing was not then present.  The uses of the word previously create an interesting combination of concepts. First, the word would reference something profane, evil, lewd. Second, the word would denote something empty or unworthy.

From thinking of his head, Taylor moves to the idea of top of a tower. The picture of a crown on a head becomes the image of a tower with turrets. His own body standing erect is the tower and his head the top of the tower.  This image of a man as a tower and a tower as a man is the scene of the remainder of this stanza:

                                                      My brain pan turret is

Where swallows build and hatch: sins black and red.

My head and heart do ache, and throb at this.

Lord were my turret cleansed made by thee

The grace’s dovehouse turret much might be.

The brain pain is the skull. The tower is envisioned as ill-kempt place. The turrets are not clean, but rather birds are building nests and raising young. While bird and their young can be quite lovely, the space around and beneath the nest quickly become filthy. A tower overrun by birds would be disgusting.

Now why he chooses swallows for the undesirable bird, I do not know. A search of the King James Bible does not help much. Psalm 86: 3, “Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of hosts, my King, and my God.” Which hardly explains the use of swallow here.

The word “Sins” in line 28 receives a tremendous emphasis. First, the word follows a colon in the middle of the line. This brings the line to a pause following an accent on the word “hatch.” Second, rather than an unaccented syllable to keep the line regular iambic, the word “sins” receives an emphasis. Third, it is an “extra” accent in this line.

where SWALlows BUILD and HATCH: SINS BLACK and RED

The swallows in his brain are raising upon sins to live where crown should be.

He bemoans the effect of the realization of his:

My head and heart do ache, and throb at this.

He then ends the stanza with a prayer:

Lord were my turret cleansed made by thee

The grace’s dovehouse turret much might be.

The switch to Doves is likely suggested by the image of the Holy Spirit as a Dove at the baptism of Jesus. A dovehouse would be the place the Spirit resides.

“It is the Spirit of God in the saints that is the spirit of prayer: now God’s Spirit is a dove-like, meek, quiet, and peaceable spirit.”  Burroughs, Jeremiah. Causes, Evils, and Cures of Heart and Church Divisions. Carlton & Phillips, 1855, p. 65.

But the switch between birds is admittedly not wholly successful. If the first bird were peculiarly loathsome (say a vulture), then the emphasis would be on the particular kind of bird. The switch from vulture to dove would be effective.

But since the first bird is a swallow, the usage must imply that it is being a place of bird nests which is in view The switch to doves does not help much here. Perhaps it is a Dove house rather than a tower with bird perched willy-nilly which is in view.

But if God were to cleanse this tower, it would be lovely. If God were to cleanse his head, it would be fit for the crown.