Philip Pain may well be the most shadowy figure in all of American literature; nothing is known of his birth, his family, or his place of residence, and all we know of his death comes from the title page of his only book, where we are told that he "lately suffering Shipwrack, was drowned." Leon Howard found no evidence that he was even an American, although he discovered no trace of him in England either and surmised that he might possibly have been the son or nephew of Capt. Philip Payne of St. Christopher in the West Indies. All we have finally is his one slim book containing sixty-four six-line meditations on death, one of the more unusual examples of poetry from early New England and for one brief moment one of the best.

The six-line poems in Daily Meditations ... are printed four to a page with a...