In short, Edward Taylor’s “Another Meditation at the Same Time” offers its readers a powerful articulation of both Christianity and the relationship between its Lord and his followers. Although there are several exceptions, whose contributions are crucial to the poem's purpose, most of Taylor's metaphors use money, or at least something related to it, as a vehicle, with their tenors almost always doing the talking. By strengthening these metaphors with wordplay and complicating them with paradoxes, Taylor not only conveys the omnipotence of the Lord to whom the speaker supplicates, but also the value of the supplicant himself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay To reproduce Taylor's figure, if each Puritan were one of God's coins, then the combination of all of them would constitute God's wealth; consequently, their devotion to the Lord enriches him, causing a real co-dependency between the two. However, an important line remains to be drawn: God is not creating these coins, but rather is imprinting his image on those who are worthy enough to receive it. Through this distinction, Taylor implies that not all coins, or Puritans, are equal, but that there is a hierarchy of values ​​in the larger Christian system of exchange, somewhere within which the speaker spends the poem trying to place himself. More than just a beginning, the first stanza establishes the basis of the idea that will cover the entire poem. Wasting no time, Taylor immediately makes his metaphor clear: “Am I your gold? O purse, Lord, for their wealth; / Both in mine and in the mind found for you? (1-2). Despite this fundamental clarity of direction, the question itself is not only unanswered, but is complicated by a second level of questioning, namely whether he is actually gold or simply a bag to carry the Lord's wealth. Intensifying this complication, Taylor's wordplay on "mine," interpreted both as the speaker's soul and as an actual mine where gold would be found, questions the source of true Christian purity: it is found from within, in the "mine," or is it forged from without, requiring God's "mine." Regardless of the source, the speaker claims to be pure, but worries that his perspective is wrong, and therefore he asks God to evaluate him, “count me as thyself” (3) With another convenient pun on “o’re,” potentially read as “over” or “ore,” the latter being generally impure and requiring refinement. before producing any metal of value, Taylor continues to question the speaker's purity, explaining the possibility that any apparent virtue may be nothing more than a "goldwash" hiding a baser "brass heart" And so, the speaker must constantly test his faith - in this case against a "touchstone" - for fear of his faith. impurity, of the potential that he may be of less value to the Lord and that he may therefore fall back to the lowest step of the figurative hierarchy. Although he momentarily changes both tenor and vehicle in the second verse, Taylor's deviation is undoubtedly intentional, intended to cast the co-dependence between the Lord and his followers in a new light while maintaining the former's sovereignty. Following the example of the one that precedes it, the second stanza opens with a rhetorical question based on the greater monetary conceit: "Am I really new minted by your stamp?" (7). Here, Taylor's phrasing is crucial: “new” implies that the speaker has not always been “coined,” but has perhaps only recently proven his worth, if at all; and “in.”