Moorhead, Sarah Parsons

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MOORHEAD, Sarah Parsons

Born circa 1710s; death date unknown

Sarah Parsons Moorhead lived during the tumultuous Great Awakening, the religious revival of the 1740s which shook New England. Moorhead's one slender published work, To the Reverend James Davenport on His Departure from Boston by Way of a Dream (1742), is an extended poetic comment on the controversy that occurred in Boston over Davenport's theological opinions and religious practices.

Davenport, deeply affected by the religious zeal of the 1740s, deserted his congregation of Southold, Long Island, and began itinerant preaching. He attacked the piety and sincerity of local ministers, creating internal dissension in many congregations. Moorhead comments sharply on his behavior and admonishes backsliding and bickering Bostonians. Her public criticism of the clergy is significant because it was published contemporaneously with the events discussed in the poem. That is, a woman writer had been accepted as a critic of current events as early as 1742.

Stylistically, Moorhead mimics the poetical taste of the day. Paradoxically, although her subject is religious, Moorhead speaks with the voice of a distressed sentimental lover. Moorhead also employs the technique of a dream vision. She interjects a feminine feeling through florid description, creating an elaborate tapestry quality. Perhaps Moorhead recognized that using such sugared language would make her severe criticism acceptable to the public. Her style and subject matter thus appear as a strange but well-presented mixture of the religious and the secular, the pious and the sentimental.

Moorhead's criticism, perhaps influenced by Charles Chauncy, the conservative minister of the First Church of Boston, focuses on the extremist elements of the Great Awakening and on a prevalent religious hypocrisy. She also discusses free grace. Dealing with a major problem among the Puritans—the difficulty of differentiating between moral action and faith—Moorhead depicts the good-deeds churchgoers, who salve their conscience while actually remaining "immers'd in the black Gulph of sin, / …Pleas'd with the fancy'd Freedom of their Will." She believed that salvation can be secured only through the gift of free grace.

The poem also emphasizes the breakdown of morale in the Congregationalist churches—a result of continued quarreling over theological differences, notably among the ministers. Moorhead admonishes the New England churches to remain united against external opposition if they are to survive. She restates this notion in a short poetic postscript published with the longer Davenport verse.

Moorhead's two poems have historical importance as well as poetic merit. They indicate a general easing of social and religious restraints among New England's Puritans, which allowed women a wider range of subjects and an emergent, if limited, public voice in the New England colonies.