Philip Pain’s Daily Meditations, or, Quotidian Preparations for and Considerations of Death and Eternity, begun July 19, 1666 (1668), a discrete series of brief, searching, quasi-confessional poems, began to circulate among the Puritan colonies almost contemporaneously with The Day of Doom, Michael Wigglesworth’s immensely popular apocalyptic long poem (1662; 2nd edition published in 1666).