Make me, O Lord, thy spinning-wheel complete.

Edward Taylor (c. 1642–1729), a Puritan minister and poet in colonial New England, wrote a series of devotional poems often called the “Preparatory Meditations,” composed as private spiritual exercises in preparation for administering the Lord’s Supper. “Huswifery” (also spelled “Housewifery”) belongs to this religious, introspective context and was not published in his lifetime. The poem draws on the everyday domestic technology of spinning and weaving—familiar work in early New England households—to frame a prayer for inner transformation. Taylor’s metaphysical style characteristically turns ordinary objects into extended religious conceits, aligning daily labor with sanctification and submission to divine will.

The speaker asks God to make him a “spinning-wheel complete,” initiating an extended metaphor in which the self becomes an instrument for divine craftsmanship. The request is not for self-improvement by human effort but for God to refashion the soul so it can be used rightly—turned, wound, and worked into spiritual “cloth.” The domestic image emphasizes humility and usefulness: the believer is not the artisan but the tool, and holiness is imagined as a process of being shaped, stretched, and ordered by grace. The conceit also links inner piety to outward practice, suggesting that spiritual life, like household work, requires discipline, regularity, and a guiding hand.