Anne Killigrew's title does half the work of a caption: this is a poem to accompany a picture of St. John the Baptist in the wilderness, with angels and a lamb, and the title tells us she painted it herself. The poem lets the saint speak for himself, and what he describes is not hardship. He reports on his household. Fire, wine cellar, dining table, wardrobe and bed are all present, and all supplied by the wild. His central claim is that he is rich because he needs nothing a palace could offer. His only real wealth is holy company.
The poem is built like an inventory, with one domestic item per line, almost room by room. "The Sun's my Fire," he says, then "the hollow Spring's my Cave of Wine," where a cave becomes a cellar and spring water takes the place of a vintage. The little joke, perhaps with a faint sacramental echo, is that he lacks nothing. The repeated "my" (my Fire, my Cave, my Garments, my Pallet) gives him the pride of a householder. The wilderness, which a reader expects to be bare, has been furnished.
The verbs show how he thinks of nature. The rocks and woods "afford" him food, the herds "send" garments, and the earth "doth lend" a bed. These are the words of courteous exchange between neighbours, and the poem even calls the herds "neighbouring." Nothing is seized or hunted; everything arrives as a favour, and "lend" suggests he never forgets that the loan is temporary. Earth is "kind," a small word that turns the landscape into a host.
Against this, the poem sets the one thing he rejects: "Excess and Grandure." The vocabulary changes with it. The wilderness is described in short, concrete, mostly one-syllable words (Sun, Fire, Rocks, Woods, Meat, Dish), while the world he turns down is abstract and long-winded. Even the old spelling of "Grandure" makes it look a little inflated on the page. The verb "decline" is polite, like refusing an invitation, so his renunciation sounds more like good manners than harsh self-denial.
The most touching line is "This Lamb and I on one Dish eat." The word "This" points, as if at the painted lamb beside him. The image is of gentle intimacy, an animal and a man sharing a plate. A lamb also has a Christian meaning, since in the Gospel of John the Baptist calls Jesus the "Lamb of God," so the animal at his side may carry more than its size suggests. There is a faint tension in the rhyme of "Meat" with "eat," placed so near the lamb, although "Meat" in the period meant food in general.
The form suits the subject. The poem is eight lines of tight, regular four-beat couplets (rhyming aabbccdd), with roughly eight syllables a line. Each couplet is end-stopped and complete in itself, so the poem moves in neat, calm steps like a life with few things in it. The first rhyme, "shine" with "Wine," is warm and sensory. The last, "decline" with "Divine," is the most important pairing in the poem, because a refusal and a revelation share a sound. The final line also turns away from the earth for the first time. The elision in "M'Associates" squeezes the word into the metre, and the line ends on its one truly lofty word. The angels in the picture are the only company he values, and he does not need to describe them further because the viewer can see them.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much argument it fits into so small a space. It turns the usual idea of poverty upside down, so that the hermit seems the best-provided person in the scene. It also shows a painter lending words to her own picture, so that image and verse back each other up. And it manages this without sermonising. The saint never lectures, but simply lists what he has, and the reader finishes the thought that the list is enough.