SIRS RENAISSANCE
March 3, 2005, n.p.

Written by ProQuest Information and Learning staff. Copyright © 2005, ProQuest Information and Learning Company.

Poetry of Phillis Wheatley

     Phillis Wheatley is remembered as the first African American known to have a volume of poetry published in the 18th century. Ironically, it was not published in America. While the New World colonists from Europe were receptive of her work--many finding it quite remarkable--they were not prepared fully to legitimize a black woman's literary talents by publishing her work. With the help of her master's household in Boston, Wheatley turned to England to publish her one and only volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

     As the title of the book indicates, Wheatley's work focuses on very specific themes regarding her religious beliefs, and several of the poems reflect a devout, fundamental Christian faith. But a greater number of the poems are elegies written in remembrance of people she knew or had heard about. The titles of a few clearly explain their content: "On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age," "On the Death of a Young Gentleman," "To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband," "To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and Child of the Name of Avis, Aged One Year."

     But it was an elegy with another lengthy title--"An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield"--that won Wheatley national and international attention. Whitefield was a world-renowned Christian leader whose death touched many people. Wheatley's endearing poem about him touched them as well. In it she writes:

     Hail, happy saint, on thine immortal throne,
     Possest of glory, life, and bliss unknown;
     We hear no more the music of thy tongue,
     Thy wonted auditories cease to throng...

     The rhythm and rhyme of these lines--as well as the praising and pious sentiment--are typical of Wheatley's poems. But she also occasionally acknowledges racial matters, although her address is generally brief and in passing. In the Whitefield poem, for instance, she imagines that the beloved reverend beseeches others to accept God:

     "Take him my dear Americans," he said,
     "Be your complaints on his kind bosom laid:
     "Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you,
     "Impartial Saviour is his title due..."

These lines subtly suggest that Whitefield understood that the same God who created and cares for white Americans also created and cares for black Africans.

     While most of Wheatley's poems are lengthy, a short verse called "On Being Brought from Africa to America," is one of her most noted--and one of the only that openly and bluntly addresses race and religion:

     'Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,
     Taught my benighted soul to understand
     That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
     Once I redemption neither sought nor knew,
     Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
     "Their color is a diabolic die."
     Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
     May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

     Ironically, Wheatley begins this poem by crediting slavery with leading her to Christianity. Most readers today may be shocked that she would refer to the kidnapping and transporting of a seven-year-old child from her family to a different continent as "mercy." Yet we must understand the times and the circumstances in which Wheatley was composing her work.

     Only certain attitudes were "safe" for blacks to express in their new white world. Wheatley relies on her devout faith to soften the atrocities she and her fellow slaves endured. However, in the last two lines of this poem (Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,/May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.), she makes a bold stand for the equality of all races on that "angelic train" to heaven.

     It is interesting to compare Wheatley's description of her capture in "On Being Brought from Africa to America" with the memory of the same event she describes in a lengthier work called "To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North-America, &c." Intended as a poem written in praise of those who were preparing to fight for a new nation and free it from a king's purported tyranny, she begins:

     Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
     Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
     Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
     Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung...

     Wheatley often espouses her love for America in her poems, in spite of the unfair treatment she bore as a black woman. But in the Earl of Dartmouth poem, she daringly recalls her introduction to the new world in a way that seems contrary to her other accounts:

     I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
     Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
     What pangs excruciating must molest,
     What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?

     Here, it is clear that Wheatley recognizes both the injustice and the heartbreak that surrounded her forced journey from Africa to America. She is pained over how her mother and father must have grieved when their child was stolen from them, never to be seen again.

     Yet, as in all the verses included in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Wheatley implies a happy and righteous conclusion to her circumstances. Whether her sentiment was heartfelt or simply the result of accepting her limitations, she retained her exaltation of Americans' pursuit of freedom--even at the exclusion of her own personal liberty.

Work Cited

     Renascence Editions: An Online Repository of Works Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799, University of Oregon, 1992-2004, http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm, accessed December 30, 2004.

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