{"id":290,"date":"2021-02-16T19:09:19","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T19:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-empire-amliterature\/?post_type=chapter&p=290"},"modified":"2021-07-12T13:53:42","modified_gmt":"2021-07-12T13:53:42","slug":"phillis-wheatley","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-empire-amliterature\/chapter\/phillis-wheatley\/","title":{"raw":"Phillis Wheatley, Poems & Letter","rendered":"Phillis Wheatley, Poems & Letter"},"content":{"raw":"

Introduction: Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753\u20131784)<\/h2>\r\n\"Phillis\r\n\r\nBorn in Africa (probably in Senegal or Gambia), Phillis Wheatley was enslaved at the age of seven or eight when she was bought by John Wheatley (1703\u20131778) of Boston to serve as his wife Susannah\u2019s companion. Susannah fostered Wheatley\u2019s intellectual avidity by having her daughter Mary oversee Wheatley\u2019s education. Wheatley became well-read in the Bible; classical literature, including some of the classics in their original Latin; and English literature, responding especially to the works of Alexander Pope (1688\u20131744), master of the heroic couplet, and John Milton. She also converted to Christianity, becoming a member of the Old South Congregational Church.\r\n\r\nHer first poem, \u201cOn Messrs. Hussey and Coffin\u201d (1767), was published in the Newport Mercury. What brought her attention as a writer\u2014let alone an articulate black female slave\u2014was her 1771 broadside elegy on George Whitefield (1714\u20131770), a famous evangelist minister. Touted thenceforth as a prodigy, Wheatley traveled to London for the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). There she became a minor celebrity, meeting the lord mayor of London, Benjamin Franklin, and William Legge, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth (1731\u20131801). To the latter, she appealed for justice for those \u201csnatched\u201d from Africa, taken from their \u201cparent\u2019s breast\u201d and deprived of freedom.\r\n\r\nThe same year that her Poems were published, Wheatley was freed from slavery. She was with Susannah when she died a year later. Wheatley married John Peters, a free black man, in 1778, the same year John Wheatley died. Wheatley and her husband lived in poverty. In 1779, a proposal for a second volume of her poetry appeared, promising several letters and thirty-three poems, but the promise was never fulfilled. None of the projected poems have been discovered, either. Over the course of her marriage, Wheatley lost two children and died in 1784 soon after the birth of her third. She and her infant were buried together in an unmarked grave.\r\n\r\nIn the past, her poetry was deemed unoriginal, as giving little sense of Africa, her race, or her life as a slave. This reading attests to Wheatley\u2019s strategic success in opposing prevalent views of women, blacks, and slaves during her era. Her poems are now recognized for their strong assertion of equality among all humankind and their strong-minded expression of self to contemporary readers who denied that selfhood.\r\n

Poems & Letter<\/h2>\r\n

On Being Brought from Africa to America (1773)<\/h3>\r\n\u2019Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,\r\nTaught my benighted soul to understand\r\nThat there\u2019s a God, that there\u2019s a Saviour too:\r\nOnce I redemption neither sought nor knew.\r\nSome view our sable race with scornful eye,\r\n\u201cTheir colour is a diabolic die.\u201d\r\nRemember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,\r\nMay be refin\u2019d, and join th\u2019 angelic train.\r\n\r\nYou may learn about analyzing language in a text from viewing this video, which offers one possible in-depth interpretation of \"On Being Brought from Africa to America\" that emphasizes the complexity inherent in language choice in a seemingly simple poem.\r\n\r\n[embed]https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qFh4zdW-XDc[\/embed]\r\n\r\n
\r\n

\"cover<\/h3>\r\n

To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth (1773)<\/h3>\r\n<\/header>
\r\n

HAIL, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,\r\nFair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:\r\nThe northern clime beneath her genial ray,\r\nDartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:\r\nElate with hope her race no longer mourns, 5\r\nEach soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,\r\nWhile in thine hand with pleasure we behold\r\nThe silken reins, and Freedom\u2019s charms unfold.\r\nLong lost to realms beneath the northern sides\r\nShe shines supreme, while hated faction dies: 10\r\nSoon as appear\u2019d the Goddess long desir\u2019d,\r\nSick at the view, she languish\u2019d and expir\u2019d;\r\nThus from the splendors of the morning light\r\nThe owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.\r\nNo more, America, in mournful strain\r\nOf wrongs, and grievance unredress\u2019d complain,\r\nNo longer shall thou dread the iron chain,\r\nWhich wanton Tyranny with lawless hand\r\nHad made, and with it meant t\u2019 enslave the land.<\/p>\r\n

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,\r\nWonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,\r\nWhence flow these wishes for the common good,\r\nBy feeling hearts alone best understood,\r\nI, young in life, by seeming cruel fate\r\nWas snatch\u2019d from Afric\u2019s fancy\u2019d happy seat:\r\nWhat pangs excruciating must molest,\r\nWhat sorrows labour in my parent\u2019s breast?\r\nSteel\u2019d was that soul and by no misery mov\u2019d\r\nThat from a father seiz\u2019d his babe belov\u2019d:\r\nSuch, such my case. And can I then but pray\r\nOthers may never feel tyrannic sway?<\/p>\r\n

For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,\r\nAnd thee we ask thy favours to renew,\r\nSince in thy pow\u2019r, as in thy will before,<\/p>\r\n

To sooth the griefs, which thou did\u2019st once deplore.\r\nMay heav\u2019nly grace the sacred sanction give\r\nTo all thy works, and thou for ever live\r\nNot only on the wings of fleeting Fame,\r\nThough praise immortal crowns the patriot\u2019s name,\r\nBut to conduct to heav\u2019ns refulgent fane,\r\nMay fiery coursers sweep th\u2019 ethereal plain,\r\nAnd bear thee upwards to that blest abode,\r\nWhere, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\n

Letter to Rev. Samson Occom (1773)<\/h3>\r\n<\/header>
The Connecticut Gazette, March 11, 1774<\/section>
<\/section>
Rev\u2019d and honor\u2019d Sir,I have this Day received your obliging kind Epistle, and am greatly satisfied with your Reasons respecting the Negroes, and think highly reasonable what you offer in Vindication of their natural Rights: Those that invade them cannot be insensible that the divine Light is chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa; and the Chaos which has reign\u2019d so long, is converting into beautiful Order, and [r]eveals more and more clearly, the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably Limited, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one Without the other: Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian slavery; I do not say they would have been contented without it, by no means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward tile Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically, opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,\u2014I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.\u2014<\/section><\/section>
<\/section>
\r\n
\r\n\r\nNote<\/strong>:\r\n\r\nSamson Occum was a Mohegan Native American who converted to Christianity and was ordained as a Presbyterian Minister.\u00a0 He initiated and raised money for a school for Native Americans that eventually - because of dealings he was not a part of - became Dartmouth College. Has an interesting background, written about in many online sources.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n

Questions to consider<\/h3>\r\n
    \r\n \t
  • What racial prejudices does Wheatley confront in \u201cOn Being Brought from Africa to America?\u201d<\/li>\r\n \t
  • What images of slavery does Wheatley use in \u201cTo the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth\u201d that could apply equally to black slaves and white colonists? What\u2019s the effect of this transfer?<\/li>\r\n \t
  • How does Wheatley counter implied arguments for slavery in her \u201cLetter to Rev. Samson Occom?\u201d To what hypocrisies does she draw attention, and why?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>","rendered":"

    Introduction: Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753\u20131784)<\/h2>\n

    \"Phillis<\/p>\n

    Born in Africa (probably in Senegal or Gambia), Phillis Wheatley was enslaved at the age of seven or eight when she was bought by John Wheatley (1703\u20131778) of Boston to serve as his wife Susannah\u2019s companion. Susannah fostered Wheatley\u2019s intellectual avidity by having her daughter Mary oversee Wheatley\u2019s education. Wheatley became well-read in the Bible; classical literature, including some of the classics in their original Latin; and English literature, responding especially to the works of Alexander Pope (1688\u20131744), master of the heroic couplet, and John Milton. She also converted to Christianity, becoming a member of the Old South Congregational Church.<\/p>\n

    Her first poem, \u201cOn Messrs. Hussey and Coffin\u201d (1767), was published in the Newport Mercury. What brought her attention as a writer\u2014let alone an articulate black female slave\u2014was her 1771 broadside elegy on George Whitefield (1714\u20131770), a famous evangelist minister. Touted thenceforth as a prodigy, Wheatley traveled to London for the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). There she became a minor celebrity, meeting the lord mayor of London, Benjamin Franklin, and William Legge, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth (1731\u20131801). To the latter, she appealed for justice for those \u201csnatched\u201d from Africa, taken from their \u201cparent\u2019s breast\u201d and deprived of freedom.<\/p>\n

    The same year that her Poems were published, Wheatley was freed from slavery. She was with Susannah when she died a year later. Wheatley married John Peters, a free black man, in 1778, the same year John Wheatley died. Wheatley and her husband lived in poverty. In 1779, a proposal for a second volume of her poetry appeared, promising several letters and thirty-three poems, but the promise was never fulfilled. None of the projected poems have been discovered, either. Over the course of her marriage, Wheatley lost two children and died in 1784 soon after the birth of her third. She and her infant were buried together in an unmarked grave.<\/p>\n

    In the past, her poetry was deemed unoriginal, as giving little sense of Africa, her race, or her life as a slave. This reading attests to Wheatley\u2019s strategic success in opposing prevalent views of women, blacks, and slaves during her era. Her poems are now recognized for their strong assertion of equality among all humankind and their strong-minded expression of self to contemporary readers who denied that selfhood.<\/p>\n

    Poems & Letter<\/h2>\n

    On Being Brought from Africa to America (1773)<\/h3>\n

    \u2019Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
    \nTaught my benighted soul to understand
    \nThat there\u2019s a God, that there\u2019s a Saviour too:
    \nOnce I redemption neither sought nor knew.
    \nSome view our sable race with scornful eye,
    \n\u201cTheir colour is a diabolic die.\u201d
    \nRemember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
    \nMay be refin\u2019d, and join th\u2019 angelic train.<\/p>\n

    You may learn about analyzing language in a text from viewing this video, which offers one possible in-depth interpretation of “On Being Brought from Africa to America” that emphasizes the complexity inherent in language choice in a seemingly simple poem.<\/p>\n