th’ angelic train” in spite of their captors’ strong belief that the dark race is hopeless and greatly inferior.

Wheatley utilizes a white/dark contrast to demonstrate the narrator’s movement from a life of misunderstanding and ignorance in a “Pagan land” to a life of deliverance and revelation in her new home. Up until the last line of the poem, Wheatley inserts such dark language as “benighted soul,” “sable race,” “diabolic die,” and “black as Cain” to depict both her and her race’s real and perceived place in the psychological world of their new homes. Although the last line contains no definite reference to light, Wheatley creates a light tone when she says, “refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” Thus, the possibility of a darkened soul’s moving into a spiritual light under the most adverse of conditions becomes evident.

Wheatley even utilizes semiotics, although the term may have been unknown to her, when she creates a title which illustrates the underlying concept of her poem. Wheatley draws attention to her being forced to leave her home instead of to her being taken to a better place by titling her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” By placing Africa first, Wheatley intimates that her past holds as much if not more importance than her future.

However, the strongest but often missed device to be found in “On Being Brought from Africa to America” is Wheatley’s subtle irony which she presents through limited use of italicized words. This irony allows Wheatley to placate her white reading public by permitting them to hear what makes them feel good while, in fact, she is saying exactly how wrong her captors’ perceptions are. For instance, her readers no doubt understood her reference to “my Pagan land” as a condemnation of the place from which they had freed her. Rather, when one accepts Wheatley’s irony, “Pagan land” illuminates the concept that the most ungodly of actions came when the rescuers forced Wheatley and others into enslavement. This same ironic approach should be considered when pondering the word “Saviour.” Although one immediately thinks of a religious salvation, the italics draw attention to the specific word and to the distinct possibility that the speaker did not completely want to be saved from the life she knew.

It is in line seven, however, that the significance of italics becomes evident with the inclusion of the proper nouns “Christians,” “Negroes,” and “Cain.” Again, a superficial reading of these words leads to the conclusion that the speaker is offering a statement of gratitude for having been delivered from her previously spiritually dark life. One must look closely at the pronouncement that “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,/ May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” and appreciate Wheatley’s placement of her race on an even playing field with her captors through the possibility that the black race’s shortcomings can be just as completely forgiven as those of the white race and that the white race is the one destroying its brothers as Cain did Abel.

The poem’s two quatrains of heroic couplets serve the same artistic and philosophical purpose as do the octave and sestet of a traditional sonnet. The first section lays the foundation for the speaker’s argument, while the second section presents the speaker’s conclusion or resolution. For instance, in the first quatrain, the narrator tells, in a relatively positive voice, of her removal from a world of darkness into one of light. The second quatrain then provides a sounding board for the narrator’s more complex conclusion, that blacks as well as whites, the enslaved as well as the enslavers, have the same potential for salvation and becoming a member of the “angelic train,” thus negating the egocentric attitude of whites. This message is often misread by careless readers.