SOURCE: "Anglo-American Racism and Phillis Wheatley's 'Sable Veil,' 'Length'ned Chain,' and 'Knitted Heart'," in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, University Press of Virginia, 1989, pp. 338-445

[In the following excerpt, Grimsted claims that Wheatley's poetry, rather than avoiding the controversial issues of slavery and independence, obliquely displays a critical sensitivity and attention to racial and political injustice.]

…While Wheatley's race assured continuing attention to her work, it perhaps has also circumvented the interpretive rigor with which it has been treated.¹³ The appreciative critics from the beginning have judged its quality reasonably well, if not very deeply. The London Magazine, reviewing her poems on publication, said they showed "no astonishing powers of genius," but revealed talent remarkably "vigorous and lively." Lydia Maria Child's evaluation of them in the 1830s was similar, and Delano Goddard called the best of them "simple, graceful, and not without traces of genuine poeticand religious feeling" in the 1880s. In this tradition is Julian D. Mason, who edited the standard edition of Wheatley's writings: "While not exceptional in quality, these poems are almost as good as any that were published by Americans at that time."¹⁴ There is some negative irony in phrases like "not without" and "as good as any" that appeared in earlier defenders as well. Gilbert Imlay in 1795 asked, "What white person upon this continent has written more beautiful lines?" and ten years later Samuel Stanhope Smith demanded how many southern planters "could have written poems equal to those of P. Whately?"¹⁵ Laurels won against such paltry competition bear some taint.

Both Imlay and Smith misspelled Wheatley's name, perhaps because they became acquainted with her through the comments of her most famous castigator, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: "Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem." This snidely nasty evaluation of Wheatley's aesthetic deformity appeared in Jefferson's most extensive "suggestion" that blacks were an innately inferior race, and its racist implications can be explicitly seen as late as the 1870s when journalist and Jackson biographer James Parton claimed her poetry illustrated Negro "inherent mental inferiority."¹⁶ A hardly much gentler criticism came from a differing racial perspective. J. Saunders Redding developed this position in the 1930s by decrying Wheatley's "wan creative energies" related to her "negative, bloodless, unracial quality." LeRoi Jones repeated this denunciation for the broadest audience and Merle A. Richmond gave it its fullest development, in which substantial sensitivity preceded the brutal conclusion that Wheatley's poems showed "a lobotomy-like excision of human personality with warmth and blood and the self-assertiveness that is grounded in an awareness of one's self."¹⁷

The two caricatures of Phillis Wheatley as an innately inferior being or as a socially lobotomized basket case are equally wrong. Her poetry is certainly limited and derivative in its forms and diction, "a very respectable echo of the Papal strains," in Evert Duyckinck's concisely witty 1856 phrase.¹⁸ Wheatley took too seriously, as literarily aspiring adolescents are apt to do, her chief guide, Alexander Pope, especially his conviction that following poetic precedent was not a substitute for, but the equivalent of, personal observation. Pope wrote of Virgil's Aeneid:

When first young Maro in his boundless mind
A work t'outlast immortal Rome design'd,
Perhaps he seem'd above the Critick's law
And but from Nature's fountain scorned to draw:
But when t'examine every part he came
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.¹⁹

To equate Nature and Alexander Pope had, of course fargreater drawbacks, a problem exacerbated by the metronomic rhythm of Pope's iambic pentameters and the inevitably often loveless couplings of the required rhyme. Nor could Wheatley exploit Pope's trait that most invigorated his tidy forms: his snippishly cynical view of the human comedy. Sarcastic superiority was not in the eighteenth century an approved mode for women, children, blacks, slaves, or Christians, and Wheatley was thus quintupally barred from public display of its pleasures.

Since Wheatley's deepest convictions were an extension of her mistress's intense Christianity, Milton would have seemed a more logical model, but the late eighteenth-century world could hardly sustain his sonorous religious assurance.²⁰ Instead there was "the sublime"—what was awesomely beyond mere reason. Some have tied this sublimity to later romanticism. The tie exists, of course, but the sublime is perhaps more accurately seen as a rationalist categorizing of those emotions and realities that people had trouble fitting into reason's box.²¹ Wheatley's variant of this, the religious sublime, certainly did nothing to bring her verse closer to the Nature of the romantics. Nature for her remained encased in classical abstractions like Phoebus, or scientific ones derived from Newton's harmonies that "traverse the etherial space, and mark the systems of revolving worlds":

    for ever be the God unseen,
Which round the sun revolves this vast machine,
Though to his eye its mass a point appears:
Ador'd the God that whirls surrounding spheres.²²

Such lines represent Wheatley's good average poetry. They are intelligently graceful, the diction less artificially convoluted than that of the Pope passage above, but without the aphoristic sharpness of Pope's concluding line. There is, however, little conspicuous music, except in an occasional line. The soft Is give poignance to her admiring description of the gentler aspects of Homer: "The length'ning line moves languishing along." And there is a sibilant sense of descending peace in a watery twilight where "the sun slumbers in the ocean's arms."²³ Still there is little of what we expect in poetry: of words teasing on the tongue or lolling in the mind, of images weaving surprising cloth of things and thoughts and emotions. So powerfully have Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century romantics shaped the sense of what poetry is that one can appreciate what went between (except for the humorous, especially in mildly salacious form) only by an act of will, often stiffened by a stern sense of intellectual duty.

Wheatley's race complicates this problem of response because of stereotypes tied to black poetry. The funniest bit of Wheatley criticism, penned in 1913, is also one of the most honestly revealing of why she is often poorly read. William J. Long was sure that Wheatley remembered being violently taken from Africa:

She could recall the wild, free life of the tribe,—chant ofvictory or wail of defeat, leaping flames, gloom of forest, cries of wild beast, singing of birds, glory of sunrise, the stately march of wild elephants over the silent places. Here was material such as no other singer in all the civilized world could command, and she had the instinct of a poet. We open her book eagerly and we meet "On the Death of an Infant":

Through airy roads he winged his instant flight
To purer regions of celestial light.

This is not what we expected. We skip the rest, and turn the leaves … Here is not Zulu, but drawing room English; not the wild, barbaric strain of march and camp and singing fire that stirs a man's instincts, but pious platitudes, colorless imitations of Pope, and some murmurs of a terrible theology, harmless now as the rumbling of an extinct volcano. It is too bad.²⁴

Yes, too bad, because such Edgar Rice Burroughs expectations swing above the interpretive jungles of a poetry that is not conspicuously beautiful but is extraordinarily intelligent and telling, if one doesn't expect Zulu or merely "turn the leaves." And it is telling about very major eighteenth-century issues of liberty and race, of gender roles and reform. Popular mythology suggests that "wild" blacks shouted, as did some Christians (none more effectively than George Whitefield). But children, women, and slaves were not supposed to raise their voices to their masters. Wheatley spoke quietly in print, but with remarkable clarity for all that, if one attunes the ear to the subtle intelligence of her ladylike murmur.

This subtlety is clear in the two political poems that remained in Wheatley's collection when the decision was made to publish in London and not Boston.²⁵ Five were dropped on subjects such as America, the arrival of British troops, and the Boston Massacre. The reasons are clear in Wheatley's elegy to a boy killed by royal informer Ebenezer Richardson, a "Tory chief":

Ripe for destruction, see the wretch's doom.
He waits the curses of the age to come.
In vain he flies, by Justice swiftly chased,
With unexpected infamy disgraced.
Be Richardson forever banished here,
The grand Usurper's bravely vaunted heir.²⁶

Obviously such passionate assurance that the king's loyal servant was the devil's chosen successor had more appeal in Boston than Britain.

The first included political poem was much closer to Wheatley's usual mode, an address to King George that seemed to begin with the expected humility:

Your subjects hope, dread sire—
The crown upon your brows may flourish long,
And that your arm may in your God be strong!
O may your sceptre numerous nations sway,
And all with love and readiness obey!

Such soothingly conventional sentiments were jarred a bit as Wheatley began the poem's second section, though the lulling rhythm and familiar phrasing remained:

But how shall we the British king reward?
Rule thou in peace, our father, and our lord!

Amidst remembrance of thy favors past,
The meanest peasants most admire the last.

Wheatley here inserted a footnote so no one would doubt what benefaction had won George such favor: "The Repeal of the Stamp Act." At this assertion that the British (not our) king's best way of inculcating loving obedience came in abandoning policies his ministers had long tried to enforce, a tory might well have paused. Yet the pentameters rolled readers along with pious wishes that George might live beloved and blest, so that few would sharply notice the political advice in the concluding benediction:

Great God, direct, and guard him from on high,
And from his head let every evil fly!
And may each clime with equal gladness see
A monarch's smile can set his subjects free!²⁷

That presumably sounded all right to tory readers, including Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and Lt.-Gov. Andrew Oliver, who endorsed the book. No one read closely because they did not, any more than we, expect a teenage colonial slave girl to tell her "dread sire" that, if he wanted a smooth reign, he had better banish his nasty notions and smilingly let his colonies do as they pleased—and all with deferential conventionality. What safer mask than the Augustan couplet woven by someone beyond suspicion of questioning power?

Boston's patriots might well have sniffed the whiggish thrust of this salutation to the king, but would they have heard the reverberations closer to home in, say, the wording of the last couplet that ends with "free," mentions "equal," and sets up a dichotomy between ruler and subject related to "each clime," a word Wheatley and others often used to contrast tropical to northerly situations? Not distinctly, of course, but there were some jogging clues, again only for those who listened in spite of assumptions that this sort of person could not be saying this sort of thing with such seeming propriety. The previous footnote had made clear that the poet Terence was "an African by birth" and the conclusion of the previous poem announced that "an Ethiop" was lecturing Harvard students about sin, and that was tied to black. But, of course, her favoring our liberties did not have anything to do with wanting her freedom—did it? As one Boston businessman said, perceptively and seemingly with admiration, Wheatley was "an artful jade."²⁸ Her art involved, it seems, not conscious deception but thewell-honed mental mechanisms of a highly intelligent person put into roles of multifaceted subordination, but ones where genuine love and respect were her lot, too. One senses Wheatley knew herself and society with such clarity that she almost automatically asserted self while causing minimal irritation in others.

Wheatley wrote most of her poems in response to specific events. She commemorated not only political occurrences and martyrs but books she read, people she met, salvations from shipwrecks and hurricanes and desertion, and journeys for health. Over a third of her extant poems are funeral elegies, mostly for people she knew. These are all highly formulaic: some praise and much lamentation, soothed by Christian pieties about the happy afterlife. The genre is limited, and little enhanced by Wheatley's device of having the deceased send directly quoted comforting messages back from the bright beyond. In large doses they raise irritable thoughts that Wheatley was a Boston predecessor of Mark Twain's Emmeline Grangerford: first came the doctor, then Emmeline, poem in hand, and then the undertaker.²⁹ Wheatley's treatment, like death itself, was highly egalitarian: wives and husbands, youths and infants, doctors, ministers, and generals largely "received they the same."

Yet the elegies suggest genuine caring, dignity, and strength as well. There is clear sense that Wheatley longed to soothe and give meaning to sorrow and that her verse was an opiate to those who grieved: "Now sorrow is incumbent on thy heart, / Permit the Muse a cordial to impart."³⁰ Wheatley was Boston's muse of comfort. And if one reads her elegies not as globs of conventional poetry-piety but as gestures of sympathy to particular people—there are always specific names, ages, and relationships—who have lost guides, spouses, parents, and children that gave core to their lives, these poems take on substantial emotional power. Despite the neoclassic generalities, or perhaps partly because of them. the touches of personalism are sometimes haunting, such as the lines in the poem to pregnant friend Lucy Marshall, baptized the same day as Wheatley in the Old South Church, whose husband had died: "The babe unborn in the dark womb is tost, / And seems in anguish for his father lost." The double reference of "lost"—to both embryo and father—movingly joins the two dark wombs that bound life, the mother's and the earth's.³¹ Wheatley described another young widow's grief in ways that conjure up death's and grief's unwilled inevitabilities: "But see the softly stealing tears apace / Pursue each other down the mourner's face." And with the usual hope of heavenly reunion the poem ends: "He welcomes thee to pleasures more refined / And better suited to the immortal mind." Here the pious spirituality gently mirrors a suggestion of bodily pleasures, partly precious because they are mortal, physical, fleeting.³² In Wheatley's elegies dealing with family ties, males and females are about equally the deceased and the bereaved, but it is generally the "woman's heart" and character that are the dominant emotional focus. Wheatley's poems are a public extension of women's centrality in the private rituals of death.

The poet's personal involvement is often poignant as well. In theelegy on the Rev. Joseph Sewall, Wheatley's minister in her formative years, she wrote quietly: "I, too, have cause this mighty loss to mourn, / For he, my monitor, will not return." In the 1784 ode to Samuel Cooper, this sense of restrained grief gains fuller poetic and personal expression:

Still live thy merits, where thy name is known,
As the sweet Rose, its blooming beauty gone,
Retains its fragrance with a long perfume.
The hapless Muse, her loss in COOPER mourns,
And as she sits, she writes, and weeps, by turns.
A friend sincere whose mild indulgent grace
Encourag'd oft, and oft approved, her lays.

Yet to his fate reluctant we resign,
Tho' ours to copy conduct such as thine:
Such was thy wish, th'observant Muse survey'd
Thy latest breath, and this advice convey'd.³³

Perhaps no glimpse of Wheatley's life is more richly moving than this picture of the black woman, not yet thirty but impoverished, sickly, and less than a year from death herself, passing on the dying white minister's message of Christian resignation, while conveying her grief and gratitude because he had fostered her "hapless Muse." And because Wheatley wrote (perhaps partly because Cooper encouraged), the passage remains redolent with "a long perfume" that indeed commemorates his merits, and hers.

The religious vision Wheatley brought to her elegies was benevolent and sometimes sentimental; after her thirteen-year-old's ponderings on whether Nantucket merchants Coffin and Hussey were destined for heaven or hell as their ship foundered, she gave a clear heavenward benefit of the doubt to all her subjects.³⁴ Yet remnants of a stiffer Clavinism gave spine to her vision. In some of the most moving elegies she described the devastation and grief in terms similar to Pope's pictures of expanding Chaos in the Dunciad, and her tenderness did not preclude fairly tough Puritanical injunctions, as this to parents of a dead infant:

The gift of heaven to your hand
Cheerful resign at the divine command.
Not at your bar must Sovereign Wisdom stand.³⁵

There also is a saving sense of the emptiness of words, amidst a plethora of them, at death's finality, as in her elegy on Mary Oliver, the wife of the lieutenant-governor: "Virtue's rewards can mortal pencil paint? / No—all descriptive arts and eloquence are faint."³⁶

This poem continues by telling Oliver directly to accept "heavenlytidings from the Afric Muse." Wheatley often introduced such references, in ways that make clear both her proud acceptance of her background and her recognition of its implications for her audience. That she did not do this invariably or insistently seems a reflection of her priorities. She was a Christian and, like her close black friend Obour Tanner, a strong woman who found in her faith more than compensation for what was wrong or crippling in her American situation:

'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.³⁷

That Wheatley's Christ was an "impartial Saviour" she asserted in a section on Africa in the Whitefield poem. And here she followed her most direct statement of preference for Christianity in America with her most overt denunciation of America's unchristian racism:

Some view our sable race with scornful eye—
"Their color is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain
May be refined, and join the angelic train.³⁸

Here the subtle play on color in "benighted soul" in her confession of faith, and, in her racial lecture, the double meaning in "diabolic die" and the colloquialism of "black as Cain" all convey the monstrous stupidity of confusing metaphors of sin with those of skin.

The forthright but rich way Wheatley handled her origins and her color here gives weight to Richard Wright's perceptive comment that Wheatley, almost alone of American black artists, seems to be truly one in her world, instead of battling with what W. E. B. DuBois called a "divided consciousness."³⁹ Critics have complained that, in her poem to "A young African Painter," Wheatley could as well be speaking to a white artist.⁴⁰ She might answer them: "And why should appreciation of beauty or hopes for continued aesthetic and religious growth be color-coordinated?"

The second direct statement of her preference for Christian America over Africa comes in a poem that contains her second moral lecture, this one aimed at Harvard students who waste their religious and intellectual opportunities:

'Twas not long since I left my native shore
The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom:
Father of mercy, 'twas thy gracious hand
Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.⁴¹

Wheatley here describes Africa as a "land of errors"—the equivalnet of the other poem's "pagan"—but also of "Egyptian gloom." The term can conjure up Africa, but it is never one of theseveral—Ethiopia, Africa, Gambia—that Wheatley identified with her first home. Indeed Egypt's primary resonance for her and her audience was its biblical locus as the land of slavery. That even Harvard students, disdaining the chance to learn for which the black slave girl pined, might guess, if the poet underlined it. And perhaps, when reminded that "an Ethiop tells you," the brightest of them would realize the consequence of their forgetfulness of Christ's "immense compassion."

Slavery, rather than being absent from this poetry, is just to the side of religion at its emotive center. Even the elegies are rife with such verbal reverberations, as in the quiet evocation of Wheatley's color and sad victorious journey to Christianity in the description of a dead girl: "She unreluctant flies, to see no more / Her dear loved parents on earth's dusky shore."⁴² Much more often death is tied imagistically to slavery. To die in Christ is to be "from bondage freed," though death himself "reigns tyrant o'er this mortal shore," exercises his "dire dominion," and represents "all destroying Power," which vainly tries to "chain us to hell, and bar the gates of light." Wheatley addressed the "grim monarch" in terms that should have touched human slave drivers:

Dost thou go on incessant to destroy,
Our griefs to double, and lay waste our joy?
Enough thou never yet was known to say,
Though millions die, the vassals of thy sway.
Nor youth, nor science, nor the ties of love,
Nor aught on earth thy flinty heart can move.⁴³

Wheatley's poetic dramatizations of ancient stories made more direct statements about God's punishment of destructive pride and power. From Ovid she took the story of Niobe to weave a tragic portrait of maternal love and loss brought on by excessive pride in "her royal race." When Niobe "reviles celestial deities," the gods respond by killing her many children one by one, the last in her mother's arms while she vainly begs, "Ah, spare me one!" After this final death, Niobe turns to emotional stone: "A marble statue now the queen appears, / But from the marble steal the silent tears."⁴⁴ The parallel between these concluding lines, where humanness is turned to stone that is aristocratic, cold, and white, and the similar one in the elegy of comfort to Mrs. Leonard makes clear Wheatley's intent. From the story of Niobe, Wheatley created tragedy of the woman's grief that she so often described. The tragedy stems from the fact that Niobe's deprivation is the result of her personal flaw, her pride in her race and power, which in turn links the poem to Wheatley's explicit theme in the whig poetry and to her antislavery stance.

Wheatley's biblical narrative poem more directly evoked her political themes. Goliath obviously represented overbearing power against whom David acted in aid of God's fated bloody justice. An angel tells Goliath:

Those who with his omnipotence contend,
No eye shall pity, and no arm defend.
Proud as thou art, in short-lived glory great,
I come to tell thee thy approaching fate.

And David adds that he acts "That all the earth's inhabitants may know / That there's a God who governs all below." The "scenes of slaughter" and "the seas of blood" Wheatley then described are thematically tied to the approaching revolution and that conflict Thomas Jefferson and others feared when they thought of slavery and that "God is just" and "his justice cannot sleep forever."⁴⁵

The overtly whig poems bear as clear ties to slavery as the Goliath analogy did to the brewing colonial war. In a poem which was sacrificed in the move of publication to London and which exists only in a rough manuscript, Wheatley showed her strategy. The first two couplets argued that settlers tamed New England before Britain exercised its power, and then Wheatley introduced her allegory:

Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak
And (wond'rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.
Sometimes by Simile a victory's won.
A certain lady had an only son.⁴⁶

The poem goes on to show amusingly Mother Britannia taxing, neglecting, and punishing this "Best of Infants," despite its reasoned attempts to explain to "my dear mama" her ill-judged ways. But the crucial lines are the ones where Liberty makes this Ethiopian announce that "sometimes by Simile a victory's won." The black slave girl well understood how to speak by simile, to argue with uninsistent clarity the likeness of her instinct for liberty and the whig rhetoric of slaveholding white men who argued the ideal of freedom so passionately, if partially.

Critics often discover only one passage in Wheatley's volume touching on slavery, a stanza inserted in the middle of the book's second political poem, an ode to the earl of Dartmouth, praised for his friendship to the Americans, presumably either his aid in repealing the Townshend Acts or his gesture of conciliation to the Massachusetts assembly. In this poem in the middle of the volume, Wheatley straightforwardly stated her sense of tie between whig and black liberty to Dartmouth:

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song
Wonder from whence my love of freedom sprung

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancied happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case: And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?⁴⁷

Having stated her position exactly, Wheatley felt no need to repeat it in that form. Instead she let it simply resonate backward and forward through her poems on other topics so that readers, accepting or rejecting the explicit argument of the tie of whig to black freedom, would sense the verbal and emotional connection.

Some black critics have argued that the insertion of "seeming" before "cruel fate" and "fancied" to modify Africa's "happy seat" illustrate her black self-hatred, while the main emotional illustration of the argument—the grief of her father at the loss of his child—proves her inability to deal with her own feelings.⁴⁸ In fact, both adjectives underline her honesty. Wheatley did not remember Africa, one presumes because of the trauma to the child of the long voyage or what possibly was a longer and equally traumatic journey from family to slave ship in the hands of Arab or black slavers. By evoking her parent's grief for the lost child, she tied the slave experience to the human suffering that laces the elegies and bound the reality of slavery to the reality of death: those left behind lament the loss of the departed, in this case without knowledge of their going to a better world. Wheatley, of course, felt she had found a better world; her faith dictated that the "cruel fate" that brought her to Christianity was indeed "seeming." It also dictated that heaven, not Africa, become the imaginary Utopia by which she compensated for the limitations of the here and now. In the charmingly lighthearted interracial literary flirtation she conducted in the Royal American Magazine in 1774-75, Wheatley painted a picture of a luxuriant Africa, a "pleasing Gambia on my soul," but also made clear it was an imaginary "Eden."⁴⁹ All people can create Utopian dream worlds, to make sense of or compensate for the limitations of the present, but those who admit as imaginary these never-never lands of a past or future perfect are generally not the weaker or less wise.

In the Dartmouth poem Wheatley placed the portion declaring that her interest in liberty was a product of her enslavement immediately after lines praising Dartmouth for freeing America from unredressed wrongs and from the dreaded "iron chain," with which "wanton Tyranny with lawless hand" had "meant t'enslave the land." Hardly could poet say more gently, yet clearly: "These are my images, and this is my message. When you see and use the one, remember and feel the other."

In a Wheatley poem of 1778 that Mukhtar Ali Isani recently discovered and published, there is another explicit antislavery message:

But how, presumptuous, shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with th' Almighty mind—
While yet (O deed ungen'rous) they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric's blameless race?⁵⁰

The shift in pronoun from "we" in the first line to "they" in the third suggests Wheatley's deep sense of national belonging and separation: it is an anonymous "they" who injured her race in ways that threatened God's vengeance on the American cause, which is her cause, too.

Hardly less clear is the imagery of her 1775 poem praising George Washington, where she warned

      whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom's heaven defended race.
Fix'd are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes, Columbia's arm prevails.
Ah, cruel blindness to Columbia's state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.⁵¹

Though addressing England, Wheatley made clear that evil lay in the "thirst for boundless power" and that other "nations" hoped to benefit from Columbia's resistance to such tyranny. The rhyme of "disgrace" with "race," identical to that in the 1778 poem, underlined these implications. It perhaps speaks well of Washington's humanity (or less well of his reading) that he invited the slave girl to visit him in Cambridge—hesitating only about whether to address her as Miss or Mrs. Phillis—and had the poem published in Virginia and Pennsylvania.⁵² His fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson perhaps read better, and certainly wrote worse.

This same strategy informed Wheatley's penultimate poem in 1784:

Perish that thirst of boundless Power, that drew
On Albion's head the curse to tyrants due.
But thou appeas'd submit to Heaven's decree,
That bids this Realm of Freedom rival thee!⁵³

Wheatley's integration of double meaning is extraordinary in these lines that announce Heaven's decree that the new country both compete with England and come to rival England as a realm of freedom on whose soil, the recent Somerset decision implied, no slave could remain chained. The poem's concluding lines hark back to this idea, as Wheatley urged Heaven and Columbia to cooperate so that in "every Realm" will "Heavenly Freedom spread her golden ray." The dying Wheatley hailed the end of the Revolution with a repetition of her warning that lust for "boundless power" would force heavy atonement of "guiltless blood for madness not their own."

It was the same vision that led her poetically to rephrase the passage in Isaiah that Julia Ward Howe was to press to similar public service some ninety years later: "Compres'd in wrath, the swelling wine-press groan'd, / It bled, and poured the gushing purple round." However clearly Wheatley foresaw the largely" guiltless blood" of the coming vintage years, she described well the carnage to come in some four score years and ten:

Beneath his feet the prostrate troops were spread,
And round him lay the dying, and the dead.
Great God, what lightning flashes from these eyes?
What power withstands, if thou indignant rise?⁵⁴

The basic images and arguments that bind Wheatley's best poems—those that are not personal, political, or poetic transcriptions—also take life from her racial identity. The central image in her poetry is that of Phoebus, or the sun, used to represent intellectual and spiritual knowledge, as well as God's gift that fosters all life, vegetable and human, earthly and divine. Her fascination with the sun may relate to her lost childhood; her one African memory was her mother's pouring water as libation to the rising sun. Certainly she used it as exemplar of the religious sublime in accord with the dictum of the eighteenth-century critic John Dennis: "But the sun occurring to us in Meditation gives the idea of a vast and glorious Body, and the top of all the visible Creation, and the brightest material Image of the Divinity." The connection of the sun or light with knowledge and truth, though grounded in universal visual experience, could have racial connotations for those with racist proclivities. Light was comforting, and what was white was allied to it; what was black suggested the mysterious and dangerous, that which had to be controlled and subdued. It was easy enough, however, to reverse such flexible symbolism as applied to human shadings. Darkest Africa was also the sun's chosen residence, a land where "Phoebus revels on her verdant shores," and eighteenth-century science interpreted dark skins as direct reflection of people's closeness to the sun." Wheatley often played with contrasts of sun-drenched tropics and the colder climes of New England, especially in "On Imagination," where "Fancy" is portrayed as providing warmth and life even in winter: "The frozen deeps may break their iron bands, / And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands." Here the frozen north and barren sands are seen as linked by mutual need, so growth could occur—an idea that Wheatley and her circle were contemplating in more political terms in relation to sending black missionaries to Africa. The use of "iron bands" in relation to the North suggests imagistic ties with slavery in hampering the mutuality needed for flowering. And Wheatley suggested that only imagination creates the ties, concluding with her grimmest criticism of her New England home and her poetry:

Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.⁵⁶

The rare rough rhythm of the last line, the change of accent within the meter, and the hissing s sounds suggest a freezing ofher hopes and song, a hardening of flowing sea to a frozen cease. And the "unequal" harkens back to the iron bands of the North.

In "On Recollection" the relation of the light and dark imagery Wheatley used is tied to a different aspect of her antislavery theme, the divine retribution that injustice incurs. Mneme, or remembrance, here is presented as the moon that calls from darkness things otherwise forgotten with a light "celestial and refin'd," the latter Wheatley's favorite word for improved: "The heavenly phantom paints the actions done / By ev'ry tribe beneath the rolling sun." Such recollection is sweet to those individuals and nations that respect justice:

But how is Mneme dreaded by the race,
Who scorn her warnings and despise her grace?
By her unveil'd each horrid crime appears,
Her awful hand a cup of wormwood bears.

The next stanza, opening with reference to Wheatley's age, moves to the personal and partly applies the suffering of recollection to the poet, but without loss of the preceding references to the effects on "tribe" and "'race":

Now eighteen years their destined course have run
In fast succession round the central sun.
How did the follies of that period pass
Unnotic'd, but behold them writ in brass!
In Recollection, see them fresh return,
And sure 'tis mine to be ashm'd, and mourn.⁵⁷

The comma in the last line stresses Wheatley's double message. By separating the follies that were hers by a beat from those she mourned, Wheatley suggested not only her sins but the crimes done her in her eighteen years.

There are two published drafts of this poem, one printed in the London Magazine in March 1772 and the second in the book eighteen months later. The differences between these drafts illustrate the subtle intelligence with which Wheatley reworked her poems, all of them, certainly this one, written initially with extraordinary speed. Most of the changes were in the service of clarity and grace, but three of them suggest Wheatley's complex intelligence. One strong line is cut where Wheatley compared the determined sinner to Satan, "who dar'd the vengeance of the skies," and expanded the metaphor to say of God: "But oft thy kindness moves with timely fear / The furious rebel in his mad career." The imagery of this line, though not the context, suggested conservative politics, where God might check the rebel's "mad career" with proper fright. Since Wheatley regularly used images to double meaning beyond context, she cut lines that said what she did not intend politically, though they said well what she was arguing theologically and regarding racial sins. The lines in which shementioned race above were smoothed from ones that talked more strongly, one presumes she thought too coarsely, about "a perfidious race" who rejected God's will and "the good embrace" of fellowship. And she transposed the personal section so that it directly followed the passage where she talked about the eventual sufferings of a race that scorned God's warning and love. These eighteen years had given this "vent'rous Afric" not only a "great design" but one subtly rich.⁵⁸

In her best poem, "Thoughts on the Works of Providence," Wheatley took her sun image, representing both light and energy, and tied it to the need for balance in human and spiritual life, emphasizing the mutuality of warmth and shade, day and night, strength and gentleness, black and white, reason and love—the greatest of these being love. It is a poem "to praise the monarch of the earth and skies," the sun and the Son. It contains many of her most moving images such as the sun slumbering at sunset in the ocean's arms or God revealed in the Newtonian universe's "vast machine." The "God who whirls surrounding spheres" establishes the sun as "peerless monarch" to give energy and life, but in a balanced way: "Almighty, in these wondrous works of thine, / What Pow'r, what Wisdom and what Goodness shine!" The three italicized words become the subsequent sections of the poem and, significantly, Wisdom comes first and Goodness last with Power wedged safely between.

That Wisdom, which attends Jehovah's ways,
Shines most conspicuous in the solar rays:
Without them, destitute of heat and light,
This would be the reign of endless night:
In their excess how would our race complain,
Abhorring life! how hate its length'ned chain.

The ideal here is Newtonian balance, specifically tied to enough but not too much sun. But the poem has emphasized that the sun is the source of power, a monarch, so that the imagery of the last two lines is also political and, most strongly, racial. In "length'ned chain" Wheatley found the perfect metaphor for her condition, well-treated certainly, even loved and admired, but bound and, because of that, on the verge of abhorring life. This stanza concludes with a picture of potential chaos conquering if excess should prevail.

About half way through the poem Wheatley introduced darkness, the counterforce that moderates the sun's potential excess and restores human energy and strength: "The sable veil, that Night in silence draws, / Conceals effects, but shews the Almighty Cause." Wheatley, who repeatedly used "sable" to refer to her color, tied night to her race in a way that links the slave's need to conceal effects, to hide the relationships that light reveals, without losing sight of the Almighty Cause. This is, of course, God's benevolent design, but it also evokes causes, political and racial, within his creation. This idea is subtly advanced at the beginning of the nextstanza where Wheatley asked: "Shall day to day and night to night conspire / To show the goodness of the Almighty sire?" The placing of day to day and night to night creates ambiguities in the answer to the question, since God's wisdom relates to alternation and mutuality, a conspiring between light and dark.

This mutuality of light and dark is the integrating theme of Wheatley's paired poems, the hymns to morning and evening. Aurora awakes "all the thousand dies" or colors of the day and the songs of birds and poets, but the light that gives beauty also saps strength even though "Ye shady groves, your verdant bloom display, / To shield your poet from the burning day." Yet it is evening that allows the richest sunset burst of color before darkness, also God's gift, descends:

Filled with praise of him who gives the light,
And draws the sable curtains of the night,
Let placid slumbers soothe each weary mind
At morn to wake more heavenly, more refin'd.

"Thoughts on Providence" moves from stress on God's plan of mutuality to assert the equality within the creation where God shows his perfection in "the flow'ry race": "As clear as in the noble frame of man, / All lovely copies of the Maker's plan." The conventional stress on nature's beautiful plan prepares acceptance of the quiet "all" that asserts complete equality.

There follows Wheatley's closest paraphrase-commentary on Pope, in which God fends off threatening Chaos, not by creating Newton, but by himself saying, "Let there be light." This is joined to a praise of Night, now pictured as a time of freedom, where Fancy reigns in dreams "on pleasures now, and now on vengeance bent." In this passage, where Wheatley evoked the subconscious, pleasure and vengeance are joined as the objects of darkest dreams, ones that she saw (much like modern psychology) as linked to the restoration of waking balance, reason, and "improv'd" functioning. God's mercy both allows and restrains the dreamed expression of black anger "When want and woes might be our righteous lot, / Our God forgetting, by our God forgot!" This, Wheatley's most tautly aphoristic line, suggests that in night's freedom she shared in part the American black dilemma that James Baldwin has perhaps most richly presented: to allow injustices to fill one with hate is to become in a sense hateful. The extraordinary bloodiness of Wheatley's poems drawn from classical-biblical sources suggests this subterranean anger which the gentle young woman expressed only when it was sublimated in distant settings and in religious truisms about God's terrible wrath.

The poem concludes with a dialogue between Reason and Love, in which the two embrace, but not before they affirm the supremacy of Love, which "every creature's wants supplies"—unless ungrateful man interferes:

This bids the fostering rains, and dews descend
To nourish all, to serve one gen'ral end,
The good of man: yet man ungrateful pays
But little homage, and but little praise.⁵⁹

God's works with "mercy shine," because they show balance between sun and rain, light and dark, intended to "nourish all." But behind God's goodness lurks God's retributive justice for those who seek power at the expense of reason and love. Wheatley's was a God of eighteenth-century light and mercy, but both her Bible and her (and her country's) situation created the sense that man's tyrannical overreaching, if reason and religion could not check it, might demand blood atonement. Hers was not Pope's complacency of "whatever is, is right" but a sterner faith that whatever is will finally be righted.…

Notes

¹³… In addition to the Robinson books [Robinson, William H. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (Boston, 1984) and Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Boston, 1982)], Mukhtar Ali Isani has done much recently to interpret and discover Wheatley materials, especially in several articles that appeared in 1979: "'On the Death of General Wooster': An Unpublished Poem by Phillis Wheatley," Modern Philology 77:306-9; "Far from 'Gambia's Golden Shore': The Black in Late Eighteenth-Century American Imaginative Literature," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 36:353-72; "'Gambia on My Soul': Africa and the Africans in the Writings of Phillis Wheatley," Melus 1:64-72.

¹⁴London Magazine; or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligence 42 (1773):456; Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favour of that Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston, 1833), p. 171; Delano Goddard, "The Pulpit, Press, and Literature of the Revolution," in Justin Windsor, ed., Memorial History of Boston, Including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, 4 vols. (Boston, 1881), 3:147, Mason [Julian D., Jr.], ed., [The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Chapel Hill, 1996)], p. xi.

¹⁵ Gilbert Imlay, Topographical Description of Western Territory of North America … (London, 1792), pp. 229-30; Samuel Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Causes of Variety in Complexion and Figure in the Human Species …, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, 1810), p. 269.

¹⁶ Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785; reprint ed., New York, 1964), p. 135; James Parton, "Antipathy to the Negro," North American Review 127 (1878):487-88.

¹⁷ J. Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (College Park, Md., 1939), pp. 10-11; LeRoi Jones, Home (New York, 1969), pp. 105-6;Merle A. Richmond, Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton (Washington, D.C., 1974), p. 65. Robinson in his Critical Essays reprints two essays that promote this tradition, one by Angeline Jamison, published originally in the 1974 Journal of Negro Education, and another by Terrence Collins from Phylon in 1975 (pp. 128-35, 147-58). In this negative tradition is Martha Bacon, Puritan Promenade (Boston, 1964), pp. 1-42, and Geneva Cobb Moore, "Metamorphosis: The Shaping of Phillis Wheatley's Poetry," Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1981. Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s the negative interpretation by black critics predominated, but a more positive vision seems to be growing since then, as in Robinson, Wheatley and Her Writings, pp. 91-126, and the work of Mukhtar Ali Isani and John Shields.

¹⁸ Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2 vols. (New York, 1856), 1:367. Kenneth Holder, in the most purely literary study of Wheatley's verse, argues its closeness to Pope's forms. He finds greatest differences in syntax, related to Pope's greater flexibility and emphasis on wit and aphorism in his later verse ("Some Linguistic Aspects of Heroic Couplets in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley," Ph.D. diss, North Texas State University, 1973).

¹⁹ Alexander Pope, "Essay on Criticism," Aubrey Williams, ed., Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope (Boston, 1969), p. 166. Only five of her poems diverge from rhymed couplets, two in blank verse and three in other rhymed forms.

²⁰ In her second poem to a British lieutenant (1775), Wheatley called Milton the "British Homer," in reply to the seaman's introducing Newton and Milton as the great exemplars of British genius (Mason, ed., Poems, p. 85).

²¹ David Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England (Lexington, Ky., 1972); John C. Shields, "Phillis Wheatley and the Sublime," in Robinson, Critical Essays, pp. 189-205, and idem, "Phillis Wheatley's Poetry of Ascent," Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1978, pp. 137-62.

²² "Thoughts on the Works of Providence," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 20.

²³ "To Maecenas" and "Providence," ibid., pp. 3, 20. Both these lines are quoted in the first substantial Wheatley review, London Monthly Review 48 (1774):458.

²⁴ William J. Long, American Literature (Boston, 1913), pp. 145-46. Long concluded that Wheatley had been turned into a "wax puppet" and that "she sings like a canary in a cage." This evaluationobviously relates to those of Redding and Richmond, and perhaps draws on that of Katherine Lee Bates, American Literature (New York, 1898), who said "the rare song-bird of Africa" was "thoroughly tamed in her Boston Cage" (p. 79). A similar later white evaluation is Bacon, Puritan Promenade, p. 38.

²⁵ The proposed list in the Boston Censor, Feb. 29, 1772, suggests that six poems related to political events or persons were omitted from the London collection, as were seven on personal or religious themes.

²⁶ "On the Death of Mr. Snider Murdered by Richardson," in [Robert C.] Kuncio, "[Some] Unpublished Poems [of Phillis Wheatley]," [New England Quarterly 43 (1970):] p. 294.

²⁷ "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty, 1768," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 6. Closest to the interpretation that follows are two favorable considerations of Wheatley's work that were printed in Phylon: Arthur P. Davis, "The Personal Elements in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley," 12 (1953): 191-98, and R. Lynn Matson, "Phillis Wheatley—Soul Sister?" 33 (1972):222-30.

²⁸ John Andrews to William Barrell, Jan. 28, 1774, Andrews-Eliot Papers, Mass. Hist. Soc. In an earlier letter, Feb. 24, 1773, Andrews explained to Barrell that Wheatley was "stopped by her friends from printing them here and was made to expect a large emolument if she sent the copy home," fairly good evidence that the proposals did not "fail" in Boston.

²⁹ Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York, 1896), pp. 142-43. John W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New York, 1967), pp. 155-77, deals with colonial works, and Mukhtar Ali Isani, "Phillis Wheatley and the Elegiac Mode," in Robinson, Critical Essays, pp. 208-14, and Gregory Rigsby, "Form and Content in Phillis Wheatley's Elegies," College Language Association Journal 19 (1975):246-51, handle the Wheatley funeral work sensitively.

³⁰ "To a Clergyman on the Death of His Lady," Mason ed., Poems, p. 25. Some of the specifics about the names of the deceased and bereaved were dropped from the proposed Boston publications, seemingly because they were not as meaningful in England as they were to Bostonians.

³¹ "On the Death of Dr. Samuel Marshall, 1771," ibid., p. 41.

³² "To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband," ibid., p. 13. The improvements here over the 1771 broadside version "To Mrs. Leonard" suggest Wheatley's revising skills (ibid., p. 72).

³³ "On the Death of Rev. Dr. Sewall, 1769" and "An Elegy to Dr.Samuel Cooper," ibid., pp. 8, 79.

³⁴ "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," in [Carl] Bridenbaugh, "[The] Earliest Published Poem [of Phillis Wheatley]," [New England Quarterly, 42 (1969):] pp. 583-84.

³⁵ "On the Death of J. C., an Infant," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 44. "To a Lady on the Death of Three Relations" and "To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother" offer good examples of elegies that begin with a view of the chaos of death (ibid., pp. 23, 39).

³⁶ "To His Honour the Lieutenant Governor, on the Death of His Lady, March 24, 1773," ibid., p. 56.

³⁷ Tanner's letters have been lost, presumably with other papers that fell into John Peters's hands. Mrs. William Beecher, who knew Tanner at Newport and apparently got Wheatley's letters to Tanner from her, provides the only description that has turned up. See Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 7 (1863-64):273.

³⁸ "On Being Brought from Africa to America" and "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770," Mason ed., Poems, pp. 7, 10.

³⁹ Richard Wright, White Man, Listen (New York, 1964), pp. 76-78; W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint ed., New York, 1976), p. 36.

⁴⁰ Richmond, Bid the Vassal Soar, p. 62.

⁴¹ "To the University of Cambridge, in New England," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 5. In this revision, Wheatley changed the 1767 manuscript to avoid any suggested tie between "sable" or black and sin. In the earlier form Africa was a "sable land of error" and sin a "sable monster." This is strong evidence of the self-consciousness she developed about her argument through images.

⁴² "To the Honourable T. H., Esq., on the Death of His Daughter," ibid., p. 47.

⁴³ "On the Death of Three Relations," "To a Gentleman and Lady," "On the Death of J. C.," "An Elegy to Miss Mary Moorhead, on the Death of Her Father, the Reverend Mr. John Moorhead," and "To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband," ibid., pp. 23, 39, 44, 80, 12. Such images are strong in her last poem, "To Mr. and Mrs.—on the Death of Their Infant Son," probably influenced by her loss of two babes. The poem begins "O Death! whose sceptre, treambling realms obey, / And weeping millions mourn thy savage sway" and includes a picture of the baby's struggle: "For long he strove the tyrant to withstand, / And the dread terrors of his iron hand."

⁴⁴ "Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from Ovid's Metamorphoses," ibid., pp. 53-54.

⁴⁵ "Goliath of Gath," ibid., pp. 16-18; Jefferson, Notes, p. 56.

⁴⁶ "America," in Kuncio, "Unpublished Poems," p. 295. Of all the Wheatley poems that exist only in a rough form, this one seems cleverest, despite lack of clarity in its final sections.

⁴⁷ "To the Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North America, etc," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 34.

⁴⁸ Redding, To Make a Poet Black, pp. 10-11; Richmond, Bid the Vassal Soar, p. 60; Terrence Collins, "The Darker Side," in Robinson, Critical Essays, pp. 153-54.

⁴⁹ "Phillis's Reply to the Answer in Our Last by the Gentleman of the Navy," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 86. The navy gentleman had begun the praise of Africa "where cheerful phoebus makes all nature gay," which Wheatley then employed. Seemingly the British naval officer accepted Wheatley's politics as he lamented his country's fall from cultural prominence, and admitted that now England

No more can boast, but of the power to kill,
By force of arms, or diabolic skill.
For softer strains we quickly must repair
To Wheatley's song, for Wheatley is the fair
That has the art, which art could ne'er acquire:
To dress each sentence with seraphic fire.

⁵⁰ "On the Death of General Wooster," in Isani, "An Unpublished Poem," p. 308.

⁵¹ "To His Excellency General Washington," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 90.

⁵² George Washington to Joseph Reed, Feb. 10, 1776, and to Wheatley, Feb. 28, 1776, in [Jared] Sparks, ed., [The] Writings of [George] Washington, [12 vols. (Boston, 1837)] 3:297-99. Benson J. Lossing recorded that Wheatley did visit General Washington (The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution …, 2 vols. [1855; reprint ed., Glendale, N.Y., 1970], 1:556; Virginia Gazette, Mar. 20, 1776; Pennsylvania Magazine 2 [1776]: 193).

⁵³ "Liberty and Peace: A Poem," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 94.

⁵⁴ "Isaiah 63:1-8," ibid., pp. 27-28.

⁵⁵ [Margaretta Matilda] Odell, Memoir [and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave (Boston, 1834)], pp. 12-13; Edward N. Hooker, ed., The Critical Works of John Dennis(Baltimore, 1939), p. 339; "Phillis's Reply," Mason, ed., Poems, p. 86; Smith, Causes of Variety, pp. 212-23. In more than half Wheatley's poems there are references to the sun, which John C. Shields connects with "hierophantic solar worship" in Africa ("Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism," American Literature 52 [19801: 103-4, and "Poetry of Ascent," pp. 39-62).

⁵⁶ "On Imagination," Mason, ed., Poems, pp. 30-31. The contrast between tropical and northern climes is central in poems like "To a Lady on Coming to North America with Her Son for the Recovery of Her Health," ibid., pp. 36-37.

⁵⁷ "On Recollection," ibid., pp. 28-29.

⁵⁸ "Recollection, to Miss A M," ibid., pp. 74-75. A letter from Boston accompanied the poem, attesting that it was written immediately upon the suggestion of a girl who said she had never read a poem on recollection (London Magazine; or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligence 41 [1772]:134-35). The poem to the earl of Dartmouth was also written to show her skill to a visitor, perhaps while he watched (Thomas Wooldridge to the earl of Dartmouth, Nov. 24, 1772, Manuscripts of [the Earl of] Dartmouth [3 vols. (London: 1887-96)], 2:107).

⁵⁹ "Thoughts on the Works of Providence," "Hymn to the Morning," and "Hymn to the Evening," Mason, ed., Poems, pp. 19-23, 26-27; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York, 1955), pp. 71-95.