SOURCE: "Phillis Wheatley's Subversive Pastoral," In Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4, Summer, 1994, pp. 631-47.

[In the following essay, Shields studies Wheatley's adoption of classical tropes and attributes to her poetry a subtle critique of the social injustice of her time.]

Most readers of Phillis Wheatley's poetry have long been aware that she employed the pastoral mode in her poems with some frequency. These readers have not recognized, nevertheless, that this poet manipulated the pastoral mode in a subversive manner. The work of Annabel Patterson instructs us that "what people think of Vergil's Eclogues is a key to their own cultural assumptions, especially as those are organized by the concept of the artist/intellectual."¹ As the brevity of the Eclogues "made them a natural exercise for elementary education in the classics," so Patterson observes, "they entered the European consciousness at a formative stage."² Whoever tutored Wheatley in Latin, for of course someone must have, may well have asked her to write pastoral compositions in Latin, as was expected of students in early America's Latin grammar schools. Patterson maintains that Europeans of the Renaissance and eighteenth century understood pastoral's "dialectical, tensive structure" as characterized, on the one hand, by the idyllic, Theocritean simplicity of shepherds' singing contests and love songs and, on the other hand, by Vergil's exploration of a realism that embraced "the consequences of civil war, problems of landownership and the relationship of writers to rulers." These two sides of the dialectic formed, in the minds of those Europeans who adapted the eclogues to their own needs, "a metaphorical system by which they could allude to the power structures of their own society, describe their own poetics and determine their owncultural stance."³

George Puttenham, Elizabethan author of the immensely popular rhetoric handbook The Arte of English Poesie (1589), understood the pastoral's potentiality for subversion when he wrote that the "eclogue" was devised to enable the poet "under the vaile of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as perchance had not bene safe to have beene disclosed in any other sort."⁴ To guess what Puttenham may have meant by his notion of the safe and the unsafe, which is to say, to appropriate Puttenham to the demands of an early-American author, such as Phillis Wheatley, who chooses to employ the subversive pastoral, the late sixteenth-century rhetorician suggests that the pastoral may offer, to those who may require it, a mask to utter what others less concerned about personal safety may assert in the mode of satire or in self-avowed social commentary. According to Puttenham, Vergil in his own Eclogues treats "by figure matters of greater importance then the loves of Titirus and Corydon"; for Puttenham holds that these poems "containe and enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behaviour."⁵ The subversive pastoral, then, emerges as the subtle product of an author who wishes to, or who must, adopt a mask to make her or his critique of societal ills known in print, motivated by an intense desire to alter unacceptable or inappropriate behavior.

The subversive pastoral created by Phillis Wheatley enacts a powerful and spectacular performance. The mystery here is that it took more than 210 years to recognize the subversive mode in this author. To be sure, the facts that Wheatley is a woman and an African American have both militated against giving her poetry and prose a fair assessment, but these two conditions are hardly the only ones that obfuscate a judicious evaluation. Many readers of her work refuse to let go of the old double canard, first that she writes in the "detested" mode of neoclassicism, with its heroic couplets and poetic diction, and second that she is nothing better than a derivative imitator of Alexander Pope. Of course the first of these obfuscating principles has recently been demonstrated, universally, to have been absolutely without foundation; the many apologies for proper reading of literary works cast in the neoclassic mode are now so widely accepted that no rehearsal of their tenets is required here. The second canard, that Wheatley writes like a slave of Pope, continues to damage her reputation. All four of these factors, her sex, her race, her neoclassicism, and her alleged lack of originality, have combined through the years to relegate Wheatley's poetry to marginal status.

At the outset, the very nature of Wheatley's poetic mission, motivated in large part by her African heritage,⁶ differs radically from that of Pope's. Whereas the British master of sound wrote pastorals in the manner of Rapin's rural, naive simplicity, when he wished to critique the foibles or mores of his contemporaries, he was free to choose the unmasked genre of satire. This direct means of criticism was not available to a woman author who, at the timeher 1773 Poems was published, also wrote under the disadvantage of being a slave. She therefore adopts the mask of subversion, enabling her to levy sometimes severe censure, particularly of the institution of slavery, under the guise of an innocuous purveyor of the status quo. As this practice predicts such fictional characters as Charles Waddel Chesnutt's Uncle Julius McAdoo and Langston Hughes's Jesse B. Semple, who manage to get the upper hand over their white adversaries by shielding tough cleverness and subtlety beneath a mask of innocuousness, Wheatley's intelligent application of a subversive mode, principally within her verse, though occasionally in her letters, should actually surprise no one.

The primary poetic modes available to Wheatley throughout her relatively brief career were those of the pastoral, the elegy, the lyric, and the epic. Indeed, Wheatley not only writes in all four of these modes, but she often mixes elements from them in the same poem. "On Imagination," for example, contains the lyric "I," "me," and "my," pastoral images of flourishing fields and warm water murmuring over sandy banks, the elegiac intensity of anagnorisis or revelation, and an epic sweep of circumferencing a great expanse.

The famous portrait frontispiece to the 1773 Poems also makes a subversive statement. Although in the opening poem of this collection she declares "here I sit, and mourn a grov'ling mind" (11),⁷ the inclusion of this portrait makes a rebellious statement: Wheatley sits non-humbly and aggressively before a writing desk, on which one sees paper with writing on it, holding a pen and striking a contemplative pose, obviously promising still more writing to come. Although it is indeed true that some African Americans in New England were at this time allowed to learn to read and write, by no means did all African Americans enjoy such privileges, and Wheatley's first attempt to publish a volume of poems in the Boston of 1772 met with no success, having been rejected for racist reasons.⁸ Obviously celebrating both her race and her womanhood, Wheatley's portrait self-consciously contradicts her mask of humility in a way that parallels the sophisticated urbanity of Vergil's shepherds. The alert reader should, therefore, be admonished that he or she should expect the pastoral voice in Wheatley's poetry not to be lukewarm, but rather aggressively heated.

The author of Wheatley's "Preface" to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, probably her London printer Archibald Bell, claims "she had no Intention ever to have published" (iv) these poems, yet it was well known to many of her American readers, at least, that she had in fact tried to obtain enough subscribers to publish a volume in Boston during the preceding year. This "Preface," however inadvertently, contributes to the establishment of Wheatley's mask. Although it may have been the fashion of the day to register such a disclaimer, this published statement once again contradicts real circumstance and signals the construction of a mask, one that appears designed to increase the sales of her volume. In any event, the volume apparently did do well in London, for at least nine reviews appeared there between September 1773, when the volume appeared, and the end of the year. And it should not go unremarked that, in the important letter to David Wooster of 18 October 1773, announcing her manumission, she writes that John Wheatley, her master, gave "me my freedom" "at the desire of my friends in England" (170). So it is clear that her pen has served her well in her struggle for freedom. In other words, her mask has aided her with great effectiveness, so much so that she has actually written herself into a condition of freedom.

"To Maecenas," which opens Poems, begins in the world of pastoral, for its first couplet reads: "Maecenas, you, beneath the myrtle shade, / Read o'er what poets sung, and shepherds play'd" (9). Although the suggestion to open with a paean to Maecenas, now universal symbol of the loyal patron, hails from Horace's dedicatory poem introducing Book I of his Odes,⁹ the shade of the myrtle tree and shepherds piping on oaten reeds belong to Vergil's Eclogues.¹⁰ This poem appropriately presents the major subject matter of the volume. Her aspiration to work within the genre of the epic, for example, she indicates in four lines describing Patroclus's plea to Achilles that he be allowed to aid the Greeks while wearing Achilles's armor (see Pope's Iliad, opening lines of Book 16). Depicting the African Terence as "happier" and herself as "less happy" (11) because his pen brought him freedom while hers has yet to do so, she introduces her individual struggle for freedom and by implication the general topic of freedom and the central subject of all her works. While extolling the virtues of "great Maecenas!" Wheatley vows to sing the praises of the deity "from whom those virtues sprung" (11), thereby focusing on virtuous behavior and on her idea of God, the two subjects named in her title, the "Moral" and the "Religious." In her frequent references to the Muses and in citing Helicon and Parnassus, she expresses her concerted interest in poetic afflatus and its role in her poetics. She points out as well that "Phoebus reigns above the starry train" and that "bright Aurora purples o'er the main," hence introducing her preoccupation with solar imagery. That Wheatley establishes the atmosphere of pastoral before treating any other subject specifies the importance of this mode to her undertaking. "To Maecenas" not only states that its author bears "a grov'ling mind," but also that she is unable to "raise the song" whose "fault'ring music dies upon my tongue" (11). Yet this piece presents an extraordinary performance in which she self-consciously demonstrates her power over words.

Indeed, she appears to be determined to give precisely such a demonstration when she describes first a verbal depiction of Homer's awe-inspiring "Celestial Gods" in these terms: "as the thunder shakes the heav'nly plains, / A deep felt horror thrills through all my veins." Next wishing to paint in words an opposite effect, she drops the fast-paced mono- and disyllabic words of the example above for the more deliberate, slow-moving liquid "r's" and "l's" of the following couplet: "When the gentler strains demandthy graceful song, / The length'ning line moves languishing along." In the next stanza, despite this illustration of her power to choose sounds that "must seem an Eccho to the Sense" (Pope's Essay on Criticism, 1. 365), she expresses an ardent desire to emulate Homer and Vergil: "O could I rival thine and Virgil's page, / Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage"—no meager ambition. For if she could bring her verse to such high achievement, "Then should my song in bolder notes arise, / And all my numbers pleasingly surprize" (10).

Following this implicit challenge for Wheatley herself to rise to greatness, she asks "why this partial grace, / To one alone of Afric's sable race" (11). In other words, unaware of African authors other than the Latin playwright Terence (who is thought to have been born in Carthage or perhaps to have belonged to an African tribe), Wheatley queries why have there been no other African writers besides Terence, until now. For now, she tells Maecenas, "Thy virtues … shall be sung" in her poetry. The disclaimers regarding her humble inadequacies mask the ambitions of an intelligent poet who, composing at the height of her abilities," is emboldened to "snatch a laurel from thine [i.e., her patron's] honour'd head" (12). Part of what Wheatley means here becomes obvious when we understand that laurel symbolizes Apollo (god of the arts), poetic inspiration, and victory.

Poetic inspiration is, nonetheless, not Wheatley's sole concern in the triplet containing the "laurel" passage; in full this triplet sounds as follows:

While blooming wreaths around thy temples spread
I'll snatch a laurel from thine honour'd head,
While you indulgent smile upon the deed.
(12)

As these lines comprise the only triplet in this poem of couplets, we may assume the poet intends (certainly the text "intends") to focus attention on the content of these lines. Of course, to achieve the laurel meant among poets of the classical world to attain poetic maturity, to "arrive" as a poet. That Wheatley claims she will "snatch a laurel" (emphasis mine) indicates she recognizes the uncertain reception among white readers of her poetic efforts. I do not mean to suggest Wheatley is uncertain; indeed, she is so certain that her 1773 Poems announces her competence to the world that she records that announcement in her own words in her volume's first poem. Nevertheless, unlike white poets, she must "snatch" her laurel rather than simply seize it or take it. While the good white poet enjoys the opulence of "blooming wreaths" spreading unchecked "around thy temples," she, the good black poet and a slave, finds herself so impoverished and dependent that she is forced either to be silent—which will not do for this aggressive voice, which never seriously considers silence as an alternative—or to "snatch" her place as a poetic voice. The surreptitiousness denoted by the verb "snatch" forcefully extends Wheatley's subversive voice. She becomes so bold that, after proclaiming her theft, she "instructs" her patron-readers to "smile upon the deed" with indulgence. Only the apparent harmlessness of her humble mask empowers her to "get away with" stating such aggression, but only a resituating of her poetic voice within the mode of subversive pastoral reveals the integrity of her rebellion.

An arresting parallel to this triplet occurs in the poetry of Mather Byles, nephew of Cotton Mather and a Congregational minister who enjoyed considerable popularity as a poet and journalist during the first half of the eighteenth century. According to one source, Byles may well have served Wheatley as both Latin tutor and advisor to her composition of poems; certainly her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral was modeled upon Byles's 1744 Poems on Several Occasions.'¹² In "Written in Milton's Paradise Lost," Byles longs to possess Milton's "tuneful Arts/Of lofty Verse," just as Wheatley hopes to emulate Homer and Vergil. "Thus with ambitious Hand;" continues Byles, "I'd boldly snatch / A spreading Branch from his immortal Laurels."¹³ Byles pursues this vain desire throughout the next 150 lines until he finally concedes he is unequal to the task: "But, 0 my Muse, shake off these idle Dreams, / Imaginary Trances! vain Illusions!" For in Byles's own judgment, Milton's "mighty Numbers tow'r above thy Sight, / Mock thy low Musick, and elude thy Strains."¹⁴

Here, as in Wheatley's triplet, are nature's spreading plants, the action of snatching a laurel and, of course, the ambition of an aspiring poet. Of much greater significance, however, are the marked differences between teacher and student. While Byles casts his desire to snatch a laurel in the subjunctive mood, as a condition contrary to fact, Wheatley expresses her action of seizing the laurel in the declarative mood. That is, although Byles is content with wishing, Wheatley declares she will accomplish the deed. Byles uses the conditional mood probably because, as he himself states, he is unequal to such achievement as Milton's. Wheatley, on the other hand, does not compare herself to Milton—indeed, in the context of the laurel, not even to Homer or Vergil, whom she has named earlier in the poem. Rather she will seize the badge of her poetic maturity from one who dispenses patronage—certainly a more realistic and more realizable aspiration, signaling Wheatley's deeper commitment to the profession of author. Whereas Byles went on to practice the ministry, eventually giving up the writing of poetry altogether, Wheatley attempted throughout her life to forge a living from the products of her pen.

As well, nothing in Byles's poem even resembles the sly comment, "While you indulgent smile upon the deed." Clearly, Wheatley fully intends to have her laurel and, in addition, to take that prize while her white supporters, and even her white non-supporters, look on, despite the racist and sexist prejudices of her time. Unlike her white male teacher and example who, because of his race and gender, had a much better chance to succeed, Wheatley informs allher readers, white and black, male and female, that she will succeed as an author, in spite of all the odds against her. Certainly her determination merits the attributive heroic. Also, by transforming Byles's conditional statement and his playful subservience to Milton into willful declaration, Wheatley underlines Byles's lack of commitment to his profession as poet, thereby subtly subverting his play.

In this, one of her most self-reflexive poems (the pronoun "I" in the objective, possessive, and nominative cases appears fifteen times), Wheatley constructs a world that appears to be nonthreatening to her predominantly white audience, but she undermines that construction by asserting that she fully intends to write superior poetry that will "snatch" a victory for her within the world of subversive pastoral. Few—indeed, perhaps none at all—will guess what she really hopes to do. But she knows.

With a mask of benignity firmly in place, Wheatley proceeds in subsequent poems to delineate the characteristics of virtue, exhort young Harvard students to lay aside sin, and praise King George III's repeal of the Stamp Act. In this last piece, "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty. 1768," Wheatley closes with these two diverting couplets:

Great God, direct, and guard him from on high
And from his head let ev'ry evil fly!
And may each clime with equal gladness see
A monarch's smile can set his subjects free!
(17)

These lines suggest another message beyond mere praise. If every evil flies from the mind of George, then it follows that every one of his subjects should enjoy freedom—not necessarily whites alone but perhaps even African Americans.

This pattern of donning a mask and uttering harmless, accepted generalities serves her again in the very next poem, the controversial "On Being Brought from Africa to America." The first four lines express subservient-sounding, supplicatory gratitude for being introduced to Christianity, much in the strain of Jupiter Hammon, an African-American poet contemporary with Wheatley but of less skill and daring. But then Wheatley suddenly and radically shifts tone. No longer the least bit supplicatory, as Hammon always remained, she adopts an accusatory tone. With no transition, she declares, "Some view our sable race with scornful eye, / 'Their colour is a diabolic die'." This last line is set in quotation marks as if it were an actual comment she overheard. The couplet that follows and that concludes this eight-line lyric, however, constitutes nothing less than an unmitigated command: "Remember, Christians, a Negros [sic], black as Cain, / May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train" (18). Her mask, once again, has empowered her to castigate all malicious, hypocritical whites who would harm her or her black brothers and sisters. In Wheatley's last extant letter to British philanthropist John Thornton, she similarly observes, "The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dang'rous than its smiles and flatteries" (183). Obviously Wheatley was too intelligent to be fooled by white duplicity.

Wheatley sustains the voice of pastoral with frequency throughout her poetry. Even one of her elegies begins by establishing a locus conventional to pastoral: "Where contemplation finds her sacred spring" (53). Although perhaps this line affects an atmosphere of philosophic contemplation, Parnassus, home of the muses, also resounds within it. "[B]right Aurora" is celebrated in "An Hymn to the Morning," a paean to the memory of her mother in Africa, whom she recalled to her white captors as "pouring out water at his rising." As the day passes and the sun rises in the sky, "Ye shady groves, your verdant gloom display / To shield your poet from the burning day" (56). This sun, or Apollo, god of poetry, awakens "the sacred lyre" of the poet's creativity, provoking the rise within her of "The bow'rs, the gales, the variegated skies / In all their pleasures" (57), perhaps a memory of her native Gambia adapted to the rhetoric of pastoral.

This same pastoral strain dominates the "new world" she constructs in her most important single poem, "On Imagination." Wheatley's power over words, manifested in the operation of her forceful imagination, enables her to depict the flourishing of gay scenes with smiling fields, even "Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptur'd eyes." Indeed, the poet's imagination can "break … [the] iron bands" of "The frozen deeps" "And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands." Of course, to a slave, the image of "iron bands" breaking can not be accidental. Recall her allusion to Terence, who broke his "iron bands" by means of the power of his pen. In Wheatley's new world, moreover, she pictures with the force of myth a paradisical golden age:

Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crown'd;
Show'rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.
(66-67)

With the references to the Roman deities Flora, goddess of flowers, and Sylvanus, god of forests and shepherds, Wheatley has constructed here an almost wholly pagan, classical world, through which may glimmer recollection of her native Gambia.

If Wheatley is a staunch, conservative Christian, filled with a never-questioning piety, as claimed by such critics as J. Sanders Redding,¹⁵ then why are biblical figures absent from her ideal paradise? Earlier in this same poem, Wheatley speaks of "Soaringthrough air to find the bright abode, / Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God" (66). If this "God" is Jehovah and not Jove, then why does she not place in her ideal world Joshua, Moses, Elijah, or Job? Rather than biblical characters, we find Flora and Sylvanus from the classical hierarchy of dieties. This practice of celebrating a wholly pagan construction untempered by references to Judeo-Christian figures characterizes the products of her poetic maturity, evident in such poems as "Niobe in Distress," "An Hymn to the Morning," "An Hymn to the Evening," "To Maecenas," "To a Gentleman of the Navy," "Phillis's Reply to the Answer," "To His Excellency General Washington," and "Liberty and Peace." Even though she continued to sound the note of orthodoxy in her letters to her intimate friend and committed Christian, Obour Tanner, and in elegies on such Christian subjects as the Reverend John Moorhead and David Wooster, Wheatley appears to have mitigated her former orthodoxy, at least after 1772, in favor of embracing classicism as an indication of her Enlightenment theology.¹⁶ In late 1783, Wheatley wrote an emotional elegy on the death of Samuel Cooper, the pastor who had baptized her, who was reputed to be one of the most liberal ministers of the day and was a forerunner of Unitarianism. The elegy portrays Cooper not as a minister but as a man of public affairs who dealt enthusiastically with the American Revolution, with the Boston order of Masons, and with Wheatley herself, whom Cooper often encouraged to write. Indeed, one must search for the only line in this fifty-two line elegy that identifies Cooper's function as minister: "Thy Church laments her faithfull Pastor fled."¹⁷

But one need not search long for the classical world of pastoral in "On Imagination." The line in which Sylvanus appears, for example, probably owes something to Vergil's tenth eclogue. For that matter, Wheatley's "Sylvanus may diffuse his honors round," may well be a translation of Vergil's "venit et agresti capitis Silvanus honore" (I. 24).¹⁸ As Wheatley's familiarity with Horace has already been shown, she may as well have in mind here the following passage from the second epode: "pater/Silvane, tutor finium" (11. 21-22).¹⁹ For is not Wheatley staking out her own boundaries in this poem? Is she not carving out her own property, the property of her imagination, in a realm inviolable by the ravages of slavery? Indeed, her poetic realm possesses no iron bands, nor is it limited by boundaries. And of course the boundary over which Sylvanus rules is that separating civilization from the uncultivated, boundless wilds of the forests and plains; that is, he guards his own realm of the unsullied forests from the threat of civilization. It can be no accident, then, that Wheatley fixes upon this particular figure from classical myth, for Sylvanus symbolizes release from any and all "iron bands." Wheatley has constructed here a new world that empowers her to "amaze th' unbounded soul" (66). In her own phrasing, "Such is thy [the imagination's] power" (67).

Attendant upon the abandon symbolized by Sylvanus is that associated with the goddess Flora. Indeed, in the most popularclassical handbook of the day, William King's An Historical Account of the Heathen Gods and Heroes (1710), the author writes that "Flora was a Courtezan, who got a great Sum of Money by her immodest Practices." Her celebrations "came to that Excess of Indecency," according to King, that they became characterized "by Persons appearing naked."²⁰ Such juxtaposition of Flora and Sylvanus can hardly be accidental, because both represent the throwing aside of convention and restraint. What at first looks harmless enough, upon closer examination challenges even the sexual mores of Wheatley's time. One does not, however, recognize the intensity of this subversion of her white oppressors' socio-political (is not all politics based upon a "border" of one kind or another?) practices until one has recovered the rhetoric of her subversive pastoral.

As well as transporting her into the realm of a golden-age pastoral, free from the strictures of a slave-holding civilization, Wheatley's imagination enables her to depict her mother's dawn:

From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.

The triplet rhyme here, the only one in the entire poem, calls attention to the importance of this image to the poet. As is usually the case in her poetry, the beauty of the dawn is soon followed by the regal image of the sun: "The monarch of the day I might behold, / And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold?" (67). 1 emphasize the first-person pronoun to signal the self-reflexive character of this poem. Using the first-person singular pronoun six times, Wheatley clearly intends to describe in this lyric the power of imagination as it functions within her own mind. The images of waters murmuring over sands, flowers decking the plain, and forests in full foliage resonate with the pastoral recollection of her native Gambia, which she describes in a later poem, "Phillis's Reply to the Answer."

This was composed as the third installment in a series, whose first poem was authored by Wheatley, "To a Gentleman of the Navy," and whose second, "The Answer," was written as a response to the first by a man named Rockfort or Rockford. All three appeared in the Royal American Magazine of Boston between late October and early December 1774. "Rockfort" had in "The Answer" described a visit to the west coast of Africa as a place "Where cheerful phoebus [sic] makes all nature gay; / Where sweet refreshing breezes gently fan; / The flow'ry path, the ever verdent [sic] lawn, / The artless grottoes, and the soft retreats" (142). Whether or not this description actually captures the torrid zones of equatorial, coastal West Africa, it does indeed describe the world of classical pastoral. Nevertheless, "The Answer's" "fair description," in Wheatley's words, of "artless grottos," not made by human hands, and "the sylvan shade" prompt the return of "pleasing Gambia on my soul." She extols that memory in the following passage:

With native grace in spring's luxuriant reign,
Smiles the gay mead, and Eden blooms again,
The various bower, the tuneful flowing stream,
The soft retreats, the lovers golden dream,
Her soil spontaneous, yields exhaustless stores;
For phoebus revels on her verdant shores.
(144)

The combination of classicism and Judeo-Christianity characteristic of this passage is now recognized as commonplace in this period of American classicism. But in the poetry of one who has so persistently been considered an orthodox Christian, it is surprising to observe classicism dominating Judeo-Christianity, for the allusion to "Eden" here remains only a casual reference. Perhaps the impetus to prefer pastoral's "golden dream" derives from the close approximation of that very world to Wheatley's recollection of her homeland.

To return to the 1773 Poems, however, Wheatley uses her harmless pastoral mask to celebrate the paintings of an African-American artist. Whereas Mather Byles places a poem to an artist named Pictorio toward the end of his volume, Wheatley arranges in a similar position a poem dedicated to African artist Scipio Moorehead, slave of the Reverend John Moorhead (on whose death Wheatley wrote an elegy mentioned earlier). Like Scipio, Wheatley is also a slave when she depicts in words his "shades of time." Calling herself "the Afric muse" (117) in the poem immediately after "To S.M. a Young African painter, on Seeing His Works," Wheatley unabashedly informs the world that African Americans can produce paintings just as white folks can. Signaling her own debt to Vergil's eclogues, she describes one of Scipio's paintings as it if were a rendering on canvas of the first half of Vergil's eighth eclogue: "No more to tell of Damon's tender sighs, / Or rising radiance of Aurora's eyes" (115). As Damon, a disappointed lover in Vergil's eighth eclogue, begins to sing in plaintive strains, he opens his section of the poem by referring to the rising of the dawn. Byles had before her told of Pictorio's portraits of classical subjects, but Wheatley subversively insists that, just as a slave can rival a white man's poetic output, a slave can also challenge a white painter's sophistication.

Wheatley concludes her volume²¹ with a poem that, like the volume's first, opens with images drawn from pastoral. In a tribute to her mistress Susanna, Wheatley bids "Adieu, New England's smiling meads, / Adieu, the flow'ry plain" (119). The poet also alludes in this poem to the Greek goddess of youth, Hebe, who for her may have represented good health. Hebe also represented in classical thought one who could free men from chains and bondage; serving in this capacity, her rituals were characterized by unrestrainedcelebrations. As in the book's first poem, Wheatley again suggests subversively that her real object is freedom, hence effectively drawing a complete circle, ending where she began by advancing the cause of freedom.

One can only guess who suggested the inflammatory title for this poem when it appeared in Boston just after her departure for London on 8 May 1773. Perhaps she herself proposed the politically charged title of one printed version: "To the Empire of America Beneath the Western Hemisphere. Farewell to America" (219).²² Although she both toned down some poems in her London volume and omitted several political pieces celebrating colonial rebellion, in the diction of this title, she anticipates the tone in which she later exalts George Washington in this electrifying couplet: "A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, / With gold unfading, WASHINGTON by thine" (146).

Wheatley's last known poem, "An Elegy on Leaving—," is heavily laden with pastoralism. Such phrases as "ye friendly bow'rs," "each sequester'd seat," and "The groves, from noon-tide rays a kind retreat," all from the first four-line stanza, place the temper of this piece firmly in the pastoral world. And with fourteen uses of the first-person singular pronoun (in all three cases), this poem is one of her most self-reflexive. Yet, at the same time, this piece is one of her bleakest, for she appears to bid adieu to the entire world of poetic creativity: "No more my hand shall wake the warbling lyre" (156). Written only months before her death in abject poverty, Wheatley may well have here cast her own elegy. Despite the bleakness of the line just quoted, she rallies in the last stanza by declaring "But come sweet Hope, from thy divine retreat" (157). Significantly, not a whit of Christianity appears in this profoundly meditative and introspective poem, in which she deplores "those pleasing hours… ever flown" and the "scenes of transport" now retired "from my thoughts" (156). Even her consolation comes from Horatian "calm Content." In only twenty-eight lines, Wheatley constructs a wholly classical lament that can only be finally labeled pastoral elegy.

In contrast to Wheatley's usual application of the pastoral mode, and despite this poem's heavy dependence on that mode, "An Elegy on Leaving—" carries no obvious hint of subversion. This poem is, nevertheless, significant to an investigation of Wheatley's use of the pastoral mode because it presents yet another rejection of the Christianity of her white oppressors. She seeks consolation here, in the final expression of her poetic powers, not in the promise of a Christian heaven or an alleged transcendence into Paradise, but in the gilding, golden rays of her African sun. Given the fact that she so often celebrates the soothing warmth of the sun in contrast to the less hospitable Boston skies, we should find it no surprise that she longs for "pleasing Gambia" as her poetic powers begin to elude her. As the tone of this fine poem captures that of prayer, its publication almost seems intrude upon the author's privacy, as we do when we read the poetic meditations of Edward Taylor. As in "On Imagination," Wheatley's celebration of classical pastoral resonates with her African heritage. In its rejection of white folks' Christianity, "An Elegy on Leaving—," enacts a final example of subversion, linking her oeuvre with that of Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and other African Americans who have sought their ideas of God outside a Christian context. By putting on a mask of harmlessness and manipulating the conventions of pastoral, Phillis Wheatley, America's first black author to publish a book on any subject, has woven into her poetry the narrative and the example of a courageous and intelligent soul who refuses to accept "things as they are" and struggles constantly to be free.

Notes

¹ Annabel Patterson, "Vergil's Eclogues: Images of Change," in Roman Images, ed. Annabel Patterson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), 163.

² Ibid., 164.

³ Ibid., 168

⁴ George Puttenham, "From The Arte of English Poesie," English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. 0. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), 163-86.

⁵ Ibid., 167.

⁶ For a preliminary investigation of Wheatley's African heritage and her debt to that heritage as traceable in her opus, see my chapter, "Phillis Wheatley," in African American Writers, ed. Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991), 473-91, esp. 473-82.

⁷ Phillis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988). Subsequent parenthetical citations of Wheatley's works refer to this volume.

⁸ For a discussion of Boston's rejection of Wheatley's 1772 "Proposal" for a volume, see William H. Robinson's Black New England Letters (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1977), 51-52. In addition, I am not the first to make the point in print that Wheatley's portrait enacts a sort of rebellion. See, for example, Houston A. Baker, Jr., The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). 6. Here Baker calls Wheatley's portrait "almost revolutionary."

⁹ Horace, Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1929).

¹⁰ Vergil, Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-IV, trans. H.Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974).

¹¹ As this poem is not named in her Boston "Proposal" of 1772, it very probably was written after April of that year. So considered, it joins a number of other poems, including "Thoughts on the Works of Providence," "On Recollection," the hymns to the "Morning" and "Evening," "Isaiah LXIII," "To S.M. a Young African Painter," and "On Imagination," all representing her best work, suggesting that in the year preceding publication of Poems, Wheatley had risen to the height of her poetic powers.

¹² See my "Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study in Literary Relationship," CLA Journal 23, no. 4 (June 1980), 377-90.

¹³ Mather Byles, Poems on Several Occasions (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1744), 25.

¹⁴ Ibid., 34.

¹⁵ See "Wheatley, Phillis" by J. Saunders Redding in Dictionary of American Negro Biography, Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 640-42, esp. 641.

¹⁶ For further discussion of a pattern of evolving liberalism regarding Wheatley's early dogmatically Christian views as expressed in "Atheism" and "An Address to the Deist," see my "Phillis Wheatley" in African American Writers, especially 482-483.

¹⁷ I quote here from Wheatley's manuscript version, 224.

¹⁸ "Even Sylvanus came with the rustic honor [or distinction] of his head"; i.e., wearing a floral chaplet (translation mine).

¹⁹ "Father Sylvanus, guardian of borders" (translation mine).

²⁰ William King, An Historical Account of the Heathen Gods and Heroes, intro. by Hugh Ross Williamson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), 193.

²¹ As the last two poems, "A Rebus" by another author (perhaps James Bowdoin, who founded Bowdoin College, later attended by Hawthorne and Longfellow) and "An Answer to the Rebus" by Wheatley do not fit the spirit of the volume but appear to be appended to it, serving as further attestation as to the authenticity of Wheatley's authorship, I consider Wheatley's Poems to conclude with "A Farewell to America."

²² This title appeared with a longer version of the poem on 10 May 1773 in The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy.