The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Many of her elegies meditate on the soul in heaven, as she does briefly here in line 8. The prosperous Wheatley family of Boston had several slaves, but the poet was treated from the beginning as a companion to the family and above the other servants. In spiritual terms both white and black people are a "sable race," whose common Adamic heritage is darkened by a "diabolic die," by the indelible stain of original sin. Common Core State Standards Text Exemplars, A Change of World, Episode 1: The Wilderness, To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name, To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works. The opening thought is thus easily accepted by a white or possibly hostile audience: that she is glad she came to America to find true religion. Gates documents the history of the critique of her poetry, noting that African Americans in the nineteenth century, following the trends of Frederick Douglass and the numerous slave narratives, created a different trajectory for black literature, separate from the white tradition that Wheatley emulated; even before the twentieth century, then, she was being scorned by other black writers for not mirroring black experience in her poems. WikiProject Linguistics may be able to help recruit an expert. She was the first African American to publish a full book, although other slave authors, such as Lucy Terry and Jupiter Hammon, had printed individual poems before her. This appreciative attitude is a humble acknowledgment of the virtues of a Christian country like America. In the event that what is at stake has not been made evident enough, Wheatley becomes most explicit in the concluding lines. Back then lynching was very common and not a good thing. INTRODUCTION In the poem, she gives thanks for having been brought to America, where she was raised to be a Christian. She returned to America riding on that success and was set free by the Wheatleysa mixed blessing, since it meant she had to support herself. In fact, although the lines of the first quatrain in "On Being Brought from Africa to America" are usually interpreted as celebrating the mercy of her white captors, they are more accurately read as celebrating the mercy of God for delivering her from sin. Provides readers with strategies for facilitating language learning and literacy learning. On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA The capitalization of AFRICA and AMERICA follows a norm of written language as codified in Joshua Bradley's 1815 text A Brief, Practical System of Punctuation To Which are added Rules Respecting the Uses of Capitals , Etc. . Importantly, she mentions that the act of understanding God and Savior comes from the soul. Wheatley was a member of the Old South Congregational Church of Boston. Endnotes. Phillis Wheatley uses very particular language in this poem. Conditions on board some of the slave ships are known to have been horrendous; many died from illness; many were drowned. Redemption and Salvation: The speaker states that had she not been taken from her homeland and brought to America, she would never have known that there was a God and that she needed saving. Nevertheless, that an eighteenth-century woman (who was not a Quaker) should take on this traditionally male role is one surprise of Wheatley's poem. Lines 1 to 4 here represent such a typical meditation, rejoicing in being saved from a life of sin. al. These miracles continue still with Phillis's figurative children, black . During the war in Iraq, black recruitment falls off, in part due to the many more civil career options open to young blacks. She asks that they remember that anyone, no matter their skin color, can be said by God. Wheatley is guiding her readers to ask: How could good Christian people treat other human beings in such a horrific way? She separates herself from the audience of white readers as a black person, calling attention to the difference. Over a third of her poems in the 1773 volume were elegies, or consolations for the death of a loved one. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). This legitimation is implied when in the last line of the poem Wheatley tells her readers to remember that sinners "May be refin'd and join th' angelic train." Spelling is very inaccurate and hinders full understanding. In lieu of an open declaration connecting the Savior of all men and the African American population, one which might cause an adverse reaction in the yet-to-be-persuaded, Wheatley relies on indirection and the principle of association. HubPages is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. Starting deliberately from the position of the "other," Wheatley manages to alter the very terms of otherness, creating a new space for herself as both poet and African American Christian. Get LitCharts A +. She notes that the poem is "split between Africa and America, embodying the poet's own split consciousness as African American." Western notions of race were still evolving. Such authors as Wheatley can now be understood better by postcolonial critics, who see the same hybrid or double references in every displaced black author who had to find or make a new identity. This strategy is also evident in her use of the word benighted to describe the state of her soul (2). Adding insult to injury, Wheatley co-opts the rhetoric of this groupthose who say of blacks that "Their colour is a diabolic die" (6)using their own words against them. Almost immediately after her arrival in America, she was sold to the Wheatley family of Boston, Massachusetts. The first two children died in infancy, and the third died along with Wheatley herself in December 1784 in poverty in a Boston boardinghouse. Educated and enslaved in the household of . Though lauded in her own day for overcoming the then unimaginable boundaries of race, slavery, and gender, by the twentieth century Wheatley was vilified, primarily for her poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America." Contents include: "Phillis Wheatley", "Phillis Wheatley by Benjamin Brawley", "To Maecenas", "On Virtue", "To the University of Cambridge", "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty", "On Being Brought from Africa to America", "On the Death of the Rev. By being a voice for those who can not speak for . This could be a reference to anything, including but not limited to an idea, theme, concept, or even another work of literature. Today: African American women are regularly winners of the highest literary prizes; for instance, Toni Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, and Suzan-Lori Parks won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Publication of Wheatley's poem, "An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine George Whitefield," in 1770 made her a household name. In "On Being Brought from Africa to America," Wheatley asserts religious freedom as an issue of primary importance. This is a reference to the biblical Book of Genesis and the two sons of Adam. Today: Oprah Winfrey is the first African American television correspondent; she becomes a global media figure, actress, and philanthropist. In this essay, Gates explores the philosophical discussions of race in the eighteenth century, summarizing arguments of David Hume, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson on the nature of "the Negro," and how they affected the reception of Wheatley's poetry. Currently, the nature of your relationship to Dreher is negative, contemptuous. Her poems thus typically move dramatically in the same direction, from an extreme point of sadness (here, the darkness of the lost soul and the outcast, Cain) to the certainty of the saved joining the angelic host (regardless of the color of their skin). However, in the speaker's case, the reason for this failure was a simple lack of awareness. Wheatley's use of figurative language such as a metaphor and an allusion to spark an uproar and enlighten the reader of how Great Britain saw and treated America as if the young nation was below it. The European colonization of the Americas inspired a desire for cheap labor for the development of the land. Arthur P. Davis, writing in Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, comments that far from avoiding her black identity, Wheatley uses that identity to advantage in her poems and letters through "racial underscoring," often referring to herself as an "Ethiop" or "Afric." Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site. Phillis Wheatley was born in Africa in 1753 and enslaved in America. Further, because the membership of the "some" is not specified (aside from their common attitude), the audience is not automatically classified as belonging with them. This has been a typical reading, especially since the advent of African American criticism and postcolonial criticism. Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes, And through the air their mingled music floats. The irony that the author, Phillis Wheatley, was highlighting is that Christian people, who are expected to be good and loving, were treating people with African heritage as lesser human beings. . the English people have a tremendous hatred for God. The poem's meter is iambic pentameter, where each line contains ten syllables and every other syllable is stressed. Betsy Erkkila describes this strategy as "a form of mimesis that mimics and mocks in the act of repeating" ("Revolutionary" 206). In thusly alluding to Isaiah, Wheatley initially seems to defer to scriptural authority, then transforms this legitimation into a form of artistic self-empowerment, and finally appropriates this biblical authority through an interpreting ministerial voice. Reading Wheatley not just as an African American author but as a transatlantic black author, like Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, the critics demonstrate that early African writers who wrote in English represent "a diasporic model of racial identity" moving between the cultures of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. That this self-validating woman was a black slave makes this confiscation of ministerial role even more singular. It is not only "Negroes" who "may" get to join "th' angelic train" (7-8), but also those who truly deserve the label Christian as demonstrated by their behavior toward all of God's creatures. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. That there was an audience for her work is beyond question; the white response to her poetry was mixed (Robinson 39-46), and certain black responses were dramatic (Huddleston; Jamison). Began Simple, Curse In this, she asserts her religion as her priority in life; but, as many commentators have pointed out, it does not necessarily follow that she condones slavery, for there is evidence that she did not, in such poems as the one to Dartmouth and in the letter to Samson Occom. Richard Abcarian (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is a professor of English emeritus at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for thirty-seven years. Learning Objectives. In this book was the poem that is now taught in schools and colleges all over the world, a fitting tribute to the first-ever black female poet in America. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Pagan It has been variously read as a direct address to Christians, Wheatley's declaration that both the supposed Christians in her audience and the Negroes are as "black as Cain," and her way of indicating that the terms Christians and Negroes are synonymous. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Wheatley was in the midst of the historic American Revolution in the Boston of the 1770s. That theres a God, that theres a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. for the Use of Schools. Illustrated Works Remember: This is just a sample from a fellow student. Wheatley, however, is asking Christians to judge her and her poetry, for she is indeed one of them, if they adhere to the doctrines of their own religion, which preaches Christ's universal message of brotherhood and salvation. Poem Analysis, https://poemanalysis.com/phillis-wheatley/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america/. An allusion is an indirect reference to, including but not limited to, an idea, event, or person. She wants them all to know that she was brought by mercy to America and to religion. As Wheatley pertinently wrote in "On Imagination" (1773), which similarly mingles religious and aesthetic refinements, she aimed to embody "blooming graces" in the "triumph of [her] song" (Mason 78). Cain Her choice of pronoun might be a subtle allusion to ownership of black slaves by whites, but it also implies "ownership" in a more communal and spiritual sense. I would definitely recommend Study.com to my colleagues. She took the surname of this man, as was the tradition, but her first name came from the slave ship The Phillis, which brought her to America. The Puritan attitude toward slaves was somewhat liberal, as slaves were considered part of the family and were often educated so that they could be converted to Christianity. Among her tests for aesthetic refinement, Wheatley doubtless had in mind her careful management of metrics and rhyme in "On Being Brought from Africa to America." In the final lines, Wheatley addresses any who think this way. Here she mentions nothing about having been free in Africa while now being enslaved in America. 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land. John Hancock, one of Wheatley's examiners in her trial of literacy and one of the founders of the United States, was also a slaveholder, as were Washington and Jefferson. by Phillis Wheatley. 15 chapters | "Mercy" is defined as "a blessing that is an act of divine favor or compassion" and indicates that it was ordained by God that she was taken from Africa. At the age of 14, she published her first poem in a local newspaper and went on to publish books and pamphlets. In effect, she was attempting a degree of integration into Western culture not open to, and perhaps not even desired by, many African Americans. 19, No. 3, 1974, pp. If she had left out the reference to Cain, the poem would simply be asserting that black people, too, can be saved. "On Being Brought from Africa to America" is a poem written by Phillis Wheatley, published in her 1773 poetry collection "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral." In appealing to these two audiences, Wheatley's persona assumes a dogmatic ministerial voice. Black people, who were enslaved and thought of as evil by some people, can be of Christian faith and go to Heaven. Walker, Alice, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Honoring the Creativity of the Black Woman," in Jackson State Review, Vol. There were public debates on slavery, as well as on other liberal ideas, and Wheatley was no doubt present at many of these discussions, as references to them show up in her poems and letters, addressed to such notable revolutionaries as George Washington, the Countess of Huntingdon, the Earl of Dartmouth, English antislavery advocates, the Reverend Samuel Cooper, and James Bowdoin. Religion was the main interest of Wheatley's life, inseparable from her poetry and its themes. This very religious poem is similar to many others that have been written over the last four hundred years. They signed their names to a document, and on that basis Wheatley was able to publish in London, though not in Boston. Additional information about Wheatley's life, upbringing, and education, including resources for further research. By Phillis Wheatley. Baker, Houston A., Jr., Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing, University of Chicago Press, 1991.