Wheatley continued to write throughout her life and there was some effort to publish a second book, which ultimately failed. Phillis Wheatley is all about change. How do her concerns differ or converge with other black authors? The poem describes Wheatley's experience as a young girl who was enslaved and brought to the American colonies in 1761. Had the speaker stayed in Africa, she would have never encountered Christianity. assessments in his edited volume Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. the colonies have tried every means possible to avoid war. In "On Being Brought from Africa to America," the author, Phillis Wheatley uses diction and punctuation to develop a subtle ironic tone. 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. The poem's rhyme scheme is AABBCCDD and is organized into four couplets, which are paired lines of rhymed verse. Hers is a seemingly conservative statement that becomes highly ambiguous upon analysis, transgressive rather than compliant. Some view our sable race with scornful eye. Phillis was known as a prodigy, devouring the literary classics and the poetry of the day. Pagan 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. This is an eight-line poem written in iambic pentameter. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/being-brought-africa-america, "On Being Brought from Africa to America No wonder, then, that thinkers as great as Jefferson professed to be puzzled by Wheatley's poetry. 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. This could be a reference to anything, including but not limited to an idea, theme, concept, or even another work of literature. Today: African Americans are educated and hold political office, even becoming serious contenders for the office of president of the United States. The liberty she takes here exceeds her additions to the biblical narrative paraphrased in her verse "Isaiah LXIII. Wheatley's identity was therefore somehow bound up with the country's in a visible way, and that is why from that day to this, her case has stood out, placing not only her views on trial but the emerging country's as well, as Gates points out. Over a third of her poems in the 1773 volume were elegies, or consolations for the death of a loved one. Explore "On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley. It also contains a lot of figurative language describing . In the following excerpt, Balkun analyzes "On Being Brought from Africa to America" and asserts that Wheatley uses the rhetoric of white culture to manipulate her audience. To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works. Perhaps her sense of self in this instance demonstrates the degree to which she took to heart Enlightenment theories concerning personal liberty as an innate human right; these theories were especially linked to the abolitionist arguments advanced by the New England clergy with whom she had contact (Levernier, "Phillis"). From the start, critics have had difficulty disentangling the racial and literary issues. "The Privileged and Impoverished Life of Phillis Wheatley" If allowances have finally been made for her difficult position as a slave in Revolutionary Boston, black readers and critics still have not forgiven her the literary sin of writing to white patrons in neoclassical couplets. This, she thinks, means that anyone, no matter their skin tone or where theyre from, can find God and salvation. Poetry for Students. The final word train not only refers to the retinue of the divinely chosen but also to how these chosen are trained, "Taught to understand." Although she was an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. 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. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. 2002 She had written her first poem by 1765 and was published in 1767, when she was thirteen or fourteen, in the Newport Mercury. Poetic devices are thin on the ground in this short poem but note the thread of silent consonants brought/Taught/benighted/sought and the hard consonants scornful/diabolic/black/th'angelic which bring texture and contrast to the sound. . The line leads the reader to reflect that Wheatley was not as naive, or as shielded from prejudice, as some have thought. Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. She was taught theology, English, Latin, Greek, mythology, literature, geography, and astronomy. The two allusions to Isaiah in particular initially serve to authorize her poem; then, in their circular reflexivity apropos the poem itself, they metamorphose into a form of self-authorization. Merriam-Webster defines a pagan as "a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main world religions." One of Wheatley's better known pieces of poetry is "On being brought from Africa to America.". Jefferson, a Founding Father and thinker of the new Republic, felt that blacks were too inferior to be citizens. When we consider how Wheatley manages these biblical allusions, particularly how she interprets them, we witness the extent to which she has become self-authorized as a result of her training and refinement. Figurative language is used in this poem. 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. There are poems in which she idealizes the African climate as Eden, and she constantly identifies herself in her poems as the Afric muse. 2, December 1975, pp. She was greatly saddened by the deaths of John and Susanna Wheatley and eventually married John Peters, a free African American man in Boston. She did not mingle with the other servants but with Boston society, and the Wheatley daughter tutored her in English, Latin, and the Bible. The rest of the poem is assertive and reminds her readers (who are mostly white people) that all humans are equal and capable of joining "th' angelic train." The poem consists of: A single stanza of eight lines, with full rhyme and classic iambic pentameter beat, it basically says that black people can become Christian believers and in this respect are just the same as everyone else. This has been a typical reading, especially since the advent of African American criticism and postcolonial criticism. Martin Luther King uses loaded words to create pathos when he wrote " Letter from Birmingham Jail." One way he uses loaded words is when he says " vicious mobs lynch your mother's and father's." This creates pathos because lynching implies hanging colored folks. "In every human breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Lov, Gwendolyn Brooks 19172000 An example is the precedent of General Colin Powell, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War (a post equal to Washington's during the Revolution). Another instance of figurative language is in line 2, where the speaker talks about her soul being "benighted." Levernier considers Wheatley predominantly in view of her unique position as a black poet in Revolutionary white America. In this poem Wheatley gives her white readers argumentative and artistic proof; and she gives her black readers an example of how to appropriate biblical ground to self-empower their similar development of religious and cultural refinement. Given this challenge, Wheatley managed, Erkkila points out, to "merge" the vocabularies of various strands of her experiencefrom the biblical and Protestant Evangelical to the revolutionary political ideas of the dayconsequently creating "a visionary poetics that imagines the deliverance of her people" in the total change that was happening in the world. Crowds came to hear him speak, crowds erotically charged, the masses he once called his only bride. Elvis made white noise while disrupting conventional ideas with his sexual appeal in performances. Most descriptions tell what the literary elements do to enhance the story. Although she was an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. What difficulties did they face in considering the abolition of the institution in the formation of the new government? Just as she included a typical racial sneer, she includes the myth of blacks springing from Cain. A Narrative of the Captivity by Mary Rowlandson | Summary, Analysis & Themes, 12th Grade English Curriculum Resource & Lesson Plans, ICAS English - Papers I & J: Test Prep & Practice, Common Core ELA - Literature Grades 9-10: Standards, College English Literature: Help and Review, Create an account to start this course today. Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain. A second biblical allusion occurs in the word train. All rights reserved. Conducted Reading Tour of the South 'On Being Brought from Africa to America' is a poem by Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84), who was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was probably still in her early twenties. Her religion has changed her life entirely and, clearly, she believes the same can happen for anyone else. In effect, she was attempting a degree of integration into Western culture not open to, and perhaps not even desired by, many African Americans. More on Wheatley's work from PBS, including illustrations of her poems and a portraitof the poet herself. The early reviews, often written by people who had met her, refer to her as a genius. Educated and enslaved in the household of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley, lionized in New England and England, with presses in both places publishing her poems,. This poem is more about the power of God than it is about equal rights, but it is still touched on. 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. Some view our sable race with scornful eye. Even before the Revolution, black slaves in Massachusetts were making legal petitions for their freedom on the basis of their natural rights. While the use of italics for "Pagan" and "Savior" may have been a printer's decision rather than Wheatley's, the words are also connected through their position in their respective lines and through metric emphasis. (February 23, 2023). Erin Marsh has a bachelor's degree in English from the College of Saint Benedict and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University's Low Residency program. It also uses figurative language, which makes meaning by asking the reader to understand something because of its relation to some other thing, action, or image. The eighteen judges signed a document, which Phillis took to London with her, accompanied by the Wheatley son, Nathaniel, as proof of who she was. According to Merriam-Webster, benighted has two definitions. As the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry, Wheatley uses this poem to argue that all people, regardless of race, are capable of finding salvation through Christianity. The pealing thunder shook the heav'nly plain; Majestic grandeur! Here Wheatley seems to agree with the point of view of her captors that Africa is pagan and ignorant of truth and that she was better off leaving there (though in a poem to the Earl of Dartmouth she laments that she was abducted from her sorrowing parents). While Wheatley's poetry gave fuel to abolitionists who argued that blacks were rational and human and therefore ought not be treated as beasts, Thomas Jefferson found Wheatley's poems imitative and beneath notice. 189, 193. The first time Wheatley uses this is in line 1 where the speaker describes her "land," or Africa, as "pagan" or ungodly. She wrote and published verses to George Washington, the general of the Revolutionary army, saying that he was sure to win with virtue on his side. ." 1-13. Phillis Wheatley's poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America" appeared in her 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first full-length published work by an African American author. Benjamin Franklin visited her. His art moved from figurative abstraction to nonrepresentational multiform grids of glowing, layered colors (Figure 15). Conditions on board some of the slave ships are known to have been horrendous; many died from illness; many were drowned. They must also accede to the equality of black Christians and their own sinful nature. She knew redemption through this transition and banished all sorrow from her life. It is also pointed out that Wheatley perhaps did not complain of slavery because she was a pampered house servant. Some were deists, like Benjamin Franklin, who believed in God but not a divine savior. 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,Taught my benighted soul to understandThat there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.Some view our sable race with scornful eye,"Their colour is a diabolic die. 27, No. "On Being Brought from Africa to America by Phillis Wheatley". We sense it in two ways. Many of her elegies meditate on the soul in heaven, as she does briefly here in line 8. She separates herself from the audience of white readers as a black person, calling attention to the difference. Through all the heav'ns what beauteous dies are . He identifies the most important biblical images for African Americans, Exile . Poem Analysis, https://poemanalysis.com/phillis-wheatley/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america/. On this note, the speaker segues into the second stanza, having laid out her ("Christian") position and established the source of her rhetorical authority. In the following essay, Scheick argues that in "On Being Brought from Africa to America," Wheatleyrelies on biblical allusions to erase the difference between the races. The first two children died in infancy, and the third died along with Wheatley herself in December 1784 in poverty in a Boston boardinghouse. She notes that the poem is "split between Africa and America, embodying the poet's own split consciousness as African American." For example, "History is the long and tragic story . Anne Bradstreet Poems, Biography & Facts | Who is Anne Bradstreet? Shockley, Ann Allen, Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide, G. K. Hall, 1988. She had not been able to publish her second volume of poems, and it is thought that Peters sold the manuscript for cash. Mary Beth Norton presents documents from before and after the war in. The African slave who would be named Phillis Wheatley and who would gain fame as a Boston poet during the American Revolution arrived in America on a slave ship on July 11, 1761. In the final lines, Wheatley addresses any who think this way. Her rhetoric has the effect of merging the female with the male, the white with the black, the Christian with the Pagan. Surely, too, she must have had in mind the clever use of syntax in the penultimate line of her poem, as well as her argument, conducted by means of imagery and nuance, for the equality of both races in terms of their mutually "benighted soul." 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." . To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member. Wheatley's first name, Phillis, comes from the name of the ship . 1-7. Spelling and Grammar. Africa, the physical continent, cannot be pagan. window.__mirage2 = {petok:"cajhZ6VFWaUJG3veQ.det3ab.5UanemT4_W4vp5lfYs-86400-0"}; This poem has an interesting shift in tone. In consideration of all her poems and letters, evidence is now available for her own antislavery views. In A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, Betsy Erkkila explores Wheatley's "double voice" in "On Being Brought from Africa to America." To a Christian, it would seem that the hand of divine Providence led to her deliverance; God lifted her forcibly and dramatically out of that ignorance. These include but are not limited to: The first, personification, is seen in the first lines in which the poet says it was mercy that brought her to America. LitCharts Teacher Editions. And indeed, Wheatley's use of the expression "angelic train" probably refers to more than the divinely chosen, who are biblically identified as celestial bodies, especially stars (Daniel 12:13); this biblical allusion to Isaiah may also echo a long history of poetic usage of similar language, typified in Milton's identification of the "gems of heaven" as the night's "starry train" (Paradise Lost 4:646). Her refusal to assign blame, while it has often led critics to describe her as uncritical of slavery, is an important element in Wheatley's rhetorical strategy and certainly one of the reasons her poetry was published in the first place. 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. Wheatley does not reflect on this complicity except to see Africa as a land, however beautiful and Eden-like, devoid of the truth. Another thing that a reader will notice is the meter of this poem. 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. Though a slave when the book was published in England, she was set free based on its success. This idea sums up a gratitude whites might have expected, or demanded, from a Christian slave. Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site. Encyclopedia.com. From the 1770s, when Phillis Wheatley first began to publish her poems, until the present day, criticism has been heated over whether she was a genius or an imitator, a cultural heroine or a pathetic victim, a woman of letters or an item of curiosity. Research the history of slavery in America and why it was an important topic for the founders in their planning for the country. This creates a rhythm very similar to a heartbeat. Thomas Jefferson's scorn (reported by Robinson), however, famously articulates the common low opinion of African capability: "Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Whately, but it could not produce a poet. Some readers, looking for protests against slavery in her work, have been disenchanted upon instead finding poems like "On Being Brought from Africa to America" to reveal a meek acceptance of her slave fate. Text is very difficult to understand. On Being Brought from Africa to America was written by Phillis Wheatley and published in her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773. Wheatley explains her humble origins in "On Being Brought from Africa to America" and then promptly turns around to exhort her audience to accept African equality in the realm of spiritual matters, and by implication, in intellectual matters (the poem being in the form of neoclassical couplets). What type of figurative language does Wheatley use in most of her poems . The poem consists of: Phillis Wheatley was abducted from her home in Africa at the age of 7 (in 1753) and taken by ship to America, where she ended up as the property of one John Wheatley, of Boston. The reversal of inside and outside, black and white has further significance because the unredeemed have also become the enslaved, although they are slaves to sin rather than to an earthly master. The speaker of this poem says that her abduction from Africa and subsequent enslavement in America was an act of mercy, in that it allowed her to learn about Christianity and ultimately be saved. It is organized into four couplets, which are two rhymed lines of verse. Shuffelton also surmises why Native American cultural production was prized while black cultural objects were not. The world as an awe-inspiring reflection of God's will, rather than human will, was a Christian doctrine that Wheatley saw in evidence around her and was the reason why, despite the current suffering of her race, she could hope for a heavenly future. 372-73. 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