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It has a steady rhythm, the classic iambic pentameter of five beats per line giving it a traditional pace when reading: Twas mer / cy brought / me from / my Pag / an land, Taught my / benight / ed soul / to und / erstand. In addition, their color is consider evil. 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. 215-33. Not an adoring one, but a fair one. "The Privileged and Impoverished Life of Phillis Wheatley" 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. Irony is also common in neoclassical poetry, with the building up and then breaking down of expectations, and this occurs in lines 7 and 8. Began Simple, Curse Her slave masters encouraged her to read and write. Parks, Carole A., "Phillis Wheatley Comes Home," in Black World, Vo. The masters, on the other hand, claimed that the Bible recorded and condoned the practice of slavery. Either of these implications would have profoundly disturbed the members of the Old South Congregational Church in Boston, which Wheatley joined in 1771, had they detected her "ministerial" appropriation of the authority of scripture. She was about twenty years old, black, and a woman. Line 5 does represent a shift in the mood/tone of the poem. The way the content is organized. being Brought from Africa to America." In the poem "Wheatley chose to use the meditation as the form for her contemplation of her enslavement." (Frazier) In the poem "On being Brought from Africa to America." Phillis Wheatley uses different poetic devices like figurative language, form, and irony to express the hypocrisy of American racism. The Lord's attendant train is the retinue of the chosen referred to in the preceding allusion to Isaiah in Wheatley's poem. There are poems in which she idealizes the African climate as Eden, and she constantly identifies herself in her poems as the Afric muse. themes in this piece are religion, freedom, and equality, https://poemanalysis.com/phillis-wheatley/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america/, Poems covered in the Educational Syllabus. Africa, the physical continent, cannot be pagan. 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). assessments in his edited volume Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. 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." Religion was the main interest of Wheatley's life, inseparable from her poetry and its themes. 1-8." Indeed, at the time, blacks were thought to be spiritually evil and thus incapable of salvation because of their skin color. Notably, it was likely that Wheatley, like many slaves, had been sold by her own countrymen. 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, Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. These were pre-Revolutionary days, and Wheatley imbibed the excitement of the era, recording the Boston Massacre in a 1770 poem. Read the full text of On Being Brought from Africa to America, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, "The Privileged and Impoverished Life of Phillis Wheatley". Phillis Wheatley Poems & Facts | What Was Phillis Wheatley Known For? The last four lines take a surprising turn; suddenly, the reader is made to think. In just eight lines, Wheatley describes her attitude toward her condition of enslavementboth coming from Africa to America, and the culture that considers the fact that she is a Black woman so negatively. Wheatley is saying that her soul was not enlightened and she did not know about Christianity and the need for redemption. 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. She grew increasingly critical of slavery and wrote several letters in opposition to it. Have a specific question about this poem? 27, 1992, pp. Poem Solutions Limited International House, 24 Holborn Viaduct,London, EC1A 2BN, United Kingdom, Discover and learn about the greatest poetry ever straight to your inbox, Discover and learn about the greatest poetry, straight to your inbox. To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member. Through the argument that she and others of her race can be saved, Wheatley slyly establishes that blacks are equal to whites. She did light housework because of her frailty and often visited and conversed in the social circles of Boston, the pride of her masters. This is why she can never love tyranny. Baker offers readings of such authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange as examples of his theoretical framework, explaining that African American women's literature is concerned with a search for spiritual identity. Line 2 explains why she considers coming to America to have been good fortune. She was baptized a Christian and began publishing her own poetry in her early teens. Then, there's the matter of where things scattered to, and what we see when we find them. Crowds came to hear him speak, crowds erotically charged, the masses he once called his only bride. This simple and consistent pattern makes sense for Wheatleys straightforward message. The "authentic" Christian is the one who "gets" the puns and double entendres and ironies, the one who is able to participate fully in Wheatley's rhetorical performance. In regards to the meter, Wheatley makes use of the most popular pattern, iambic pentameter. We respond to all comments too, giving you the answers you need. 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. An allusion is an indirect reference to, including but not limited to, an idea, event, or person. 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. She did not seek redemption and did not even know that she needed it. ." 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. The refinement the poet invites the reader to assess is not merely the one referred to by Isaiah, the spiritual refinement through affliction. The poem describes Wheatley's experience as a young girl who was enslaved and brought to the American colonies in 1761. The idea that the speaker was brought to America by some force beyond her power to fight it (a sentiment reiterated from "To the University of Cambridge") once more puts her in an authoritative position. It is organized into rhyming couplets and has two distinct sections. Once again, Wheatley co-opts the rhetoric of the other. '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. 233 Words1 Page. 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. But in line 5, there is a shift in the poem. Stock illustration from Getty Images. 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. Please continue to help us support the fight against dementia with Alzheimer's Research Charity. With almost a third of her poetry written as elegies on the deaths of various people, Wheatley was probably influenced by the Puritan funeral elegy of colonial America, explains Gregory Rigsby in the College Language Association Journal. That theres a God, that theres a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. It is not mere doctrine or profession that saves. She places everyone on the same footing, in spite of any polite protestations related to racial origins. That this self-validating woman was a black slave makes this confiscation of ministerial role even more singular. A strong reminder in line 7 is aimed at those who see themselves as God-fearing - Christians - and is a thinly veiled manifesto, somewhat ironic, declaring that all people are equal in the eyes of God, capable of joining the angelic host. She had been enslaved for most of her life at this point, and upon her return to America and close to the deaths of her owners, she was freed from slavery. 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. 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. The difficulties she may have encountered in America are nothing to her, compared to possibly having remained unsaved. "In every human breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Lov, Gwendolyn Brooks 19172000 Some view our sable race with scornful eye. It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. On Being Brought from Africa to America. In this instance, however, she uses the very argument that has been used to justify the existence of black slavery to argue against it: the connection between Africans and Cain, the murderer of Abel. Tracing the fight for equality and womens rights through poetry. According to Merriam-Webster, benighted has two definitions. The first is "overtaken by darkness or night," and the second is "existing in a state of intellectual, moral, or social darkness." Phillis lived for a time with the married Wheatley daughter in Providence, but then she married a free black man from Boston, John Peters, in 1778. answer choices. 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). The first two children died in infancy, and the third died along with Wheatley herself in December 1784 in poverty in a Boston boardinghouse. 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). For Wheatley's management of the concept of refinement is doubly nuanced in her poem. Like them (the line seems to suggest), "Once I redemption neither sought nor knew" (4; my emphasis). Almost immediately after her arrival in America, she was sold to the Wheatley family of Boston, Massachusetts. It is organized into four couplets, which are two rhymed lines of verse. 7Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain. She was instructed in Evangelical Christianity from her arrival and was a devout practicing Christian. On this note, the speaker segues into the second stanza, having laid out her ("Christian") position and established the source of her rhetorical authority. The resulting verse sounds pompous and inauthentic to the modern ear, one of the problems that Wheatley has among modern audiences. Postmodernism, bell hooks & Systems of Oppression, Introduction to Gerard Manley Hopkins: Devout Catholicism and Sprung Rhythm, Leslie Marmon Silko | Biography, Poems, & Books, My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass | Summary & Analysis, George Eliot's Silly Novels by Lady Novelists: Summary & Analysis, The Author to Her Book by Anne Bradstreet | Summary & Analysis, Ruined by Lynn Nottage | Play, Characters, and Analysis, Neuromancer by William Gibson | Summary, Characters & Analysis, The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges | Summary & Analysis. This poem also uses imperative language, which is language used to command or to tell another character or the reader what to do. Q. 103-104. This style of poetry hardly appeals today because poets adhering to it strove to be objective and used elaborate and decorous language thought to be elevated. Wheatley wrote in neoclassical couplets of iambic pentameter, following the example of the most popular English poet of the times, Alexander Pope. Wheatley may also cleverly suggest that the slaves' affliction includes their work in making dyes and in refining sugarcane (Levernier, "Wheatley's"), but in any event her biblical allusion subtly validates her argument against those individuals who attribute the notion of a "diabolic die" to Africans only. The debate continues, and it has become more informed, as based on the complete collections of Wheatley's writings and on more scholarly investigations of her background. "On Being Brought From Africa to America" is eight lines long, a single stanza, and four rhyming couplets formed into a block. 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. Phillis Wheatley was born in Gambia, Africa, in 1753. In these ways, then, the biblical and aesthetic subtleties of Wheatley's poem make her case about refinement. This question was discussed by the Founding Fathers and the first American citizens as well as by people in Europe. "On Being Brought from Africa to America" is a statement of pride and comfort in who she is, though she gives the credit to God for the blessing. Endnotes. Descriptions are unrelated to the literary elements. HISTORY of the CHRISTIAN CHURCH 1 1 Schaff, Philip, History of the Christian Church, (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.) 1997. Wheatley is guiding her readers to ask: How could good Christian people treat other human beings in such a horrific way? 92-93, 97, 101, 115. In 1773, Poems of Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared. both answers. The poem was published in 1773 when it was included in her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. . The brief poem Harlem introduces themes that run throughout Langston Hughess volume Montage of a Dream Deferred and throughout his, Langston Hughes 19021967 Additional information about Wheatley's life, upbringing, and education, including resources for further research. She does more here than remark that representatives of the black race may be refined into angelic mattermade, as it were, spiritually white through redemptive Christianizing. This could explain why "On Being Brought from Africa to America," also written in neoclassical rhyming couplets but concerning a personal topic, is now her most popular. Hers is a seemingly conservative statement that becomes highly ambiguous upon analysis, transgressive rather than compliant. Taking Offense Religion, Art, and Visual Culture in Plural Configurations His professional engagements have involved extensive travel in North and South America, Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and in 1981 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Foreign Languages Institute, Beijing. It is supremely ironic and tragic that she died in poverty and neglect in the city of Boston; yet she left as her legacy the proof of what she asserts in her poems, that she was a free spirit who could speak with authority and equality, regardless of origins or social constraints. 3That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: 4Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. It is also pointed out that Wheatley perhaps did not complain of slavery because she was a pampered house servant. Speaking for God, the prophet at one point says, "Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction" (Isaiah 48:10). 248-57. HubPages is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. To the University of Cambridge, in New England. Here, Wheatley is speaking directly to her readers and imploring them to remember that all human beings, regardless of the color of their skin, are able to be saved and live a Christian life. Explore "On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley. The result is that those who would cast black Christians as other have now been placed in a like position. 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. In alluding to the two passages from Isaiah, she intimates certain racial implications that are hardly conventional interpretations of these passages. ", In the last two lines, Wheatley reminds her audience that all people, regardless of race, can be Christian and be saved. Form two groups and hold a debate on the topic. Wheatley's mistress encouraged her writing and helped her publish her first pieces in newspapers and pamphlets. "On Being Brought From Africa to America" is an unusual poem. Following are the main themes. "On Being Brought from Africa to America." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, shorter 9th ed., Vol.1, W. W Norton & Company, 2017, pp. That there's a God, that there's a Slaves felt that Christianity validated their equality with their masters. These ideas of freedom and the natural rights of human beings were so potent that they were seized by all minorities and ethnic groups in the ensuing years and applied to their own cases. She begin the poem with establishing her experience with slavery as a beneficial thing to her life. They are walking upward to the sunlit plains where the thinking people rule. 2002 . Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. Wheatley was in the midst of the historic American Revolution in the Boston of the 1770s. This poem has an interesting shift in tone. 814 Words. This is followed by an interview with drama professor, scholar and performer Sharrell Luckett, author of the books Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches and African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity. FURT, Wheatley, Phillis This poetic demonstration of refinement, of "blooming graces" in both a spiritual and a cultural sense, is the "triumph in [her] song" entitled "On Being Brought from Africa to America.". By making religion a matter between God and the individual soul, an Evangelical belief, she removes the discussion from social opinion or reference. Get LitCharts A +. Wheatley's shift from first to third person in the first and second stanzas is part of this approach. Cain - son of Adam and Eve, who murdered his brother Abel through jealousy. As did "To the University of Cambridge," this poem begins with the sentiment that the speaker's removal from Africa was an act of "mercy," but in this context it becomes Wheatley's version of the "fortunate fall"; the speaker's removal to the colonies, despite the circumstances, is perceived as a blessing. She wrote about her pride in her African heritage and religion. WikiProject Linguistics may be able to help recruit an expert. succeed. Each poem has a custom designed teaching point about poetic elements and forms. Nevertheless, in her association of spiritual and aesthetic refinement, she also participates in an extensive tradition of religious poets, like George Herbert and Edward Taylor, who fantasized about the correspondence between their spiritual reconstruction and the aesthetic grace of their poetry. She was so celebrated and famous in her day that she was entertained in London by nobility and moved among intellectuals with respect. al. Wheatley continues her stratagem by reminding the audience of more universal truths than those uttered by the "some." Now the speaker states that some people treat Black people badly and look upon them scornfully. Of course, her life was very different. Metaphor. 1 Phillis Wheatley, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," in Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, ed. it is to apply internationally. The effect is to place the "some" in a degraded position, one they have created for themselves through their un-Christian hypocrisy. May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Benjamin Rush, a prominent abolitionist, holds that Wheatley's "singular genius and accomplishments are such as not only do honor to her sex, but to human nature." She meditates on her specific case of conversion in the first half of the poem and considers her conversion as a general example for her whole race in the second half. 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. She is both in America and actively seeking redemption because God himself has willed it. Those who have contended that Wheatley had no thoughts on slavery have been corrected by such poems as the one to the Earl of Dartmouth, the British secretary of state for North America. Judging from a full reading of her poems, it does not seem likely that she herself ever accepted such a charge against her race. In effect, both poems serve as litmus tests for true Christianity while purporting to affirm her redemption. Born c. 1753 She wants them all to know that she was brought by mercy to America and to religion. 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. Phillis Wheatley was born in Africa in 1753 and enslaved in America. ." The multiple meanings of the line "Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain" (7), with its ambiguous punctuation and double entendres, have become a critical commonplace in analyses of the poem. Even Washington was reluctant to use black soldiers, as William H. Robinson points out in Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. If Wheatley's image of "angelic train" participates in the heritage of such poetic discourse, then it also suggests her integration of aesthetic authority and biblical authority at this final moment of her poem. Speaking of one of his visions, the prophet observes, "I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple" (Isaiah 6:1). The impact of the racial problems in Revolutionary America on Wheatley's reputation should not be underrated. On Being Brought From Africa To America By Phillis Wheatley 974 Words 4 Pages To understand the real meaning of a literary work, we need to look into the meaning of each word and why the author has chosen these particular words and not different ones. 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). POEM TEXT Particularly apt is the clever syntax of the last two lines of the poem: "Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain / May be refin'd." 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. This condition ironically coexisted with strong antislavery sentiment among the Christian Evangelical and Whig populations of the city, such as the Wheatleys, who themselves were slaveholders. 'Twas mercy brought me from my The justification was given that the participants in a republican government must possess the faculty of reason, and it was widely believed that Africans were not fully human or in possession of adequate reason. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. 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 voice is an important feature of her poem. "On Being Brought from Africa to America" finally changes from a meditation to a sermon when Wheatley addresses an audience in her exhortation in the last two lines. The lady doth protest too much, methinks is a famous quote used in Shakespeares Hamlet. //]]>. Another instance of figurative language is in line 2, where the speaker talks about her soul being "benighted." She is grateful for being made a slave, so she can receive the dubious benefits of the civilization into which she has been transplanted. The European colonization of the Americas inspired a desire for cheap labor for the development of the land. Wheatley's English publisher, Archibald Bell, for instance, advertised that Wheatley was "one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted Genius, that the world ever produced." The power of the poem of heroic couplets is that it builds upon its effect, with each couplet completing a thought, creating the building blocks of a streamlined argument. They have become, within the parameters of the poem at least, what they once abhorredbenighted, ignorant, lost in moral darkness, unenlightenedbecause they are unable to accept the redemption of Africans. The need for a postcolonial criticism arose in the twentieth century, as centuries of European political domination of foreign lands were coming to a close. 2, Summer 1993, pp. In the poem, she gives thanks for having been brought to America, where she was raised to be a Christian. by Phillis Wheatley. Cain is a biblical character that kills his brother, an example of the evil of humanity. This is an eight-line poem written in iambic pentameter. '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. Instant PDF downloads. Barbara Evans. Being brought from Africa to America, otherwise known as the transatlantic slave trade, was a horrific and inhumane experience for millions of African people. The latter is implied, at least religiously, in the last lines. Some view our sable race with scornful eye. A discussionof Phillis Wheatley's controversial status within the African American community. A resurgence of interest in Wheatley during the 1960s and 1970s, with the rise of African American studies, led again to mixed opinions, this time among black readers. The speaker, a slave brought from Africa to America by whites magnifies the discrepancy between the whites' perception of blacks and the reality of the situation. This poem is more about the power of God than it is about equal rights, but it is still touched on. This could be a reference to anything, including but not limited to an idea, theme, concept, or even another work of literature. However, in the speaker's case, the reason for this failure was a simple lack of awareness. This, she thinks, means that anyone, no matter their skin tone or where theyre from, can find God and salvation. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., claims in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley that Boston contained about a thousand African Americans out of a population of 15,520. 2 Wheatley, "On the Death of General Wooster," in Call and Response, p. 103.. 3 Horton, "The Slave's Complaint," in Call and Response, pp.