Could the United States be a land of freedom and condone slavery? In 1773, Poems of Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared. 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. Indeed, at the time, blacks were thought to be spiritually evil and thus incapable of salvation because of their skin color. Because she was physically frail, she did light housework in the Wheatley household and was a favorite companion to Susanna. More on Wheatley's work from PBS, including illustrations of her poems and a portraitof the poet herself. Like many Christian poets before her, Wheatley's poem also conducts its religious argument through its aesthetic attainment. She believes that her discovery of God, after being forcibly enslaved in America, was the best thing that couldve happened to her. As her poem indicates, with the help of God, she has overcome, and she exhorts others that they may do the same. 61, 1974, pp. Pagan The first allusion occurs in the word refin'd. This phrase can be read as Wheatley's effort to have her privileged white audience understand for just a moment what it is like to be singled out as "diabolic." 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. Poetry for Students. It also talks about how they were looked at differently because of the difference in the color of their skin. Lastly, the speaker reminds her audience, mostly consisting of white people, that Black people can be Christian people, too. 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). Mistakes do not get in the way of understanding. answer choices. Both races inherit the barbaric blackness of sin. . Retrieved February 23, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/being-brought-africa-america. Merriam-Webster defines a pagan as "a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main world religions." The speaker begins by declaring that it was a blessing, a free act of God's compassion that brought her out of Africa, a pagan land. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Carretta and Gould note the problems of being a literate black in the eighteenth century, having more than one culture or language. Began Simple, Curse window.__mirage2 = {petok:"cajhZ6VFWaUJG3veQ.det3ab.5UanemT4_W4vp5lfYs-86400-0"}; It is organized into four couplets, which are two rhymed lines of verse. Wheatley was a member of the Old South Congregational Church of Boston. Read Wheatley's poems and letters and compare her concerns, in an essay, to those of other African American authors of any period. It is organized into rhyming couplets and has two distinct sections. In alluding to the two passages from Isaiah, she intimates certain racial implications that are hardly conventional interpretations of these passages. Colonized people living under an imposed culture can have two identities. 235 lessons. 257-77. That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. She was in a sinful and ignorant state, not knowing God or Christ. In this regard, one might pertinently note that Wheatley's voice in this poem anticipates the ministerial role unwittingly assumed by an African-American woman in the twenty-third chapter of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (1859), in which Candace's hortatory words intrinsically reveal what male ministers have failed to teach about life and love. She demonstrates in the course of her art that she is no barbarian from a "Pagan land" who raises Cain (in the double sense of transgressing God and humanity). 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). The fur is highly valued). Such couplets were usually closed and full sentences, with parallel structure for both halves. According to Merriam-Webster, benighted has two definitions. Later rebellions in the South were often fostered by black Christian ministers, a tradition that was epitomized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights movement. The Wheatleys had to flee Boston when the British occupied the city. She was taught theology, English, Latin, Greek, mythology, literature, geography, and astronomy. 8May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train. 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." Explore "On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley. In this poem Wheatley finds various ways to defeat assertions alleging distinctions between the black and the white races (O'Neale). Rigsby, Gregory, "Form and Content in Phillis Wheatley's Elegies," in College Language Association Journal, Vol. This essay investigates Jefferson's scientific inquiry into racial differences and his conclusions that Native Americans are intelligent and that African Americans are not. The narrator saying that "[He's] the darker brother" (Line 2). I would definitely recommend Study.com to my colleagues. She describes Africa as a "Pagan land." But the women are on the march. Remember, 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 brief poem Harlem introduces themes that run throughout Langston Hughess volume Montage of a Dream Deferred and throughout his, Langston Hughes 19021967 Susanna Wheatley, her mistress, became a second mother to her, and Wheatley adopted her mistress's religion as her own, thus winning praise in the Boston of her day as being both an intelligent and spiritual being. 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. Jefferson, a Founding Father and thinker of the new Republic, felt that blacks were too inferior to be citizens. , "On Being Brought from Africa to America," in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. Back then lynching was very common and not a good thing. These were pre-Revolutionary days, and Wheatley imbibed the excitement of the era, recording the Boston Massacre in a 1770 poem. She notes that the poem is "split between Africa and America, embodying the poet's own split consciousness as African American." The image of night is used here primarily in a Christian sense to convey ignorance or sin, but it might also suggest skin color, as some readers feel. Whilst there is no mention of the physical voyage or abduction or emotional stress, the experience came about through the compassion of God. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem. Currently, the nature of your relationship to Dreher is negative, contemptuous. Phillis Wheatley uses very particular language in this poem. The first is "overtaken by darkness or night," and the second is "existing in a state of intellectual, moral, or social darkness." For example, her speaker claims that it was "mercy" that took her out of "my Pagan land" and into America where she was enslaved. 1'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land. Recent critics looking at the whole body of her work have favorably established the literary quality of her poems and her unique historical achievement. WikiProject Linguistics may be able to help recruit an expert. Spelling and grammar is mostly accurate. Remember: This is just a sample from a fellow student. This racial myth and the mention of slavery in the Bible led Europeans to consider it no crime to enslave blacks, for they were apparently a marked and evil race. In this sense, white and black people are utterly equal before God, whose authority transcends the paltry earthly authorities who have argued for the inequality of the two races. Being made a slave is one thing, but having white Christians call black a diabolic dye, suggesting that black people are black because they're evil, is something else entirely. John Peters eventually abandoned Wheatley and she lived in abject poverty, working in a boardinghouse, until her death on December 5, 1784. 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. (Thus, anyone hearing the poem read aloud would also have been aware of the implied connection.) She does not, however, stipulate exactly whose act of mercy it was that saved her, God's or man's. 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. 15 chapters | HISTORICAL CONTEXT 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. Africa, the physical continent, cannot be pagan. However, in the speaker's case, the reason for this failure was a simple lack of awareness. In Jackson State Review, the African American author and feminist Alice Walker makes a similar remark about her own mother, and about the creative black woman in general: "Whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden.". PDF. Iambic pentameter is traditional in English poetry, and Wheatley's mostly white and educated audience would be very familiar with it. She addresses Christians, which in her day would have included most important people in America, in government, education, and the clergy. First, the reader can imagine how it feels to hear a comment like that. 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. The use of th and refind rather than the and refined in this line is an example of syncope. To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name Avis, Aged One Year. Figurative language is used in literature like poetry, drama, prose and even speeches. She now offers readers an opportunity to participate in their own salvation: The speaker, carefully aligning herself with those readers who will understand the subtlety of her allusions and references, creates a space wherein she and they are joined against a common antagonist: the "some" who "view our sable race with scornful eye" (5). '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. 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." Line 2 explains why she considers coming to America to have been good fortune. Although her intended audience is not black, she still refers to "our sable race." On the other hand, by bringing up Cain, she confronts the popular European idea that the black race sprang from Cain, who murdered his brother Abel and was punished by having a mark put on him as an outcast. to America") was published by Archibald Bell of London. She wants them all to know that she was brought by mercy to America and to religion. She was planning a second volume of poems, dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, when the Revolutionary War broke out. In "On Being Brought from Africa to America," Wheatley identifies herself first and foremost as a Christian, rather than as African or American, and asserts everyone's equality in God's sight. A soul in darkness to Wheatley means someone unconverted. One of Wheatley's better known pieces of poetry is "On being brought from Africa to America.". HubPages is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. 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. Her slave masters encouraged her to read and write. , 92-93, 97, 101, 115. 121-35. Teacher Editions with classroom activities for all 1699 titles we cover. Figurative language is used in this poem. The liberty she takes here exceeds her additions to the biblical narrative paraphrased in her verse "Isaiah LXIII. The speaker makes a claim, an observation, implying that black people are seen as no better than animals - a sable - to be treated as merchandise and nothing more. 1753-1784. 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. In the event that what is at stake has not been made evident enough, Wheatley becomes most explicit in the concluding lines. There is a good example of an allusion in the last lines when the poet refers to Cain. She was about twenty years old, black, and a woman. Wheatley gave birth to three children, all of whom died. It seems most likely that Wheatley refers to the sinful quality of any person who has not seen the light of God. 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). (February 23, 2023). Phillis Wheatley. 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). Line 5 boldly brings out the fact of racial prejudice in America. The final and highly ironic demonstration of otherness, of course, would be one's failure to understand the very poem that enacts this strategy. Particularly apt is the clever syntax of the last two lines of the poem: "Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain / May be refin'd." The pair of ten-syllable rhymesthe heroic coupletwas thought to be the closest English equivalent to classical meter. 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." This appreciative attitude is a humble acknowledgment of the virtues of a Christian country like America. Despite what might first come to someones mind who knows anything about slavery in the United States, she saw it as an act of kindness. From the start, critics have had difficulty disentangling the racial and literary issues. During her time with the Wheatley family, Phillis showed a keen talent for learning and was soon proficient in English. Although she was an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. It is about a slave who cannot eat at the so-called "dinner table" because of the color of his skin. 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. Wheatley admits this, and in one move, the balance of the poem seems shattered.