Excerpt

Excerpt from Poems on various subjects, religious and moral, by Phillis Wheatley

Can Afric's muse forgetful prove?
Or can such friendship fail to move
A tender human heart?
Immortal Friendship laurel-crown'd
The smiling Graces all surround
With ev'ry heav'nly Art.

To the Honourable T. H. Esq; on the Death
of his Daughter.

WHILE deep you mourn beneath the cypress-shade
The hand of Death, and your dear daughter laid
In dust, whose absence gives your tears to flow,
And racks your bosom with incessant woe,
Let Recollection take a tender part,
Assuage the raging tortures of your heart,
Still the wild tempest of tumultuous grief,
And pour the heav'nly nectar of relief:
Suspend the sigh, dear Sir, and check the groan,
Divinely bright your daughter's Virtues shone:
How free from scornful pride her gentle mind,
Which ne'er its aid to indigence declin'd!
Expanding free, it sought the means to prove
Unfailing charity, unbounded love!
She unreluctant flies to see no more
Her dear-lov'd parents on earth's dusky shore:
Impatient heav'n's resplendent goal to gain,
She with swift progress cuts the azure plain,
Where grief subsides, where changes are no more,
And life's tumultuous billows cease to roar;
She leaves her earthly mansion for the skies,
Where new creations feast her wond'ring eyes.
To heav'n's high mandate cheerfully resign'd
She mounts, and leaves the rolling globe behind;
She, who late wish'd that Leonard might return,
Has ceas'd to languish, and forgot to mourn;
To the same high empyreal mansions come,
She joins her spouse, and smiles upon the tomb:
And thus I hear her from the realms above:
"Lo! this the kingdom of celestial love!
"Could ye, fond parents, see our present bliss,
"How soon would you each sigh, each fear dismiss?
"Amidst unutter'd pleasures whilst I play
"In the fair sunshine of celestial day,
"As far as grief affects an happy soul
"So far doth grief my better mind controul,
"To see on earth my aged parents mourn,
"And secret wish for T-----! to return:
"Let brighter scenes your ev'ning-hours employ:
"Converse with heav'n, and taste the promis'd joy"

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Explanation

Detailed Explanation of Phillis Wheatley’s Elegy to T. H. Esq; on the Death of His Daughter

Context & Background

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) was the first published African American poet and one of the most remarkable literary figures of the 18th century. Enslaved as a child and brought to Boston, she was educated by her enslavers, the Wheatley family, and became a prodigious writer, engaging with classical, biblical, and neoclassical traditions. Her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was groundbreaking, challenging racial and gendered assumptions about intellectual capability.

This poem is an elegiac address to an unnamed gentleman (T. H. Esq;) upon the death of his daughter. Elegy was a popular 18th-century form, often blending personal grief with Christian consolation. Wheatley’s poem reflects both neoclassical conventions (allusions to Greek/Roman mythology, structured meter) and Christian eschatology (the afterlife, divine providence). Notably, as an enslaved woman writing to a white patron, Wheatley navigates social hierarchies while asserting her own poetic authority.

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Themes

1. Grief & Consolation

   • The poem begins with the father’s unrelenting sorrow ("incessant woe," "wild tempest of tumultuous grief") but shifts toward heavenly solace, urging him to replace mourning with faith in divine justice.
   • The daughter’s virtuous life is framed as her passport to heaven, where she now experiences "unutter’d pleasures" and "celestial day."

2. Christian Resignation & Providence

   • The daughter’s death is not a tragedy but a divine summons ("To heav'n's high mandate cheerfully resign’d"). Wheatley emphasizes surrender to God’s will, a common Puritan/Evangelical theme.
   • The afterlife is depicted as a place of perfect harmony ("where grief subsides, where changes are no more"), contrasting with earthly suffering.

3. Virtue as Immortality

   • The daughter’s charity and humility ("free from scornful pride," "unfailing charity") elevate her soul. Wheatley suggests that moral excellence transcends death.
   • The poem aligns with neoclassical ideals of virtue (e.g., the "laurel-crown’d" friendship in the opening stanza), but Christianizes them.

4. Parental Love & Separation

   • The father’s grief is sympathetic but futile—his daughter is now beyond earthly sorrow. The poem gently reproves excessive mourning ("Suspend the sigh, dear Sir, and check the groan").
   • The daughter’s voice from heaven (apostrophe) reassures her parents, but also reveals her lingering concern for them, creating a bittersweet tension.

5. Slavery & Freedom (Subtextual)

   • While not explicit, Wheatley’s status as an enslaved poet colors the text. The daughter’s liberation in death ("She leaves her earthly mansion for the skies") may subtly parallel Wheatley’s own desire for spiritual freedom.
   • The mention of "Leonard" (likely the daughter’s husband, possibly a reference to a real or symbolic figure) and the wish for his return could evoke separation and longing, themes resonant with enslaved families torn apart.

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Literary Devices & Structure

1. Neoclassical & Biblical Allusions

   • "Laurel-crown’d": The laurel wreath symbolizes poetic or heroic honor (Apollo’s crown in Greek myth). Wheatley claims Afric’s Muse (herself) is worthy of this tradition.
   • "The smiling Graces": The Charites (Greek goddesses of charm) surround Friendship, personified as divine. This elevates the poem’s moral and artistic ambition.
   • "Cypress-shade": The cypress tree was a funerary symbol in classical and Renaissance poetry (e.g., Milton’s Lycidas).
   • "Empyreal mansions": A miltonic phrase (from Paradise Lost), describing heaven’s highest realm.

2. Personification & Apostrophe

   • Recollection is personified as a comforter ("Let Recollection take a tender part"), acting to "assuage" grief.
   • The daughter speaks from heaven ("Lo! this the kingdom of celestial love!"), a dramatic shift that humanizes the afterlife and offers direct consolation.

3. Contrast & Juxtaposition

   • Earth vs. Heaven:
     • Earth: "dusky shore," "tumultuous billows," "rolling globe" (chaos, sorrow).
     • Heaven: "resplendent goal," "azure plain," "fair sunshine" (serenity, light).
   • Grief vs. Joy: The father’s mourning is temporal; the daughter’s joy is eternal.

4. Metaphor & Imagery

   • "Heav'nly nectar of relief": Grief is a physical wound; divine comfort is a healing drink (nectar = ambrosia, food of the gods).
   • "Cut the azure plain": The soul’s ascent is like a ship sailing swiftly through the sky (azure = blue, associated with heaven).
   • "Life’s tumultuous billows": Life’s hardships are stormy waves, now calmed in death.

5. Meter & Rhyme

   • Written in heroic couplets (rhyming iambic pentameter), a neoclassical form used by Pope and Dryden. This lends dignity and restraint to the emotion.
   • The rhythm mimics grief’s ebb and flow—some lines are smoother (e.g., "She leaves her earthly mansion for the skies"), while others are more halting (e.g., "And racks your bosom with incessant woe").

6. Irony & Paradox

   • The daughter’s death is her triumph ("Impatient heav'n's resplendent goal to gain").
   • Her love for her parents becomes a source of sorrow in heaven ("As far as grief affects an happy soul"), a paradoxical idea that earthly attachments persist even in paradise.

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Significance & Interpretation

1. Wheatley’s Poetic Authority

   • The opening stanza asserts her right to poetic tradition ("Can Afric’s muse forgetful prove?"). As a Black woman in a white-dominated literary world, she challenges racial stereotypes by demonstrating mastery of European forms.
   • The poem transcends its occasion—while ostensibly a condolence, it becomes a meditation on mortality, virtue, and divine order.

2. Christian Universalism vs. Racial Particularity

   • Wheatley’s Christianity is inclusive—the daughter’s virtue is colorblind, aligning with Wheatley’s own arguments for spiritual equality (e.g., her famous line, "Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train").
   • Yet, the poem’s elevated language may also reflect social constraints—as an enslaved woman, she must appeal to white patrons while subtly asserting her own voice.

3. The Afterlife as Liberation

   • The daughter’s joyful ascent can be read as a metaphor for freedom. For Wheatley, who was legally property, the idea of a soul unshackled in death would have been profoundly resonant.
   • The line "She unreluctant flies" suggests willing escape, contrasting with the forced migration of enslaved Africans.

4. Gender & Virtue

   • The daughter is praised for traditional feminine virtues (charity, gentleness, marital devotion). Yet, her active ascent to heaven ("cuts the azure plain") gives her agency in death.
   • Wheatley, as a woman poet, redefines female excellence—not just domestic piety, but intellectual and spiritual strength.

5. Historical & Literary Legacy

   • This poem exemplifies early African American literature’s engagement with European forms while infusing them with Black experience.
   • It paved the way for later Black writers (e.g., Jupiter Hammon, Paul Laurence Dunbar) who used elegy to process loss and assert dignity.
   • Wheatley’s subtle resistance—claiming a place in the poetic canon while critiquing slavery’s injustices—makes her work foundational to American literary history.

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Conclusion: The Poem’s Core Message

Wheatley’s elegy is both a personal consolation and a theological statement. She urges the grieving father to replace sorrow with faith, portraying death not as an end but as a transformation into divine glory. The daughter’s virtuous life earns her heaven, where she now intercedes for her parents’ peace.

Yet, beneath the neoclassical polish and Christian piety, the poem hints at deeper longings—for freedom, reunion, and recognition. Wheatley, writing from bondage, imagines a realm where no earthly hierarchies persist, and where the soul, like her poetry, transcends its origins.

In this way, the poem is not just about a daughter’s death, but about the possibility of liberation—for the deceased, for the mourner, and, implicitly, for Wheatley herself.

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Questions

Question 1

The poem’s opening stanza ("Can Afric's muse forgetful prove?...") serves primarily to:

A. Assert the poet’s authority within a literary tradition that historically excluded her, while framing the elegy as an act of both artistic and moral duty.
B. Introduce a rhetorical question that underscores the universal power of grief, positioning the poet as a neutral observer of human suffering.
C. Invoke classical mythology to elevate the subject of the elegy to the status of a divine figure, thereby justifying the poem’s lofty diction.
D. Establish a contrast between the poet’s African heritage and the European literary forms she employs, highlighting the tension between cultural identity and artistic assimilation.
E. Prepare the reader for a meditation on the fleeting nature of earthly attachments, using the muse as a metaphor for the inevitability of loss.

Question 2

The daughter’s voice from heaven ("Lo! this the kingdom of celestial love!...") functions most significantly to:

A. Undermine the father’s grief by presenting the afterlife as a realm of such overwhelming joy that earthly sorrow becomes irrational.
B. Reinforce the neoclassical ideal of stoicism, where emotional restraint is framed as the highest virtue in the face of loss.
C. Introduce a paradox whereby the daughter’s happiness in heaven is diminished by her lingering concern for her parents, thereby complicating the poem’s consolation.
D. Serve as a direct rebuttal to the poem’s earlier imagery of earthly chaos, replacing "tumultuous billows" with the "fair sunshine of celestial day."
E. Shift the poem’s tone from elegy to exhortation, transforming the daughter into a guide who not only comforts but actively instructs the living on how to grieve.

Question 3

The line "She unreluctant flies to see no more / Her dear-lov'd parents on earth's dusky shore" is most richly interpreted as:

A. An ambivalent celebration of liberation, where the daughter’s eager ascent to heaven is tinged with the pathos of permanent separation from those she loves.
B. A critique of parental attachment, suggesting that the daughter’s spiritual maturity requires her to sever emotional ties to her earthly family.
C. A reinforcement of Christian doctrine, wherein the soul’s willingness to depart reflects its purity and readiness for divine judgment.
D. A metaphor for the poet’s own aspirations, using the daughter’s flight as an allegory for Wheatley’s desire to transcend the constraints of her earthly condition.
E. An inversion of the elegy’s conventional focus on the mourner, redirecting sympathy toward the deceased, who must endure the pain of leaving her loved ones behind.

Question 4

The poem’s use of neoclassical devices (e.g., "laurel-crown’d," "the smiling Graces," "empyreal mansions") primarily serves to:

A. Align the poem with the aesthetic preferences of Wheatley’s white patrons, thereby securing her place within the literary canon of the time.
B. Create a tension between the poem’s Christian themes and its pagan imagery, forcing the reader to reconcile seemingly disparate traditions of consolation.
C. Elevate the daughter’s virtue to the level of mythological heroes, thereby emphasizing her exceptionalism as a figure worthy of poetic immortalization.
D. Mask the poem’s subversive undertones, using conventional forms to convey radical ideas about freedom and equality without overtly challenging the status quo.
E. Highlight the poet’s erudition, demonstrating her mastery of European literary traditions as a means of asserting intellectual parity with her contemporaries.

Question 5

The most defensible reading of the poem’s closing lines ("Let brighter scenes your ev'ning-hours employ: / Converse with heav'n, and taste the promis'd joy") is that they:

A. Represent a strategic pivot from personal grief to collective faith, wherein the poet subtly redefines the father’s loss as an opportunity for spiritual growth.
B. Offer a hollow consolation, revealing the limitations of religious faith when confronted with the finality of death.
C. Echo the neoclassical ideal of carpe diem, urging the father to replace mourning with a focus on the pleasures of the present moment.
D. Serve as a veiled critique of the father’s excessive grief, implying that his sorrow is a failure to trust in divine providence.
E. Function as a direct address to the reader, expanding the poem’s scope beyond the father’s personal tragedy to a universal meditation on mortality.

Solutions and Explanations

1) Correct answer: A

Why A is most correct: The opening stanza is a bold assertion of poetic authority in a tradition that systematically excluded Black voices. By invoking "Afric's muse" and questioning whether she could be "forgetful," Wheatley challenges racialized assumptions about her capacity for memory, artistry, and moral insight. The stanza also frames the elegy as an act of duty—both to the grieving father and to the broader literary tradition she is claiming. The reference to "immortal Friendship" and the "heav'nly Art" of the Graces ties her work to neoclassical ideals, but the act of tying these to an African muse is radically subversive. This dual function—asserting her place in the canon while fulfilling a moral obligation—makes A the most defensible answer.

Why the distractors are less supported:

• B: The stanza is not a neutral observation of grief but a self-conscious assertion of the poet’s role. The rhetorical question is less about universality and more about Wheatley’s specific positionality.
• C: While classical mythology is invoked, the primary purpose is not to elevate the daughter (who isn’t mentioned yet) but to elevate the poet herself.
• D: The stanza does not highlight tension between African heritage and European forms; it harmonizes them by claiming the muse as African while wielding European devices.
• E: The muse is not a metaphor for loss but for poetic memory and skill. The stanza is proactive, not meditative on fleetingness.

2) Correct answer: E

Why E is most correct: The daughter’s voice from heaven transforms the poem’s mode from passive elegy to active exhortation. She does not merely comfort ("Amidst unutter’d pleasures whilst I play") but instructs ("Let brighter scenes your ev'ning-hours employ"). This shift is critical: the daughter becomes a guide, urging her parents to participate in their own consolation by engaging with heaven ("Converse with heav'n"). The tone moves from lamentation to imperative, making E the strongest choice.

Why the distractors are less supported:

• A: While the afterlife’s joy is emphasized, the daughter’s speech does not undermine grief as irrational; it redirects it toward faith.
• B: The passage is not about stoicism (suppression of emotion) but about transformation—replacing grief with active spiritual engagement.
• C: The "paradox" of heavenly grief is present, but it is not the primary function of the daughter’s voice, which is more didactic than contradictory.
• D: The daughter’s speech does replace earthly imagery, but this is a means to an end—the end being instruction, not just contrast.

3) Correct answer: A

Why A is most correct: The line captures ambivalence: the daughter’s flight is "unreluctant" (eager, free), yet she leaves her "dear-lov’d parents" on a "dusky shore" (a term that evokes both earthly sorrow and, potentially, racialized darkness). The liberation is real, but so is the permanent separation. This duality—joy in freedom, sorrow in loss—is the line’s emotional core. A acknowledges both elements without reducing the line to a single interpretation.

Why the distractors are less supported:

• B: The line does not critique parental attachment; it acknowledges its pain while affirming the daughter’s ascent.
• C: While Christian doctrine is present, the line’s poetic richness lies in its emotional complexity, not just theological correctness.
• D: The line may resonate with Wheatley’s aspirations, but it is primarily about the daughter’s experience, not an allegory for the poet.
• E: The elegy does not redirect sympathy to the deceased; it balances the perspectives of the living and the dead.

4) Correct answer: B

Why B is most correct: The neoclassical devices create a deliberate tension between pagan imagery (Graces, laurel crowns, empyreal mansions) and Christian consolation (heaven, divine mandate, celestial love). The poem forces the reader to reconcile these traditions: the daughter’s virtue is extolled in mythological terms, yet her reward is a Christian afterlife. This syncretism is not just decorative; it reflects Wheatley’s negotiation of dual traditions—classical and Christian—as a means of bridging cultural divides. B captures this productive friction better than the other options.

Why the distractors are less supported:

• A: While patronage may be a factor, the devices are not merely about appeasing white audiences; they serve a thematic purpose.
• C: The daughter is not framed as a mythological hero but as a virtuous Christian soul; the classical references elevate the poem’s style, not her status.
• D: The devices do not mask subversion; the subversion is open in the act of an enslaved Black woman commanding classical tradition.
• E: While erudition is displayed, the primary effect is thematic synthesis, not intellectual posturing.

5) Correct answer: A

Why A is most correct: The closing lines pivot strategically from personal grief ("your ev'ning-hours") to collective faith ("Converse with heav'n"). The poet does not merely offer passive comfort but redefines loss as an opportunity—for the father to engage with the divine and, by extension, to grow spiritually. This is not a hollow consolation (B) or a critique (D), but a redirection of emotional energy toward a higher purpose. A captures this transformative reframing most accurately.

Why the distractors are less supported:

• B: The consolation is not hollow; it is theologically and emotionally grounded in the poem’s vision of heaven.
• C: The lines are not carpe diem (seize the day) but carpe aeternum (seize the eternal)—focused on heavenly promise, not earthly pleasures.
• D: The father’s grief is not criticized as a failure; it is acknowledged and redirected.
• E: The address remains focused on the father, not a universal reader. The poem’s scope is intimate, not expansive.