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She ends the poem by saying that all people, regardless of race, are able to be saved and make it to Heaven. The Wheatleys noticed Phillis's keen intelligence and educated her alongside their own children. In effect, she was attempting a degree of integration into Western culture not open to, and perhaps not even desired by, many African Americans. This powerful statement introduces the idea that prejudice, bigotry, and racism toward black people are wrong and anti-Christian. Read about the poet, see her poem's summary and analysis, and study its meaning and themes. From this perspective, Africans were living in darkness. As Christian people, they are supposed to be "refin'd," or to behave in a blessed and educated manner. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. By Phillis Wheatley. 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). 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. For My People, All People: Cicely Tyson, Angela Bassett, Viola Davis 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). West Africa The speaker's declared salvation and the righteous anger that seems barely contained in her "reprimand" in the penultimate line are reminiscent of the rhetoric of revivalist preachers. She did not seek redemption and did not even know that she needed it. To the University of Cambridge, in New England. Merriam-Webster defines a pagan as "a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main world religions." Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (2003), contends that Wheatley's reputation as a whitewashed black poet rests almost entirely on interpretations of "On Being Brought from Africa to America," which he calls "the most reviled poem in African-American literature." Against the unlikely backdrop of the institution of slavery, ideas of liberty were taking hold in colonial America, circulating for many years in intellectual circles before war with Britain actually broke out. Such couplets were usually closed and full sentences, with parallel structure for both halves. ", In the last two lines, Wheatley reminds her audience that all people, regardless of race, can be Christian and be saved. For the unenlightened reader, the poems may well seem to be hackneyed and pedestrian pleas for acceptance; for the true Christian, they become a validation of one's status as a member of the elect, regardless of race . 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. Some were deists, like Benjamin Franklin, who believed in God but not a divine savior. 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. Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain. May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train. There are many themes explored in this poem. This, she thinks, means that anyone, no matter their skin tone or where theyre from, can find God and salvation. We sense it in two ways. Levernier, James, "Style as Process in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley," in Style, Vol. sable - black; (also a small animal with dark brown or black fur. 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. Wheatley lived in the middle of the passionate controversies of the times, herself a celebrated cause and mover of events. It is supposed that she was a native of Senegal or nearby, since the ship took slaves from the west coast of Africa. This is a reference to the biblical Book of Genesis and the two sons of Adam. 15 chapters | Her strategy relies on images, references, and a narrative position that would have been strikingly familiar to her audience. Figurative language is used in this poem. 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. window.__mirage2 = {petok:"cajhZ6VFWaUJG3veQ.det3ab.5UanemT4_W4vp5lfYs-86400-0"}; 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. 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. In fact, the Wheatleys introduced Phillis to their circle of Evangelical antislavery friends. HubPages is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. At this time, most African American people were unable to read and write, so Wheatley's education was quite unusual. The poet needs some extrinsic warrant for making this point in the artistic maneuvers of her verse. Line 2 explains why she considers coming to America to have been good fortune. The use of th and refind rather than the and refined in this line is an example of syncope. America has given the women equal educational advantages, and America, we believe, will enfranchise them. 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. Research the history of slavery in America and why it was an important topic for the founders in their planning for the country. 235 lessons. Her benighted, or troubled soul was saved in the process. 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." Colonized people living under an imposed culture can have two identities. Her being saved was not truly the whites' doing, for they were but instruments, and she admonishes them in the second quatrain for being too cocky. 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. Phillis Wheatley was brought through the transatlantic slave trade and brought to America as a child. On Being Brought from Africa to America Summary & Analysis. Patricia Liggins Hill, et. Create your account. Africa To America Figurative Language - 352 Words | 123 Help Me She had been publishing poems and letters in American newspapers on both religious matters and current topics. The soul, which is not a physical object, cannot be overwhelmed by darkness or night. There was no precedent for it. All the end rhymes are full. To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works. 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. Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. The more thoughtful assertions come later, when she claims her race's equality. As such, though she inherited the Puritan sense of original sin and resignation in death, she focuses on the element of comfort for the bereaved. Phillis Wheatley was born in Africa in 1753 and enslaved in America. Wheatley does not reflect on this complicity except to see Africa as a land, however beautiful and Eden-like, devoid of the truth. (PDF) Taking Offense Religion, Art, and Visual Culture in Plural Neoclassical was a term applied to eighteenth-century literature of the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, in Europe. From the start, critics have had difficulty disentangling the racial and literary issues. Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain. These miracles continue still with Phillis's figurative children, black . This question was discussed by the Founding Fathers and the first American citizens as well as by people in Europe. Wheatley was then abducted by slave traders and brought to America in 1761. 135-40. Phillis Wheatley Tone - 814 Words | Bartleby 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. Her rhetoric has the effect of merging the female with the male, the white with the black, the Christian with the Pagan. Benjamin Franklin visited her. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, One result is that, from the outset, Wheatley allows the audience to be positioned in the role of benefactor as opposed to oppressor, creating an avenue for the ideological reversal the poem enacts. Encyclopedia.com. Each poem has a custom designed teaching point about poetic elements and forms. According to "The American Crisis", God will aid the colonists and not aid the king of England because. 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. Wheatley is saying that her soul was not enlightened and she did not know about Christianity and the need for redemption. Get LitCharts A +. 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. 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. It is organized into rhyming couplets and has two distinct sections. This could be a reference to anything, including but not limited to an idea, theme, concept, or even another work of literature. In this poem Wheatley finds various ways to defeat assertions alleging distinctions between the black and the white races (O'Neale). Rather than creating distinctions, the speaker actually collapses those which the "some" have worked so hard to create and maintain, the source of their dwindling authority (at least within the precincts of the poem). To be "benighted" is to be in moral or spiritual darkness as a result of ignorance or lack of enlightenment, certainly a description with which many of Wheatley's audience would have agreed. 43, No. Carretta and Gould note the problems of being a literate black in the eighteenth century, having more than one culture or language. 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. 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"). God punished him with the fugitive and vagabond and yieldless crop curse. She wants them all to know that she was brought by mercy to America and to religion. Phillis Wheatley is all about change. Wheatley may also be using the rhetorical device of bringing up the opponent's worst criticism in order to defuse it. Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. also Observation on English Versification , Etc. She has master's degrees in French and in creative writing. LitCharts Teacher Editions. She also indicates, apropos her point about spiritual change, that the Christian sense of Original Sin applies equally to both races. 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). Source: Susan Andersen, Critical Essay on "On Being Brought from Africa to America," in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009. In "Letters to Birmingham," Martin Luther King uses figurative language and literary devices to show his distress and disappointment with a group of clergyman who do not support the peaceful protests for equality. 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. 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,.