Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is from the Eighteenth Century. While its title is insipid, its subject is freedom, and it was written by someone with a unique perspective on the notion.
The woman we know as Phillis
Wheatley was taken from her home somewhere in what’s now known as Gambia or
Senegal in 1760. She was shipped to America, ending up in Boston because she
was deemed not strong enough to work in the sugar cane fields of the West
Indies or the plantations of the South. John Wheatley, a prominent tailor,
bought the little girl to be a domestic servant for his wife; the Wheatleys
named her Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that transported her.
They reckoned her to be about seven because she was still losing her milk
teeth.
If you’re going to be enslaved
as a child, I guess the Wheatleys are about as good as it’s going to get for
you. They recognized Phillis’s intelligence and gave her an education in the
classics—unheard of for either slaves or most women. She could read Ovid,
Horace, Virgil and Homer in the original Greek and Latin, and she was heavily
influenced by Milton and Pope. She began writing poetry in her early teens.
The Wheatleys encouraged her,
even sending her to London with their son in 1771 because they thought the
climate change would help her asthma, and so she could find subscribers to
sponsor publication of her collection of poems. Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral was issued two years later.
The Wheatleys emancipated her
in 1774, but life was not kind to her. She married an improvident grocer; the
war for American independence rendered their economic condition even more
parlous. Phillis took work as a scullery maid while her husband was imprisoned
for debts, and she died in 1784. By that time, she had lost two babies and her remaining
son died soon enough that he was buried with her.
The poem for today, as I said,
is about freedom. Wheatley wrote it in 1772 while in London as an entreaty to
the newly-appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies, William Legge, Earl of
Dartmouth. The hope was that Dartmouth would be less of an arrogant prick than
his predecessor. (I do not know what the outcome was.)
I confess that Wheatley’s
style is not my cup of tea. But poetry casts a wide net, and her perspective on
freedom lends considerable influence on my willingness to listen to her. I
frankly can’t imagine that Dartmouth paid the slave poetess any more heed than
he did the colonists; that would be one of the reasons why we are not part of
Britain, or even of the Commonwealth.
I wonder how much of her early
childhood Wheatley recalled, after 19 years in Boston? How much of her mother
tongue did she still carry with her after all that Ovid, Milton, Homer and the
Bible? And I wonder the same about the thousands who were brought to the New
World and sold into chattel slavery, who didn’t have the language Wheatley
wielded to make even the tiniest cut into the peculiar institution?
“To the Right Honourable
William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for
North America, etc.”
Should you, my lord, while you
peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
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