Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Voices from the fringes: Never feel tyrannic sway

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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