Providence is the protective care of God or of nature as a spiritual power. A theodicy is the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil, often appealed to against the backdrop of such questions as “if God is so good, why is there so much suffering, misery and injustice in the world?” Even though she does not use the word “evil” in this 131-line poem apparently written when a teenager in 1772 or 1773, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” is Phillis Wheatley’s theodicy, testifying to and celebrating a non-sectarian power and presence accessible to everyone, unmediated by man’s institutions and inventions, and one so convincing, even those of us trained in a highly secular(ized) society (which appears to be her primary audience) and/or an unconvincing church (with “Whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite”[2]), may be moved to encomiums of gratitude for the healing powers of nature (especially the sun and sleep).
Wheatley’s attitude here feels similar to Rumi, who wrote, “when misfortune comes, you must quickly praise.” Rooted in a need for a ritual to help her detox (herself from) the physical and moral sickness she sees around her in this alien new land, the poem starts at—or just before—dawn, with a 10-line invocation to the celestial muse to lend a rich portion of “light divine….to guide my soul,” and “raise my mind to a seraphic strain!” to sustain her in her “arduous flight.” Yet, immediately after she expresses this wish, the poem’s tone and diction changes from rapture and an “I-thou” relationship with the divine “monarch of the earth and skies” to a less seraphic strain, a detached scientific tone, describing the sun in the third person (an “Us”—“It” relationship). When she uses the brilliant image, “as round its center moves the rolling year,” as a figure of the “monarch of earth and skies,” this “centre” could either be the sun, or the earth’s axis, but it could also be God:
Ador’d for ever be the God unseen,
Which round the sun revolves this vast machine,
Though to his eye its mass a point appears:
Ador’d the God that whirls surrounding spheres,
Which first ordain’d that mighty Sol should reign
The peerless monarch of th’ ethereal train: Lines 11-16
Is she contrasting the “God unseen” with “the God that whirls” here? Can the rhetorical contrast between “Ador’d forever” in line 11 and “ador’d” in line 14 be translated, as if to say, “you all already know about the God unseen, but let me tell you about the god that can be seen”? The mention of machine suggests that the first mention of God is the 18th century deist sense of God, the unmoved mover, who set a watch going, once upon a time, while the second figuration a more organic God of nature. It may seem that her attitude is more both/and than either/or here.
In lines, 17 through 22, her praise of the sun employs the language of Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, but on closer reading may also subvert it:
Of miles twice forty millions is his height,
And yet his radiance dazzles mortal sight
So far beneath — from him th’ extended earth
Vigour derives, and ev’ry flow’ry birth:
Vast through her orb she moves with easy grace
Around her Phoebus in unbounded space; 17-22
The vertical metaphor (Wheatley) Peters uses here to measure our distance from the sun implies that she’s looking up---rather, than, say, a map of the solar system. Furthermore, the ambiguous use of “Surrounding spheres” suggests that, even if the then “new science” tells us that the earth really moves around the sun, on earth, it still feels like the sun is going around the earth, and that these feelings are true, even if she “knows better.” In lines 21-22, there’s a hint of an erotic, coequal relationship between earth and sun. It’s the sun’s role on (in) earth that’s important. She’s not, at this point in the poem, claiming that the latter view is necessarily better, although on the levels of phanopiea (image) and melopiea (music), feeling the cosmos this way inspires sensual and dazzling language that, like the female gendered earth, “moves with easy grace” more than the machine affords, and culminates in a return of a seraphic strain:
Almighty, in these wond’rous works of thine,
What Pow’r, what Wisdom, and what Goodness shine!
And are thy wonders, Lord, by men explor’d,
And yet creating glory unador’d! (25-28)
The praise in the first couplet is quickly supplanted by what seems to be a question, even though she uses an evangelical exclamation point. Addressing the Almighty Lord directly as if to confide, she wonders about and laments men’s (this is the first mention in the poem of men) lack of adoration, and devotion to the Almighty. If we read this contrast in terms of the debate between the language of the “Scientific revolution” and the puritan religious view raging around (and within) her, Wheatley seems clearly arguing against the deists. The contrast between “explor’d” and “unador’d” could also have political significance in the context of European Imperialism, which (Wheatley) Peters was all too well aware of, in which both Africa and America were “explor’d” for their “wonders,” mined for their products (like Coltan, for instance, in today’s Congo) with a suggestion that had these men prayed to the sun more, and appreciated the present, a creation that happens, and that we may partake in, every day, they may not have been so restless to explore (certainly folks in her native Gambia weren’t trying to “explore” Europe).
Yet, her religious sensibility is hardly conventional. While many have used a unilateral metaphor, “God is (like) the sun,” in which the sun, as “vehicle” is subordinate to the “tenor” of God, Wheatley throughout this poem does not simply invert it by saying “the sun is god,” but rather finds a more bidirectional providence, by bringing the language of Christianity and the language of nature (and sun-worshipping) together, often in the “classical pagan” terms of Greco-Roman mythology (though without the dramatic violence of Gods taking the form of swans to rape nymphs[3])
That Wisdom, which attends Jehovah’s ways,
Shines most conspicuous in the solar rays: (31-32)
At the very least this suggests that if we want to know the wisdom and light of the unseen god, look at, feel, the light of the visible (and not subordinate) sun, trade your contemptus mundi for an intellectus mundi, or, more subversively still, the Sun, or Sol, Apollo or Phoebus (as God of light, poetry, music and healing) may be at least as literally an image of the eternal as the passion of the Christ (who she does not mention by name in this poem). It is not accidental that the word “soul” has “sol” in it.
After considering the relationship between god and/as the sun as the source of vigour, goodness and benevolence, this theodicy now considers the relationship between day and night, when “the sun slumbers in ocean’s arms.” (6) Although she doesn’t dwell on what would happen were there no sun, she does offer a horrific dystopian portrait of what could happen if the sun shines too much:
In their excess how would our race complain,
Abhorring life! how hate its length’ned chain!
From air adust what num’rous ills would rise?
What dire contagion taint the burning skies?
What pestilential vapours, fraught with death,
Would rise, and overspread the lands beneath? (35-40)
During a pandemic, with orange ashen California skies, 250 years later, I could see these lines of “climate change speculative fiction” as prophetic, but then I ask: could not these lines describe what the lifestyle and culture of New England would feel like to a captured Gambian? Many native Americans and other historians have commented on how filthy Boston, Philadelphia and New York were at this time. This passage could get at the root of the still present American disease (that underlies slavery and racism). It’s also difficult not to read the first couplet as the slave’s cry for freedom; if we had endless day (or what the Beach Boys call “endless summer”), they’d probably make “our race” work even more. You could call this “working class” poetry, if you like. Yet, even here:
When tasks diurnal tire the human frame,
The spirits faint, and dim the vital flame,
Then too that ever active bounty shines,
Which not infinity of space confines. (49-52)
Whatever you call it, “that ever active bounty” is a force man can’t rob or take away, however they try to mediate our relationship with it. More important is what it (or thou) does:
And thy great God, the cause of all adores.
O’er beings infinite his love extends,
His Wisdom rules them, and his Pow’r defends. (46-48)
This is the first mention of love in the poem (though it may have been suggested by goodness and beneficence) and it’s worded in such a brilliant way as to suggest not only that God’s love is infinite but the beings it’s extended to are too. And, indeed, it’s hard not to feel infinite reading this poem.
Against a backdrop in which the house slave’s day is separated from the healing powers of the sun, . no wonder a sun-worshipper may welcome night; just as earth, the watery planet, can cool the unchecked heat of the sun, so does it (or she) give us night; the almighty’s love and providence may also come in the form of sleep. In “Providence,” she describes the power of sleep twice. Here’s the first account:
The sable veil, that Night in silence draws,
Conceals effects, but shows th’ Almighty Cause,
Night seals in sleep the wide creation fair,
And all is peaceful but the brow of care.
Again, gay Phoebus, as the day before,
Wakes ev’ry eye, but what shall wake no more;
Again the face of nature is renew’d,
Which still appears harmonious, fair, and good. (53-60)
While the shorter “A Hymn To Evening,” also invoked the healing nocturnal powers of sleep:
(Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind,/At morn to wake more heav'nly, more refin'd;)[4], “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” replaces that poem’s language of sin and virtue with the language of sickness and health. When she writes “conceals effects, but shows th’Almighty Cause,” is she suggesting that sleep is an end in itself, is a reprieve from a world of men that care more about effects than the yet creating glory (28)? This praise of sleep could be especially radical, and subversive against the backdrop of a puritan work ethic in which “wake up and smell the coffee” was becoming the new imperialist national anthem, and even more for a slave who was called lazy if she “only” worked a 14 hour day.
Sadly, however, even the most peaceful dreams are not immune from “the brow of care.” The matter-of-fact acknowledgement that one could die at any second (58) is another motivation to praise for the 4th time in the poem (line 61-62). The way her theodicy is often punctuated by panegyric enactments by this point in the poem gives me an accumulated feeling that our praise and kindness may actually be a co-creative force in the divine cosmos as (Wheatley) Peters show it.
In the next extended passage, she considers more in depth the relationship between, not so much night and day as abstract terms, but diurnal sunlight and sleep. She starts with a provocative question:
Shall day to day, and night to night conspire
To show the goodness of the Almighty Sire?
This mental voice shall man regardless hear,
And never, never raise the filial pray’r? (63-66)
Conspiring means to breath together, as in “Hymn to Evening,” the sun is personified as “exhaling the incense of blooming spring.” This complementary relationship between night & day is a more Taoist (yin and yang) attitude towards holistic balance, a philosophy, which Oba T’Shaka, for instance, has shown, existed in Africa before it did in China (to say nothing of its etiolated Western forms like Alan Watts’ “The Game of Black and White”) than the Western light>dark dualisms (both metaphysically, and racially). When she writes “conspire/ to show the good,” but should we ask what are they conspiring against? The second couplet, to my ears, echoes the earlier:
And are thy wonders, Lord, by men explor’d,
And yet creating glory unador’d! (27-28)
But, first, the goodness. Sure enough, her “filial prayer” offers a seductive invitation—80 years before Walt Whitman’s loafing and inviting—to her congregation, to those she’s trying to convert[5] (for their own good, of course):
To-day, O hearken, nor your folly mourn
For time mispent, that never will return.
But see the sons of vegetation rise,
And spread their leafy banners to the skies.
All-wise Almighty Providence we trace
In trees, and plants, and all the flow’ry race;
As clear as in the nobler frame of man,
All lovely copies of the Maker’s plan. (67-74)
It’s like she’s saying, “come pray with me, praise with me,” but against the puritan/capitalist urban backdrop, it’s taken as the heresy of “come play with me.” Or, “wake up, you’re sleeping through heaven, and if you don’t want it, let me get my share” (to paraphrase Game Theory). It’s also a gentle exhortation to “slow (the machine) down!” (an injunction, even in a pandemic 250 years later, man is too often deaf to!). Besides, the time “spent” in such kindness may, after all that, yield returns (even if they’re too slow for your false economy!)
There’s also a gentle challenge to the “Great Chain of Being” metaphysics that dominated much 18th century thought---the hierarchy in which man is better (more angelic) than the animals who are better than “vegetation,” but even though she’s just asking for an acknowledgement of equal kinship between man and nature, it’s hard not to infer a sense that we may feel the providence more in “the flow’ry race” than in man.
Echoing the earlier couplet:
That Wisdom, which attends Jehovah’s ways,
Shines most conspicuous in the solar rays: (31-32)
the next two lines:
The pow’r the same that forms a ray of light,
That call d creation from eternal night. (75-76)
Provide a transition sentence, linking the “yet creating glory” of the daily rays of light in the present tense to a brief summary of a creation myth in the past-tense:
“Let there be light,” he said: from his profound
Old Chaos heard, and trembled at the sound:
Swift as the word, inspir’d by pow’r divine,
Behold the light around its Maker shine,
The first fair product of th’ omnific God,
And now through all his works diffus’d abroad. (77-82)
This is very similar to the idea/concept of God I got as a kid, in both church, TV and school, against a backdrop of the “separation of church and state.” This is a light that imposes order on chaos, the unmoved mover, swift as the logos; the word “product” recalls the earlier “wonders” (27) and “effects” (54). The capitalization, and personification, of Chaos suggests she is referring to the Greek Goddess Khaos, the first god, of the chasm of air. Does gender come into play here, as if this creation myth is the dawn of the patriarchal gods? Notably, there is absolutely no sun. “Light” has become a symbol, a mere metaphor in a dark study, indoor church, or factory made by the “Job Creator” of capitalism. Certainly Emily Dickinson, who wrote “Some Keep The Sabbath” some 80 years later, would agree. Love, too, has entirely disappeared. The next transitional couplet makes it clear she intended this passage to be an account of the light of reason, or reason’s God, or at least the way reason “understands” god, to which she contrasts sleep (in her second description of sleep)
As reason’s pow’rs by day our God disclose,
So we may trace him in the night’s repose:
Say what is sleep? and dreams how passing strange!
When action ceases, and ideas range
Licentious and unbounded o’er the plains,
Where Fancy’s queen in giddy triumph reigns.
Hear in soft strains the dreaming lover sigh
To a kind fair, or rave in jealousy;
On pleasure now, and now on vengeance bent,
The lab’ring passions struggle for a vent. 83-92
Just as there’s 2 or 3 kinds of day in this poem, there’s 2 kinds of night. While an earlier (53-74) 21-line passage showed the peaceful night waking to the filial prayer of day, conspiring together to show the goodness, in the next 17 lines (75-92), the movement from light to night may perhaps conspire to show the evil, or at least the sickness, of the symbiotic relationship between night and day. And if the peaceful sleep in the first account revealed the almighty cause, the restless sleep of the second passage may be merely an effect of reason--as-god.
John C. Shields reads this passage as a description of sleep, as the cathartic release of dreams where repressed feelings one cannot act on in day can be acted out, like the carnivalesque heterocosm of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” perhaps, especially forbidden a slave for whom “virtue” means suffering. He asks, “Is fancy’s queen here reason?” If it is, it’s clearly a very lustful, unhappy, reason, and feels more like a nightmare, an extended phantasmagoria on what she earlier called “the brow of care”[6] (56): The phrase “on pleasure now, and now on vengeance bent,” recalls Shakespeare’s “lust sonnet” (129), as well as, if personified, Harriet Jacobs depiction of Dr. Flint in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The last line of Shakespeare’s lust sonnet suggests that the “hell” of lust may be caused by a too purely idealized sense of “heaven,” or, for Wheatley, the light of the enlightenment. It’s tempting to say the earlier account of sleep was a slave’s (more peaceful) sleep, while this account is the violence of a slave master.
If, indeed, this passage is a description of reason’s God in night, the flipside, as it were, of the light of lines 77-82, it could be read as a “return of the repressed” Chaos (78), who had been “vanquished” by Light in day, as if in revenge against reason for making her tremble. If so, is it possible that Wheatley is subtly criticizing this idea of light as imposing order on chaos as futile, and a sign of psychic, and cosmic, disharmony? And even if the reign of reason in day doesn’t exactly cause this nocturnal chaos, judging by the work of many of the Philosophical rationalists of her day[7], this was how they “understood”—or feared—as (mere animal) sleep.
The fact this that restless description in lines 86-92 also contrasts with the earlier more peaceful account of sleep in lines 53-60 that engendered the beautiful panegyric daylight ritual of lines 67-74 would lend support to such claim. It’s possible that these lines aren’t even meant to be an account of sleep, but, rather, an insomniac, unable to stop the rushing onslaught of ideas and what she calls “subject passions” in her poem “On Imagination.”
What pow’r, O man! thy reason then restores,
So long suspended in nocturnal hours?
What secret hand returns the mental train,
And gives improv’d thine active pow’rs again? 93--96
Is the implied answer to these two questions is “sleep?”[8] That the previous passage was not a description of sleep, but “sleep” (or something that happens in sleep, beyond our control) is the absence of such things? As I read these lines, spoken in evangelical terms to “O man!” (gender being as important as race and culture here), I’m reminded of “Macbeth doth murder sleep.” She’s not exactly criticizing “Reason” and its men, but she is showing how their lopsided sense of God as worker rather than sleeper is not making them (or others) very happy. Or, is this power in sleep,
as the next passage could suggest, mercy?
From thee, O man, what gratitude should rise!
And, when from balmy sleep thou op’st thine eyes,
Let thy first thoughts be praises to the skies.
How merciful our God who thus imparts
O’erflowing tides of joy to human hearts,
When wants and woes might be our righteous lot,
Our God forgetting, by our God forgot! (97-103)
As the poem -in its final 34 lines--fleshes out more intimately its ethical argument in ways that go beyond argument,. she’s still exhorting “O man!” here, to be grateful on waking for the mercy the Almighty has shown to us in sleep (either for letting us feel another morn, or for calming us down). This is the first time mercy is mentioned in the poem, and a hedonistic mercy at that (the empathy & ecstacy!), and contrasts with the god that demands our suffering as signs of righteousness, the anhedonism of the puritan god and contemptus mundi!
In contrast to god as an unmoved mover, Wheatley invites us to consider devotion relationally; there is a mysterious symbiosis between mercy and gratitude (in French, merci) here. Does our gratitude cause the mercy? Does divine mercy cause our gratitude? Do we have the power to harm god? Is our gratitude our mercy? Is there any better way to think about our relationship with the divine or eternal powers over which we have no control? What way feels more free? Is nature telling us it’s our duty to let ourselves feel overflowing joy? Yet after all these wonderful feelings, the final couplet, with its negative contrast, reminds us of the very despair it is claiming to transcend, as a theodicy must acknowledge the negative to accentuate this positive. If the poem ended here, it would feel as tragic as the presence of “Winter” at the end of her “On Imagination.” But there’s two more sections: can they help our God remember?
Up to this point, the poem had largely existed primarily in the sphere of ideas and feelings on a general, even universal, level of “man” and the divine, and not so much on a level of particular intra-human relationships in an everyday social setting, but the penultimate section of the poem seems, on first reading, to be such a dramatic break from what had been going thus far, as the (transhistorical) mental powers of love and reason, personified and theatricalized take center stage:
Among the mental pow’rs a question rose,
“What most the image of th’ Eternal shows?”
When thus to Reason (so let Fancy rove)
Her great companion spoke immortal Love.
“Say, mighty pow’r, how long shall strife prevail,
“And with its murmurs load the whisp’ring gale?
“Refer the cause to Recollection’s shrine,
“Who loud proclaims my origin divine,
“The cause whence heav’n and earth began to be,
“And is not man immortaliz’d by me?
“Reason let this most causeless strife subside.”
Thus Love pronounc’d, and Reason thus reply’d. (104—115)
This allegorical dialogue between love and reason, both personified as women, can be taken as happening within Wheatley’s personal psyche, as an interior psychomachia (perhaps analogous to the principles of justice v. mercy, the more autocratic vengeful Jehova of the old testament v. the more loving, merciful Jesus, or it could be read in gendered terms—even though reason here is also gendered female). The contrast could also be read on a genre-level: reason being more the province of prose philosophers and theologians, and love more the province of poetic license (“So let fancy rove!”)
At the start of this dialogue, there’s a clear imbalance between these powers. Love laments that there is a strife that reason has the power to end, and thus the power to cause. Reason has become a tyrant to (or forgot) love. When Love appeals to “Recollection,” can such recollection o heal the “forgetting” in line 103, or to show, or at least ask reason, “Did you reason away your love; did you not once love more than you reasoned?” Perhaps she’s asking us to remember childhood innocence of playing (praying) out in the sun before adulthood came to chide this as “childish” or immature? Or perhaps, an earlier more spiritual time, of being connected to nature, now derided as “primitive societies” (whether seen in Africa or in the indigenous people being displaced), or, like the later Wordsworth (who may have read, and been influenced by Wheatley), recollect a pre-birth feeling of eternity. The way love talks about herself is very similar to the way Wheatley throughout this poem had personified the sun. This makes sense given that they began the debate by asking: “What most the image of th’ Eternal shows?”And, it should be clear by now, that, on an image level, the answer is the sun, but on the level of pathos and ethos, it is gratitude and mercy, acts of love!
This may be Wheatley reminding herself that love, ultimately, is more important than reason, or that reason is nothing unless grounded in love, or to take the highroad and meet others’ hate with love. Obviously, she’s very drawn to the temptations of the rhetoric of reason, which she’s employed throughout the poem, but the fact that Wheatley has reason reply:
“Thy birth, coelestial queen! ’tis mine to own,
“In thee resplendent is the Godhead shown;
“Thy words persuade, my soul enraptur’d feels
“Resistless beauty which thy smile reveals.”
Ardent she spoke, and, kindling at her charms,
She clasp’d the blooming goddess in her arms.
suggests a very specific speaker and situation, that she is speaking to her human “owner,” her mistress Susanna Wheatley, with the hope that if she herself—in her own struggles—can let love rule over reason’s strife, perhaps she can convince her mistress. Earlier in this poem, reason’s god had been presented as the unmoved mover. It makes sense that a slave-owner would worship (and see their reflection in) an unmoved mover, but, in this beautiful passage, reason is moved by love. . The persuasive ability here is not to be found only in Love’s words, but also in her smile. I can only wonder what went through Susanna Wheatley’s mind when she read it.
The final 10 lines of the poem (122-131) conclude her theodicy:
Infinite Love where’er we turn our eyes
Appears: this ev’ry creature’s wants supplies;
This most is heard in Nature’s constant voice,
This makes the morn, and this the eve rejoice;
This bids the fost’ring rains and dews descend
To nourish all, to serve one gen’ral end,
The good of man: yet man ungrateful pays
But little homage, and but little praise.
To him, whose works arry’d with mercy shine,
What songs should rise, how constant, how divine! (122-131)
To claim this poem had been talking/singing about infinite love the whole time requires a leap of faith in what is too derided, by reason, as “the pathetic fallacy,” the idea that non-human (and even non-animal) nature can love, but certainly such beliefs of a filial relationship with nature, a sense that we owe praise and gratitude to nature for showing mercy on us, or a sense that our praise and gratitude is a way of showing mercy to nature (and to ourselves), was not alien to the indigenous people of America, nor the ancient Greeks, nor the contemporaries in her homeland.
Notice, here the absence of the word “God,” as if she perhaps may finally convince her oppressors that you don’t really need your “God, and Saviour too" to find the image that most shows the eternal. Perhaps, using a rational syllogism can help here: Nature is God//God is Love://Nature is Love (as if to cut out the middleman of “God” whose big head made it forget that the idea and concept of Jehovah was (based on, abstracted from) the sun, or as William Blake would put it, two decades later, “thus man forgot all gods reside in the human breast.” By contrast, this poem does what she prays for in “Hymn to Humanity:”
Each human heart aspire:
To act in beauties unconfin’d
Enlarge the close contracted mind,
And fill it with they fire.”
In offering an enlargement of the “close contracted mind” of the so-called “Enlightenment” by inviting us to feel the or in “God or Nature” as an and, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” is a fitting rebuke to those whose “understanding” of Wheatley mostly comes from her most anthologized piece which is often (mis)read as her renouncing the “pagan” religion of her childhood to adopt the Christianity of her masters and their preachers. Rather, “Thoughts on The Work of Providence,” establishes a syncretism that is ultimately grounded in a (transcultural) ethos of love, mercy and gratitude on both the mortal and immortal realms to achieve true freedom and filial equality. Without having to appeal to fire and brimstone and eternal damnation, Wheatley offers an evangelical (even proto-feminist) exhortation to, and a lament of, negligent, heretic man (though she doesn’t specifically single-out Anglo-American ruling class man, it certainly could be read that way), trapped in a overly laborious work-ethic as well as “the age of reason” to realize they too would be happier if they slowed down their strife causing ways.
In writing about her poem, “On Imagination,” John C. Shields shows how Wheatley’s thought “prefigures the Romantic movement” and that she “develops a theory of imagination, in 1773, that exceeds anything of the kind in the British Isles. Not the white man’s religion, not his politics, and not even his poetics, as learned by this maturing poet, could answer her overwhelming need—to be free.” Yet, it was important that she was very subtle about her subversions, for she had a reputation amongst whites for being “uppity.” Recently, Jocelyn Wallace writes that Wheatley was well aware that “she had a rare privilege for a slave at the time, and she had to be careful not to lost it. She had to be smart (about how she wrote), and maybe that’s why she wrote more poetry and less prose in the first place. Poetry allows for more subjectivity, nuances, and individual interpretation.” “Thoughts on The Work of Providence,” operating largely in the cultural superstructure, is liberation poetics in its deepest sense of the word, and it seems to me that this message that went so unheeded then is still unheeded by people with the power to put an end to much of the world’s strife today.
[1] Dear reader, if for some reason you encounter this essay and intriqued, I ask you not to continue reading until you’ve read the poem---and then when you’re done, feel free to read it and let’s compare notes!
[2] 1774 letter to Samuel Occom from Phillis Wheatley…
[3] Though she does use the dramatic violence in other poems like “Niobe in Distress”
[4] Notice, she does not just say soothe, but sooth; one may remember that Apollo was also the god of prophecy.
[5] Shields points out that the white preacher who baptized her Christian, Samuel Cooper,who held to no absolute theological principle but the right to free inquiry, was a rare white man who understood and appreciated Wheatley’s “insistence on the equalizing results of conversion,” as if Wheatley told him, thank you for converting me the your words so I may better convert you to the African spirit in a more tolerant, henotheistic way.
[6] It’s also noteworthy that in her poem, “On Imagination” fancy is subordinate to imagination: mere fancy.
[7] With the exception of the philosopher Amo, another “privileged” slave in the white man’s world, ultimately excommunicated and banished for his heretical more Afro-centric views.
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