76 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodsthe neoclassical norms of the time. It also sometimes paints a less than flattering
picture of Africa, the land from which Wheatley was snatched when she was still a
child. “’Twas not long since I left my native shore / The land of errors, and Egyptian
gloom: /” she writes in “To the University of Cambridge, in New England” (1773),
adding, “Father of mercy, ’twas thy gracious hand / Brought me in safety from those
dark abodes.” Sometimes, however, Wheatley leans toward a more Edenic and idyllic
image of her birthplace, of the kind favored by Equiano. “How my bosom burns! /”
she declares in one of her poems (“Philis’s [sic] Reply to the Answer in our Last by
the Gentleman in the Navy” (1774)), “and pleasing Gambia on my soul returns, /
With native grace in spring’s luxurious reign, / Smiles the gay mead, and Eden
blooms again.” A lengthy description of “Africa’s blissful plain” then follows, one that
transforms it into a version of the pastoral. “The various bower, the tuneful flowing
stream,” the “soil spontaneous” that “yields exhaustless stores,” the “soft retreats,” the
“verdant shores” and “bending harvest” ripening “into gold:” all this, and more,
works against Wheatley’s claims made elsewhere (in “On Being Brought from Africa
to America” (1773) and “To His Excellency General Washington” (1776)) that she is
grateful to have been taken away from “my Pagan land” to “Columbia’s state.”
Wheatley is, in fact, a far subtler and more complicated poet than is often acknowl-
edged. The pleas for freedom are sometimes clear enough in her prose as well as her
poetry. “In every human breast God has implanted a principle, which we call love of
freedom,” she wrote in her “Letter to Samson Occom” (1774). “It is impatient of
oppression ... and by the leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same
principle lives in us.” That is echoed in poems like “Liberty and Peace” (1785) and
“To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal
Secretary of State for North America, &c” (1770). In both of these, she links the
longing for freedom felt and expressed by the American colonists to her own experi-
ence of oppression. “I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch’d from Afric’s
fancy’d happy seat,” she reveals in the latter poem. “Such, such my case. And can I
then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?” Even when the plea is not as
clear as that, however, and the description of her present plight not quite so critical,
there is still a measured sense of her own dignity, and a quiet intimation of the rights
and potential of her race. Despite her references to her own “fault’ring music” and
“grov’ling mind” in “To Maecenas” (1770), for instance, she is still ambitious enough
to invoke the example of the classical poet Terence (who, Wheatley notes, “was an
African by birth” – like her), and bold enough to ask Maecenas, the friend and poet
of the great Roman poet Horace, to be her patron too. “Then grant, Maecenas, thy
paternal rays, /” she concludes, “Hear me propitious, and defend my lays.” On a
broader scale, one of her best-known poems, “On being Brought from Africa to
America,” may well begin by suggesting that it was “mercy” that brought her
“benighted soul” from Africa to experience “redemption” in the New World. But it
then goes on to use that experience of redemption as a measure of possibility for all
African-Americans. “Some view our sable race with scornful eye,” she admits, but
then adds, pointing an admonitory figure at her, inevitably white, audience:
“Remember Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d and join th’angelicGGray_c01.indd 76ray_c 01 .indd 76 8 8/1/2011 7:54:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 57 AM