This style of poetry hardly appeals today
because poets adhering to it strove to be objec-
tive and used elaborate and decorous language
thought to be elevated. The resulting verse
sounds pompous and inauthentic to the modern
ear, one of the problems that Wheatley has
among modern audiences. This could explain
why ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to Amer-
ica,’’ also written in neoclassical rhyming cou-
plets but concerning a personal topic, is now her
most popular. The power of the poem of heroic
couplets is that it builds upon its effect, with each
couplet completing a thought, creating the build-
ing blocks of a streamlined argument. By writing
the poem in couplets, Wheatley helps the reader
assimilate one idea at a time. The opening
thought is thus easily accepted by a white or
possibly hostile audience: that she is glad she
came to America to find true religion. This idea
sums up a gratitude whites might have expected,
or demanded, from a Christian slave. The
more thoughtful assertions come later, when
she claims her race’s equality. Irony is also
common in neoclassical poetry, with the build-
ing up and then breaking down of expectations,
and this occurs in lines 7 and 8.Puritan Funeral Elegy
With almost a third of her poetry written as
elegies on the deaths of various people, Wheatley
was probably influenced by the Puritan funeral
elegy of colonial America, explains Gregory
Rigsby in theCollege Language Association Jour-
nal. While Wheatley included some traditional
elements of the elegy, or praise for the dead, in
‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to America,’’ she
primarily combines sermon and meditation tech-
niques in the poem. Many of her elegies meditate
on the soul in heaven, as she does briefly here in
line 8. Wheatley was a member of the Old South
Congregational Church of Boston. The typical
funeral sermon delivered by this sect relied on
portraits of the deceased and exhortations not
to grieve, as well as meditations on salvation.
Lines 1 to 4 here represent such a typical medi-
tation, rejoicing in being saved from a life of sin.
Generally in her work, Wheatley devotes more
attention to the soul’s rising heavenward and to
consoling and exhorting those left behind than
writers of conventional elegies have. 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. Her poems
thus typically move dramatically in the same
direction, from an extreme point of sadness
(here, the darkness of the lost soul and the out-
cast, Cain) to the certainty of the saved joining
the angelic host (regardless of the color of their
skin). ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to Amer-
ica’’ finally changes from a meditation to a ser-
mon when Wheatley addresses an audience in her
exhortation in the last two lines.Historical Context
Slavery in America
The European colonization of the Americas
inspired a desire for cheap labor for the develop-
ment of the land. The enslavement of Africans in
the American colonies grew steadily from the
early seventeenth century until by 1860 there
were about four million slaves in the United
States. Slavery did not become illegal after the
Revolution as many had hoped; it was not fully
abolished in the United States until the end of
the Civil War in 1865.Landing a cargo of black slaves in the American
colonies(ÓBettmann / CORBIS)
On Being Brought from Africa to America