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August 2007
“Pleasure Deep Down:” Writing Love and God in Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on
Subjects, Religious and Moral
Tara Bynum, Johns Hopkins University
Slaves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not
supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as they can to
please whoever owned them. Still, they were not supposed to have pleasure deep
down. She said for me not to listen to all that. That I should always listen to my
body and love it.1
But since it is thus—Let me be a Servant of Christ and that is the most perfect
freedom.—2
And so the story begins. The African American literary tradition commences with
a lone Black slave woman. The name of this literary “genius” is Phillis Wheatley, and her
examination before eighteen of Boston’s most prominent white men legitimates her
intellect. Her examiners verify that she can read. She does read: the Bible, the classics,
the early moderns, even her contemporaries. She can write, and she does write: poems
and letters. With the help of her masters, the Wheatleys, and the Countess of Huntingdon,
a wealthy British woman known for her patronage of Africans, some of her poems are
published in a collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral and in New
1
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987) 219.
Phillis Wheatley, “To John Thornton Esqr.” 30 October 1770 [1774]. Phillis Wheatley Complete
Writings. Ed. Vincent Carretta. (New York, Penguin Books) 159. All subsequent references to Wheatley’s
writing will be from this edition.
2
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England area periodicals.3 Thus, her writing and publication enable later Africans and
their descendents to write their own stories, to resist the dehumanization of their
subjection, as slaves and free persons.4
And so the story goes. Most of Wheatley’s critics seem intent upon identifying
her racial politics and her levels of racial consciousness. The resulting discourse
addresses her hidden subversion or the apparent assimilation.5 For example, in Conjugal
Union: the Body, the House and Black America, Robert Reid-Pharr argues that Wheatley
predates a coherent Black racial identity and consequently, “[t]he simple fact that Phillis
Wheatley was an author of African descent, that she existed within a purported Black
body, should not be enough to secure her status as the originator of the Black American
literary tradition.”6 That is to say, her writing does not confront or address the concerns
of an explicit cohesive Black perspective, and instead her poems stress her Christian faith
and recall the work of Alexander Pope.7 In contrast, others, like Phillipa Kafka in The
Great White Way: African American Women Writers and American Success Mythologies,
3
Several other Africans reference the Countess of Huntington: Olaudah Equiano, James Albert Ukawsaw
Gronniosaw, John Marrant.
4
A number of scholars have named Wheatley as the beginning of a literary and/or poetic tradition or
community of African American literature. See Katherine Clay Bassard, “The Daughter’s Arrival: The
Earliest Black Women’s Writing Community” Callaloo 19.2 (1992) 515; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
“Introduction.” “Race,” Writing and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1986) 5; Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women
Writers (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985) 120; June Jordan, ed. “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in
America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley.” Some of Us Did Not Die (New York:
Basic/Civitas Books, 2002) 174-186; Alice Walker, ed. “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden.” In Search of
Our Mother’s Garden. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1983) 237.
5
Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in Early American
Women’s Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 31: “The current critical bent in Wheatley
studies is to focus on (and marvel at) her ‘mastery’ of Western discourse, either as evidence of cultural
‘assimilation’ or as semiotic ‘trafficking’ in representations of whiteness.”
6
Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union: the Body, the House and Black America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999) 4.
7
Rafia Zafar challenges this type of reading in We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American
Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 17: “The refusal to recognize the liberating
possibilities of Protestant Christianity and the supposition that Wheatley must want to be ‘white’ because
she is a confessed Christian have fostered simplistic critiques of her work.”
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read a Black nationalist politics in her poems. As such, she becomes the “signifying
monkey” or the trickster figure who appropriates the “master’s tools.”8 According to
Kafka, “Wheatley’s emphasis on the African is her favorite technique for ‘destabilizing’
European discourse.”9 Wheatley subverts the European discourse of supremacy through
her deployment of signification, the psychic doubling of her voice; her words speak at the
level of her white oppressors, and they speak against their oppression.10 Still others delve
into the words, imagining an active resistance that Wheatley either directly or indirectly
articulates. All together, new and old critics insert their version of the story into new
articles, each one hoping to revise the superficial analyses of previous criticisms. Often
the story is retold, without much revision; instead, these words—resistance, authorship,
humanity, literacy, genius—rotate in and out of importance as critics assess their validity
and presence within Wheatley’s poems.
Surely, each of these words may speak to the lived experience about which
Wheatley writes. I do not disagree that the political valence of those aforementioned
tropes are important to Wheatley’s poetry. Indeed, her writing may represent significant
moments of resistance, and through these acts of resistance, the realization of her
humanity. Yet, these definitive claims about her authenticity or genius or resistance fail
to recognize Wheatley’s daily experiences as a growing, loving and emotional Black
woman. There is so much emphasis on her racial identity that Wheatley’s descriptions of
nature, pleasure and religiosity go overlooked as scholars reconcile her racial politics in
8
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
9
Phillipa Kafka, The Great White Way: African American Women Writers and American Success
Mythologies (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1993) 55; Paula Bennett, “Phillis Wheatley’s Vocation
and the Paradox of the ‘Afric Muse’” PMLA 113.1 Special Topic Ethnicity (January 1998) 66.
10
Paula Bennett, “Phillis Wheatley’s Vocation and the Paradox of the ‘Afric Muse’” 66-67.
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order to confront the mimicry or signification associated with her use of the neoclassical
poetic tradition. Scholars understand Wheatley’s writing as that of an African’s written
counter-testimony to the white sociopolitical and economic supremacy that legally
enslaves her. As a counter-testimony, Wheatley is positioned as a responder or reactor to
a larger, privileged yet seemingly undefined testimony—one associated with a white
hegemony. Once situated as counter, she cannot act as her own subject, and
consequently, Wheatley is denied the complex experiences of her faith, pleasure and
humanity.
Such claims diminish the extent to which Wheatley experiences life beyond her
subjugation. Frances Smith Foster, in Written by Herself: Literary Production by African
American Women, 1746-1892, rightfully recognizes the ways in which such claims
denigrate early African American literature: “[t]o assert that those who adopted the forms
and techniques of western literature and addressed their remarks to an audience not
confined to the African American community were really writing just to convince white
people that they too could sing American is also an ingenuous and ignoble conclusion.”11
As Foster suggests, this critique of early African Americans who use the “forms and
techniques of western literature,” produces a limitation that binds Wheatley to a discourse
of resistance and an imaginative that might only be experienced by way of fighting and
acting out against generalized social oppressions. Or, Wheatley remains an imitator.12
11
Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 15. Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations:
Culture, Gender and Community in Early American Women’s Writing (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999) 31.
12
Past criticism, by scholars such as Vernon Loggins and Benjamin Brawley, of Wheatley called attention
to her ability to imitate the poetic artistry of Alexander Pope and Milton. Scholars who approached
Wheatley’s verses as imitation often found her poetry devoid of racial consciousness and impersonal. The
emergence of a valuation of a Black Aesthetic during the 1960s further dismissed Wheatley as an slave
poet who strongly identified with a European aesthetic rather than an African one. See William H.
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My aim in this essay is not to confront the question of Wheatley’s racial
consciousness. Rather, I aim to explore the articulations and descriptions of emotive and
pleasurable experiences that also characterize Wheatley’s verse. In doing so, I want to
create an alternative reading that is not interested in exposing a more authentic Wheatley.
Rather, I simply want to explore a different side of Wheatley’s poetry. My point of entry
into Wheatley’s poetry is the textual reference from Toni Morrison’s Beloved that begins
this essay. I open with Morrison’s quotation because it imagines a slave woman’s
experience of pleasure, love and bodily appreciation that few if any scholars have read or
explored in Wheatley’s verses.13 My contention is not that Wheatley seeks to echo or
embody the words of Morrison. Rather, centuries before Toni Morrison imagines a
former slave woman’s (Baby Suggs) advice to her young granddaughter, Denver—“[s]he
said for me not to listen to all that. That I should always listen to my body and love it”—
Phillis Wheatley, an actual slave woman in eighteenth century Boston, writes of a love
for her body and her self in a collection of her poems, Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral (1773).
Wheatley’s poems move Morrison’s fictional account of slave experience into the
factual. Through her poetry and its emphasis on faith and God, Wheatley makes the same
command, as Baby Suggs, to herself. I intend to examine those poems that reveal
Wheatley’s pursuit of love and her deployment of a spiritual and eroticized relationship
with God; both the pursuit and her relationship work to help Wheatley to conceive of a
Robinson, ed., Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. (Boston: G.K. Hall &Co., 1982); Phillip M. Richards,
“Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization.” American Quarterly 44.2 (June 1992) 163-191; Phillipa
Kafka, The Great White Way: African American Women Writers and American Success Mythologies 59-60.
13
In her chapter, “Female Authorship, Public Fancy” from Cato’s Tears and the Making of AngloAmerican Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Julie Ellison is one of few scholars to
argue that “[Wheatley] represents her own poetry as pleasure, adventure, and moral opportunity; she
experiences as pure gain the writing of poetry and the transatlantic vision it permits” (Ellison 115).
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space within which she can remember and write her life; the act of writing provides her
with the tools necessary to express the literal and figurative pleasures that she encounters
as faithful follower of God.
Two poems in particular, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” and “On
Imagination,” illustrate the creative deployment of love as a tool with which Wheatley
actively praises her God while creating spaces to experience the solitary and communal
ecstasies of God’s mercy and God’s love. These two poems articulate the ways in which
Wheatley theorizes an imagined loving space that allows her to transcend the realities of
her daily dehumanization and into a sublime and erotic space that actively confronts her
spirituality.14 Wheatley creates a self whose poetic language not only represents a
spiritual liberation that prepares her for a heaven bound after-life but also a reclamation
of the sexual/spiritual agency that encourages a self-realization and affirmation on
earth/in this world/within the secular.15 The language of her self-affirming spiritual
agency is steeped in eroticized verse that anticipates a liberatory and love based theology
which exemplifies Frances Smith Foster’s assertion that for Black women, “…the work
of the word was a much an outreach program as it was a self-creating process.”16 This
“self-creating” erotic language demands that Wheatley’s poems not only imagine a
cultural, political or economic liberation but also one that includes a revaluation and
14
See Phillip M. Richards, “Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization” 180: “After the invocation, the
persona achieves the extraterrestrial perspective needed to view the sublime vista in which earth orbits a
sun situated in infinite space. At this point, the persona depicts not only the unbounded, infinite quality of
the scene but also the impact which it has upon the speaker’s soul.”
15
James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975); “Liberation is not only a
relationship with God but an encounter grounded in the historical struggle to be free (Cone 146);” “It is the
mind and body in motion, responding to the passion and the rhythm of divine revelation, and affirming that
no chain shall hold my humanity down” (Cone 152).
16
Frances Smith Foster, Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 19.
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appreciation of her body, its ability to feel, to love and to be pleasured by God.17 Her
spiritual liberation not only reaches out to the larger Christian communities of free and
enslaved Americans but also functions as a means by which she creates a subjectivity that
articulates her “courage to be”—a courage that does not simply exist to counter
continuously the social rhetoric of American society.18
Wheatley exemplifies theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of courage, which he
understands “…as an element of faith is the daring self-affirmation of one’s own being in
spite of the powers of ‘nonbeing’ which are the heritage of everything finite.”19 I borrow
theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of courage in Courage to Be because it best describes
the self-affirmation and self-appreciation that Wheatley strives for in her poems. Not only
does Wheatley represent the courage about which Tillich writes, Wheatley’s courage,
seemingly anticipates Paul Tillich’s definition of nonbeing in which he describes as the
negation of being, a fundamental quality of the individual self.20 Wheatley and her
experiences as a slave woman lift Tillich’s definition of being and nonbeing from the
mires of abstraction into a literal reality; she represents nonbeing. The legal legitimation
of her enslavement affirms her nonbeingness and attempts to undermine the courage and
the faith necessary for her to survive.21 Wheatley courageously accepts God’s love and
believes in His power and therefore transcends the social rhetoric and dehumanizing
propaganda of her American situation. Faith allows Wheatley to raise her pen in song and
write of a transcendent love.
17
Anthony B. Pinn, “Introduction.” Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic. ed. Anthony
B. Pinn and Dwight Hopkins (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004) 6.
18
Tillich, Courage To Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
19
Tillich, Dynamics of the Faith 19.
20
Tillich, The Courage to Be 32-40.
21
Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in Early African
American Literature 35. Bassard emphasizes the importance of survival and to Wheatley and in particular
identifies Wheatley as a “Middle Passage survivor” (35).
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In “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” Wheatley directly appeals to the
transcendent capabilities of her God in her very first line with an explicit command to her
soul to “Arise, my soul, on wings enraptur’d, rise (ll. 1).”22 Her enraptured feeling and
the action of rising invoke the presence of the God who captures her with his love and
encourages the production of her excessive affect. She is thrust into an ecstasy as she
rises, flying “on wings enraptured.” Wheatley becomes increasingly enthused, quite
literally full of the Holy Spirit, inspired to write and to praise the inherent goodness of the
divine whose works have built the wings upon which she rises.23 Her rising represents a
rupture, a split from her literal reality into a transcendent space—a space within which
she can receive completely the poetic rapture that inspires this verse, illustrates the
ravishment implicit in her relationship with God and manifests the intense delight
invoked by the presence of God’s glorious works: the sun, the skies, the stars, His love.
Led by this rapture and subsequent transcendence into this divine realm, Wheatley
with the help of God co-authors of this paradoxical space—both within and outside of the
real, becoming the body through which the work of the Lord may be performed. In the
process of this authoring, Wheatley becomes apart of the “light divine” (ll.7) that
“guide[s] [her] soul” (ll. 8).24 This light provides her with the sight necessary to affirm
and strengthen her faith in “the God unseen” who protects with His never-ending power,
wisdom and everlasting love. Wheatley pronounces His greatness as she exclaims
“Almighty in these wond’rous works of thine,/What Pow’r, what Wisdom, and what
22
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 26. Even though Wheatley uses “soul” here I
understand soul and body to work together as one for Wheatley much in the same way that Katherine Clay
Bassard describes in Spiritual Interrogations. Bassard argues that “Wheatley’s desire to reconnect the
captured (Black female) body and the converted (‘freed’) soul leads to a poetics grounded in issues of
power and empowerment” (Bassard 60).
23
I use “enthuse” here to mean literally full of God. See Lewis Gordon’s “Can Men Worship?” in
Existencia Africana: Understanding African Existential Thoughts. (New York: Routledge, 2000) 118-119.
24
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 26.
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Goodness shine!” (ll. 25-26).25 This exclamation exemplifies the amazing and
supernatural nature of Wheatley’s faith in God who delivers her into a “safe space” that
can exist in spite of the sociopolitical dehumanization explicit within her everyday
experience.26 This exclamation embraces the exteriority necessary to produce the ecstasy
and the rapture that inspires Wheatley to continue to write, praise and worship. At this
moment, the “wond’rous” works of the Lord manifest themselves to her senses and
produce an affective response that is literally outside of her body—ecstasy—and yet
consumes her body—enrapture.27 Wheatley’s enraptured body exemplifies the erotic,
which essayist Audre Lorde describes as “a measure of between the beginnings of our
sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”28 Wheatley writes her strongest
feelings, providing voice to that measure and inscribing her joy-filled experience on
paper. With God and amidst His wondrous works, Wheatley speaks the “unspeakable
joy” and ignites the “power, which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another
person.”29 Wheatley’s pursuit, writing, is not only shared here with another person, the
reader but also another Reader, her God.
As she enjoys writing and conversing with her God, Wheatley not only anticipates
the creative and productive erotic of Lorde and Tillich but also the search for an ideal
25
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 26.
See Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?: the African American Migration Narrative. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995); See also Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Textual Healing: Claiming Black
Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery Callaloo 19.6 (1996):
529—“The memory of the moment provides a safe space for Dessa even more in the present of the
narration than it did originally. It creates a space in her mind to which she can return to temporarily escape
her material conditions and surroundings while also claiming her physical self. Throughout the text sch
moments—as they appear in daydreams, nightdreams and memories—are instances that allow her to recall
affirmation, sensual touch (though sex or acts like hair braiding)and advice from elders.”
27
See also Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith 8: “Faith as the embracing and centered act of personality is
‘ecstatic’… ‘Ecstasy means ‘standing outside of oneself’—without ceasing to be oneself—with all the
elements which are united in the personal center.”
28
Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984) 54.
29
Lorde, Sister Outsider 54.
26
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listener that Carla Kaplan in the Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist
Paradigms, reads in novels by women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The quest for an ideal listener dominates the writing of these women who write to
develop and imagine intimate relationships in which they actively participate in dialogue.
Kaplan describes this quest for dialogue and an ideal listener as an “erotics of talk.”30 The
individual who searches for this dialogue is not only in search of an opportunity to speak
but also an opportunity to be heard. According to Kaplan, these women novelists write—
by way of an erotics of talk—their
wish-fulfillment fantasy: a desire to be reassured that exchange between people is
still possible that we are not merely alone, speaking to ourselves, talking in the
empty wind of a world from which meaningful and satisfying interrelationship
has been eradicated.31
Kaplan’s erotics serve as a communicative medium that articulates personal desire for
social interaction—that is to say, conversation and dialogue with an ideal listener—while
providing a means by which to “mark our social ‘failure’ to provide an ‘open forum.’”32
Kaplan and Lorde both recognize that the erotic is “a lens through which we scrutinize all
aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their
relative meaning within our lives.”33 As a tool for self-scrutiny and social scrutiny, this
erotics and its subsequent search for an ideal listener requires an intimacy not only with
one’s self but also the ideal listener who in many ways stands in for a lover. This
engagement with self and a listener is an empowering moment in which the self acquires
30
Carla Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
31
Kaplan 15.
32
Kaplan 16.
33
Lorde 57.
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a level of sociopolitical understanding and self-recognition that transcends the
assumptions of traditional narrative exchange and communication.
Despite the century-long gap between Kaplan’s authors and Wheatley, Wheatley
also provides the site of this utopian dialogue by establishing a poetic space within which
she navigates through the terrain of social isolation into spaces of dialogue and
conversation. Scholars, such as Phillip M. Richards and Cynthia J. Smith, have also
identified Wheatley’s pursuit of an ideal listener in her poem, “To Maecenas.” In “Phillis
Wheatley and Literary Americanization,” Richards iterates Smith’s argument as he
asserts that “Maecenas becomes a wish-fulfilling embodiment of the qualities that
Wheatley hoped to find in her readers and herself as a poet.”34 Both Richards and Smith
assume that Wheatley’s pursuit of an ideal reader is in vain; Maecenas is either an
imagined figment and not a real figure or a distant white patron, such as Mather Byles.
Despite this argument, Wheatley actually does find her ideal companion that is not an
amalgamation of real or imagined figures.
Wheatley extends Kaplan’s argument by finding dialogue with an ideal listener in
God. Kaplan’s argument assumes that the listener is a human being; it is the human ear
that validates the presence of the ideal listener and renders the conversation a dialogue
rather than “self-talk” or a troubling monologue.35 The first line of the poem is a
command from God that in turn initiates this utopian dialogue. She responds to that
command by praising her Savior and his great works: “Ador’d for ever be the God
34
Phillip M. Richards, “Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization” 171.
Kaplan 14-15. Kaplan recognizes the cultural distrust of those individuals who talk to themselves.
Kaplan and other theorists associated self-talk with children, the homeless, the mentally ill and other social
pariahs.
35
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unseen,/Which round the sun revolves this vast machine” (ll. 11-12).36 From the
command of the first line to the subsequent praises through the entirety of the poem,
Wheatley and God demarcate the bounds of their dialogue. He speaks to her in nature:
“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 evr’y flow’ry birth (ll. 1720).” From the heavens to the flowers, God speaks to her every sense: eyes, ears, touch.
Her body responds to each representation of His words with writing full of exclamations
and other punctuation markers of emotional release: “And are thy wonders, Lord, by men
explor’d,/And yet creating glory unador’d! (ll. 27-28).”37 These markers acknowledge the
difficulty that exists in speaking the joy with which living in this erotic space provides
her. But this difficulty is not frustrating but rather pleasurable because her ideal listener is
able to help her navigate those pleasurable pauses. It is the pleasure of enthusiasm, divine
ecstasy and rapture. It is a pleasure in which light conquers darkness and love conquers
death, nonbeing and dehumanization. Thus, Wheatley’s ideal listener is not human and
yet He still provides her with the “‘ideal speech situation’”—that is to say, an intimate
conversation where there is recognition, acknowledgement and mutual reciprocity.38
Furthermore, this mutual and eroticized reciprocity becomes apparent when
Wheatley’s “Thoughts” are read alongside or as a revision of Psalm XIX. Phillip M.
Richards posits that Wheatley revises this psalm, which is David’s recognition of God’s
utterances as a sign of His glory. David, in this psalm, writes:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
36
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 26.
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 26.
38
Kaplan 6.
37
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There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.39
This psalm conflates aural/oral language with the representation of God in material
objects or nature. His glory finds voice as the sun travels across the sky or as the day
whispers unto night. Wheatley revisions this psalm, expressing the ways in which she
hears and speaks within this three-fold exchange between herself, nature and God. The
exchange is sensory; that is to say, to hear the “day unto day uttereth speech, and night
unto night sheweth knowledge,” Wheatley must see the sun as it arises or feel the touch
of the wind. Every waking day, she arises to respond to the call of God who begins the
idealized discourse; for this reason, Wheatley begins this poem with the command to
“Arise, upon enraptur’d wings, arise;” without this rise, Wheatley can neither meet her
God nor respond to His touch, His sight, His Words or His nature.
Following the establishment of this ideal exchange, Wheatley, as the poem
continues, imagines a world without the divine, a world without the verbal exchange
between Wheatley and God; “This world would be the reign of endless night:/In their
excess how would our race complain,/Abhorring life! How hate its length’ned chain!” (ll.
34-36).40 As she imagines this Godless world, she loses that unspeakable joy and drifts
back into the discourses of self-pity that burden her existence. Instead of joy, complaints
and hatred dominate her experiences. She becomes literally re-enslaved, chained, bound
in a darkness that metaphorically signifies sin and legal slavery. Wheatley becomes
bound not only to legal slavery but also to the hatred that such an experience produces.
“Abhorring life! How hate its length’ned chain!,” she imagines this hatred as an
39
King James Version, Psalm 19:1-3. See also Dr. Isaac Watts, “Psalm XIX to the Tune of the 113 Ps: The
Book of Nature and Scripture.” The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and
Apply’d to the Christian State and Worship. (London: J. Oswald and J. Buckland, 1748) 3:17-19.
40
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 27.
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oppositional force to the love experienced through faith. Exclamatory marks return to
signify the hatred that results from faithlessness. In this faithless world, God would
destroy her and her imagined racial community. Inscribed in a discourse of hate, each
member of the community, drenched in an eternal night, would succumb to the empty
rhetoric that emphasized her or his degradation rather than celebrated and affirmed her or
his life. As such, God silences the beauty he produces in nature—mindful of beauty’s
relation to the ideal dialogue that inspires and encourages Wheatley. Thus, the beauty of
the earth turns into a swampy mess with “air adust” (ll. 37), “dire contagion” and
“burning skies” (ll. 38); each image seemingly masks the “beauteous dies” that cover the
world of God (ll. 43).41 Her vision and affirmation of God is literally clouded by dusty air
and burning skies; without this affirmation, Wheatley imagines herself as this swampy
mess, disjointed and dismal. Her earlier purpose becomes purposeless. Her sense of self
deteriorates as her disembodied self struggles to cohere. Thus, Wheatley rejects this
world with the exclamation, “Hail, smiling morn, that from the orient main/Ascending
dost adorn the heav’nly plain!” and God returns to restore order to her form and her
imaginings (ll. 41-42).42
When God returns to her world Wheatley regains her shape. His presence
embodies her and she becomes full of life—the aforementioned beauteous dies return to
her imagined skies and cheeks. Wheatley’s enraptured wings return and she begins to
arise, as she hails “…the smiling morn, that from the orient main/Ascending dost adorn
the heav’nly plain!” (ll. 41-42).43 The colors of the dawn conquer the Godless night and
remind her that God is and “That, full of thee, my soul in rapture soars,/And thy great
41
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 27.
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 27.
43
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 27.
42
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God, the cause of all adores” (ll. 45-46).44 Her adoration is not simply for the morning
but also it recognizes the everlasting nature of God’s adoration. Wheatley declares that
“O’er beings infinite his love extends,/His Wisdom rules them, and his Pow’r defends”
(ll. 47-48).45 Wheatley is protected by His power and His wisdom; in his words and
works, within the written and literal space with which He provides, Wheatley finds and
nurtures this everlasting love. She understands that His love will never tire, will never
end. With Him and embodied by Him, Wheatley is real—a real human being who
creates, feels and acts according to His will.
Wheatley builds upon this Godly world as she continues to develop and imagine
the tangibility, the materiality of her experiences and her relationship with God. Her
imaginings lead her away from the daytime’s “beauteous dies” into the night (ll. 43).
There is a shift in the interest of the poem when Wheatley envisions the ways in which
her God informs her nighttime. Earlier, the darkness, which one might associate with
nighttime, characterizes the loss of God and faith; it is barren, lonely and devoid of His
light. As Wheatley affirms her faith, she courageously confronts the night, visualizing the
place of God both in the light and in the dark: “As reason’s pow’rs by day our God
disclose/So we may trace him in the night’s repose” (ll. 83-84).46 In that confrontation,
Wheatley realizes that her God exists both within the night and the day, as she sleeps and
while she is awake. Wheatley conceives of his presence in her dreams, outlining His form
and praising His works. As she sleeps, God enters. She asks, “Say what is sleep? And
dreams how passing strange!/When action ceases, and ideas range/Licentious and
44
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 27.
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 27.
46
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
45
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unbounded o’er the plains” (ll. 85-87).47 At first glance, the images of stopped action and
licentious and unbounded ideas suggest that Wheatley’s nighttime thoughts counteract
the Godliness of her daytime thoughts.
Despite the earlier negative connotations of the night and darkness, this divinely
inspired night is not sinful but yet another opportunity for Wheatley to enjoy the ecstasies
produced by fullness and richness of this divine love. Even as she sleeps, God represents
Himself to her in her dreams. Within these dreams, the licentiousness and the unbounded
affect of their interrelatedness is made manifest. Additionally, man and God become one
in the nighttime. The relationship between Wheatley’s conception of God, unbound
licentiousness, and eroticized pleasure in this poem and Psalm XIX reemerges here. The
possibility of this conflated subjectivity—both God and man—once again, revises both
the biblical Psalm XIX and Isaac Watts’ revision of the same Psalm and gestures towards
a human reification as a means with which to personify God.
Both the Bible and Watts represent the sun, another form of God’s manifestation
as a bridegroom. The Bible: “In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a
bridegroom coming out of his chamber;” Watts echoes this line: “The Sun, like some
young Bridegroom drest/Breaks from the Chambers and the East.”48 Wheatley alters both
lines by conflating further God and man. The sun becomes nature—“trees, and plants,
and all the flow’ry race;/As clear as in the nobler frame of man (ll. 72-73).”49 Nature is
the former “Bridegroom” whose form Wheatley traces as it is manifested in the “trees,
47
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
See also Dr. Isaac Watts, “Psalm XIX to the Tune of the 113 Ps: The Book of Nature and Scripture.” The
Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and Apply’d to the Christian State and
Worship. (London: J. Oswald and J. Buckland, 1748) 3:17-19.
49
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
48
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and plants, and all the flow’ry race (ll. 73).”50 At this point, Wheatley does not provide
him with a human form; His materiality exists in the reality of nature.
The man enters with the “him” found several stanzas later: “As reason’s pow’rs
by day our God disclose,/So we may trace him in the night’s repose (ll. 83-84).”51 The
“him” in the second line addresses the God in the previous line while it also gestures
towards an anonymous man. If her sights are solely set upon God, she traces Him through
His nightly representations in her dreams. This “trace” echoes that of aforementioned
quotation which represents God as nature, but there as well Wheatley gestures towards
man as an image of God or copy of the “Maker’s plan (ll. 74).”52 This is an opportunity
for Wheatley to imagine her loving God as both Himself and as a man. As such, God
discloses this “him” to represent both man and God. The collective “we” (ll.84) embodies
both Wheatley and God who brought His image to her in this anonymous man.
Together, God and Wheatley look upon his form and admire it, tracing it together
as Wheatley prepares for sleep. Thus, while she sleeps, next to this man or amidst God,
Wheatley dreams of their erotic confrontation. This confrontation confirms His power—a
power that provides a space for her to become overwhelmed by various emotions of love,
rapture, passion. As she dreams, “Fancy’s queen in giddy triumph reigns (ll. 88).”53 She
explains later in her poem, “On Imagination” that Fancy’s queen is Imagination. Her
dreams play her imaginative fantasies in which she:
Hear[s] in soft strains the dreaming lover sigh
To a kind fair, or rave in jealousy;
50
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
52
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
53
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
51
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On pleasure now, and now on vengeance bent,
The lab’ring passions struggle for a vent (ll. 89-92).54
Wheatley hears her lover’s sigh, his unspeakable exclamation as a response to her
kindness or his jealousy. This sigh leads to “pleasure now” which informs the vengeance.
There is a tension between the pleasure of kindness or the pleasure of jealousy; both
struggle to claim Wheatley’s attention and their struggle results in “the lab’ring passions
struggle for a vent” (ll. 92).55 Reason—“What pow’r, O man! Thy reason then
restores/So long suspended in the nocturnal hours? (ll. 93-95)” —ends the tyrannical
struggle that emerges in sleep.56 Reason emerges not because man is so empowered but
rather God intervenes with day: “What secret hand returns the mental train,/And gives
improv’d thine active pow’rs again (ll. 95-96).”57 God is the “secret hand” who brings
forth Reason to end the nocturnal imaginings. The anonymous man who inspired the
struggle and the eroticized passions leaves the nighttime; his body is no longer a form to
trace. Instead, her God enters to remind her of his mercy, to provide her with the strength
to conquer the next day. Her eyes open and her lips say,
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…(ll. 99-102).58
54
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
56
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
57
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
58
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
55
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The end of the night brings the dawning of another day. On this day, unlike the
previous days imagined, the poetic voice does not glorify the works of God by listing
them or thinking of a world without them. Instead, Wheatley continues to dream.
This dream is of the day rather than the night. Wheatley asks “Among the mental
pow’rs a question rose,/ ‘What most the image of th’ Eternal shows?” (ll. 104-105).59 The
figures of the previous stanza’s dream re-emerge to respond to the aforementioned
question that the dream presents. Reason re-enters and with her, follows Fancy who
inspires her imagination. Imagination brings her Love—the anonymous man and God.
God is the eternality that she questions and thus, the eternal is love. The “most” here
functions as a superlative. Wheatley, in fact, asks for a display of the greatest images that
this Eternal creates. Thus, the reason, fancy and love re-emerge as symbolic
representations of the whole Eternal. Reason, fancy and love inform the presence and
existence of that Eternal being whose image not only presents itself in the manifestation
of each but also within the mind of Wheatley. This voice creates and personifies the
Eternal and its component parts. In doing so, Wheatley transcends into the Eternal,
exemplifying the ways in which she, the poet, is apart of and endowed with
characteristics of this divine. Although this Eternal is an entity unto itself, Wheatley
represents a composite image of the divine because she, too, contains the reason, the
fancy and the love that are so much apart of the Eternal being. There seems to be a
re-invocation of the previous stanza in which Wheatley mobilizes fancy, reason and love
as she dreams. That is to say, this Eternal can exist without Wheatley but in order for
Wheatley to be, she must embody both all and part of this Eternal: reason, love and
fancy. The invocation of reason, love and briefly fancy symbolizes the humanness
59
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 28.
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implicit within the divine because they epitomize Wheatley; this reason, this love and this
fancy are hers to imagine, reconstruct and write.
What follows this question and the introduction of reason, fancy and love
represents a movement away from illustrating the wonders of God to reuniting the
concepts that encompass the entirety of both humanity and God—reason, fancy and love.
The lines and stanzas that follow the initial moments of fancy, reason and love
establishes their complex, interesting and intensely spiritualized erotic relationship that is
full of both strife and reconciliation. The dialogue that follows excises fancy and initiates
the reunion of the immortal love and reason. It begins with an acknowledgment of a
feminine companionship between Love and Reason—“When thus to Reason (so let
Fancy rove)/Her great companion spoke immortal Love (ll. 106-107).”60 Both reason and
love personified as women, friends represented by the pronoun “her” because they are
indeed hers—that is Wheatley’s—feminized personifications that interrelatedly represent
various components of her poetic voice. As Wheatley represents the Eternal/God/the
divine, love and reason encompass that Figure, and thus represent a feminized God.
Wheatley creates a separate feminine persona for both love and reason, despite the joint
means by which they and fancy shape God. Thus, the “immortal Love” symbolizes God
whose everlasting love surrounds and embraces Wheatley, inspiring her feelings of
rapture and her creative and loving pursuits.
In contrast, reason represents woman, Wheatley in particular, whose humanity
demands that she participate in quantifying, qualifying and categorizing the world within
limits and boundaries deemed reasonable. Even though both are introduced as
companions it becomes evident immediately that their friendship is strained by an
60
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 29.
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ongoing conflict. The causes of this conflict remain unnamed explicitly and yet as their
dialogue ensues it becomes apparent that their hostility is caused by the inability of the
human/woman to properly acknowledge the power of love/God over the creation of her
being. As Love functions as a metaphor for God, she understands the need of the human
being to quantify and stratify his or her world in order to make sense of the complexities
of nature. And yet, to defer to reason exclusively, to quantify nature’s beauty, is indeed to
limit the breadth of God’s divine works to the rigidity of nonsensical categories. By
praising reason over God/love, the human—reason—has negated herself and denied
herself the ecstasy and rapture of God’s works and providence. Within that rapture, there
is an intimacy associated with conversation, dialogue or prayer. Reason has denied
herself (because of an emphasis upon the proven, the scientific) this intimacy and
therefore has not communicated with her God/Love.61 She has not prayed. She has not
loved. Thus, this denial, this inability to communicate/pray/love forces a separation,
which in turn causes the strife that their dialogue seeks to reconcile.
Because Love, as defined by Kaplan in Erotics of Talk, is the “ideal listener” for
Reason, she is the intimate friend and confidante. She is unable to sustain this separation
any longer. Her ears burn with a desire to hear and her mouth with a desire to talk. And
thus, she initiates the communication while Reason defers, awaiting judgment. Now
inspired by the possibility of a dialogue, the “immortal Love” alludes to the ongoing
61
In Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, Paul Tillich echoes Wheatley’s assertion in the
following quotation:
“Reason stands, like everything in man, under the bondage of estrangement. There is no part of
man that is excepted from the universal destiny of man that is excepted from the universal destiny
of sin. For the cognitive function of man’s spiritual life this means that reason is blinded and has
become unable to recognize God. The eyes of reason must be opened by the revelatory presence of
the divine Spirit in the human spirit. Only when this happens can truth be received by human
reason” (Tillich 64).
Wheatley’s Reason becomes blinded by her linearity, her formalism thereby denying herself the truth.
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conflict—“…how long shall strife prevail/And with its murmurs load the whisp’ring
gale?” (ll. 108-109)—between herself and Reason.62 Love is no longer willing to
continue this strife because she can no longer ignore or overlook her friend. Her friend is
not only the image of herself that exists within the spirit of reason but also her “ideal
listener.” She asserts that man is “immortaliz’d by [her]” (ll. 113).63 Love wants to
relegated their strife to “Recollection’s shrine;” she does not want to forget but rather
reunite with and remember her friend. She demands, “Reason let this most causeless
strife subside” (ll. 114).64 This demand acknowledges the impasse that perpetuated their
hostilities, which had them, both unable to hear, forgive or love. As such, Reason
indirectly rejects the Christian principles upon which her relationship with Love is
founded; Reason rejects the immortality afforded the Christian believer, the eternal afterlife of the saved soul. This rejection represents Wheatley’s recognition of the
contradictions implicit within a theology that both enslaves literally and liberates
metaphorically. As the personification of Reason, Wheatley uses this figure to represent
her own hesitation and disbelief—a disbelief disproved and dispelled by the transcendent
power of love (read God). Despite this earlier rejection, Love’s demand initiates the
reunion that Tillich characterizes as a feature of a Christian based love, which he
characterizes as “the anticipation of the reunion [of the separated] which takes place in
every love-relation.”65 Wheatley’s immortal Love not only anticipates the reunion
between herself and Reason but also strives for this reunion. For this reason, Love
initiates this dialogue, representing the “[u]nperverted life [that] strives for that which it
62
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 29.
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 29.
64
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 29.
65
Tillich, Love Power and Justice. London: Oxford University Press, 1954: 26.
63
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is in want, it strives with that which is separated from it, though it belongs to it.”66 She,
the immortal Love, wants and struggles toward the estranged Reason.
In the stanza that follows, Reason agrees to end their “causeless strife” (ll. 114).67
Although Love’s quest to reunite with Reason does not appear to be marked by
sexualized or eroticized tensions, Reason explicitly re-establishes a relationship marked
by rapture, beauty and smiles. Reason is not only striving for Love’s reunion, but also
seeks to rekindle a pleasurable affection; this affection emerges not only because of
physical touch. It emerges in their conversation; this dialogue represents the pleasure
experienced in their loving friendship. The end of their “causeless strife” allows Reason
to feel the rapture that she associates with the “resistless beauty” of Love’s smile and to
converse intimately with the source of her rapture. Their strife ends the moment in which
she simultaneously speaks to and hugs Love: “Ardent she spoke, and, kindling at her
charms,/She [Reason] clasp’d the blooming goddess [Love] in her arms” (ll. 120-121).68
The act of speaking, communicating to Love enables their reunion and confirms their
mutual affection for one another. Seemingly, Reason cannot exist without love; both are
apart of yet distinct from one another. Thus, the union of these two women—one mortal,
the other immortal—brings together the forces that live and work within Wheatley. Their
reunion enacts a love that Wheatley learns exists within herself; it is this reunion that
allows Wheatley to feel the erotic “lifeforce” that lives within her, which allows her to
“listen to her body and love it.”69 Consequently, endowed with love and reason, with both
66
Tillich, Love, Power and Justice 29.
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 29.
68
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 29.
69
Audre Lorde, 55; Toni Morrison, Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987: 219.
67
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an immortal and mortal persona, Wheatley experiences the pleasure of herself as both a
human being and as an image of God.
Following the dialogue and reconciliation of Love and Reason, the poetic voice
reenters and concludes,
Infinite Love wher’er we turn our eyes
Appears; this ev’ry creature wants supplies;…
…Yet man ungrateful pays
But little homage, and but little praise
To him, whose works array’d with mercy shine,
What songs should rise, how constant, how divine!” (ll. 122-123, 128-131). 70
“Infinite love” continues to supply the wants of every creature; she appears wherever
“our eyes” roam through our landscapes and in our dreams. And yet the last two
sentences dismantle the feminization of this divine and reinsert a masculine pronoun.
Rather suddenly, our feminine divine is the him, “whose works array’d with mercy
shine,/What songs should rise, how constant, how divine!” (ll. 130-131).71 Wheatley
conflates these pronounces in an effort to emphasize the presence of God within the
earlier man that she imagines. Just as immortal Love and mortal Reason represent her, the
anonymous man is both the “him” and Him. The adoption of “him” in the ending stanzas
connects an imagined figure to a knowledge to which she has come; God is a
representation of all of his believers. He is a man or she is a woman—an idea dependent
upon the believer.
*
70
71
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 29.
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 29.
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“On Imagination” extends the theological vision that Wheatley constructs and
outlines in “Thoughts on the Works of Providence.” In the latter poem, Wheatley
envisions a God comprised of love, fancy and reason whose divine works inspire a
creative and spiritualized erotic within her. The emergence and recognition of this erotic
arouses her imagination, strengthens her relationship with God thereby producing the
pleasure that prompts her to write. Inspired by the presence of God and her eroticized
spirituality, Wheatley envisions Imagination, her power and her wondrous works, which
provide her (Wheatley) with the rhetorical and creative tools necessary to describe and
survive her experiences as a Black woman. Imagination allows her to claim a discursive
space that promotes the self-making and the courage necessary to “…surpass the
wind,/And leave the rolling universe behind” (ll. 17-18).72 Wheatley personifies her
Imagination; she is the queen, the feminized manifestation of Wheatley’s “ultimate
concern,” God.73
Wheatley uses that personification and the interplay between Imagination and
Fancy to continue to develop her liberatory theology which promotes the development of
a mutual and loving relationship with God which transcends the literal and figurative
binding of the secular world. Thus, Imagination is both an extension of Wheatley and
implicit within that extension is also the presence of God. As such, Imagination
creatively manifests their affective and discursive potentialities; that is to say,
Imagination fashions, creates the images that motivate and encompass the poetic voice.
72
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
See Kimberly Rae Connor, Imagining Grace: Liberating Theology in the Slave Narrative Tradition
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Connor argues similarly with respect to the slave narrative:
“The performance of religion is exercised more often through imagination, not by trying to understand God
but by encountering God or some essence of divinity that gives meaning and purpose to their lives”
(Connor 4).
73
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The force behind the existence of Imagination is both human, Wheatley and divine, God
and it is founded within the discourses of love that frame the theology upon which
Wheatley’s poetry is based.
In the opening stanza, Imagination is introduced an imperial queen whose
“wond’rous acts in beauteous order stand, /And all attest how potent is thine hand” (ll. 34).74 These works are identified as “bright” and “deck’d with pomp,” occupying the
illusion of reality within the mind’s eye (ll. 2).75 The invocation of Imagination’s
“wond’rous acts” echoes those, which described God in “Thought’s on the Works of
Providence.” The God of Wheatley’s thoughts performs “…in these wond’rous works of
thine,/What Pow’r, what Wisdom, and what Goodness shine?.” (ll. 25-26).76 Imagination
represents a conflation of the God from “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” and a
mortal, allegorical figure—a queen with the power to imagine and also dispense
imagination. Wheatley endows Imagination with adornments that confirm her status as an
empowered queen and allegorical God: “From Helicon’s refulgent heights attend,/Ye
sacred choir and my attempts befriend:,/To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,/Ye
blooming graces, triumph in my song” (ll. 5-8).77 Her “sacred choir” and “her glories”
denote the power that this seemingly contradictory immortal/mortal queen possesses.
Imagination is glorious and therefore glorified by Wheatley’s song. Wheatley is not alone
with this singing glorification; there is also a “sacred choir” who along with Wheatley
seeks to befriend the magnificent Imagination. Both lift their voices in songs of praise “to
74
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
76
Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 26.
77
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
75
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tell her glories with a faithful tongue,/Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song” (ll. 78).78
Amidst the wondrous works of Imagination, “[n]ow here, now there, the roving
fancy flies” (ll. 9).79 There emerges another voice alongside the overpowering presence
of Imagination; her name is Fancy. The appearance of Fancy introduces an additional
narrative into the poem. Imagination no longer dominates as the central figure as she
integrates herself into Fancy’s roving experiences. Consequently, Imagination establishes
a relationship in which both she and Fancy are mutually dependent upon the presence of
one another. In Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion, Julie Ellison
gestures towards that mutual dependency: “…Fancy and Imagination divide up the
emotional labor in ways that suggest some tension between affection and power as the
two aspects of ‘ardor.’”80 Ellison goes on to argue that “Fancy the lover is subordinate to
the more glamorous Imagination.”81 I want to argue here that they are neither
oppositional nor entirely hierarchical. Fancy’s ability to use Imagination to imagine
legitimates this monarch’s power. As the monarch with divine powers, Imagination is
able to use her power to deploy images that inspire Fancy to the love with which she
reunites throughout the course of the poem.
Fancy is a roving subject who under the spell of a love/loving object becomes
captivated. That is to say, she becomes enthralled in the loving object who captures not
her body but her attention, her mind: “Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,/Till
some lov’d object strikes her wondering eyes,/Whose silken fetters all the senses
78
Wheatley “On Imagination” 36.
Wheatley “On Imagination” 36.
80
Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion 118.
81
Ibid.
79
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bind,/And soft captivity involves the mind” (ll. 9-12).82 For scholars, Michele McKay and
William J. Shieck, the introduction of the terms, “captivity” and “silken fetters”
symbolize the actuality of Wheatley’s enslavement. In “The Other Song in Phillis
Wheatley’s ‘On Imagination,’” McKay and Shieck jointly argue that in this moment,
“…the poet’s Fancy has momentarily imagined escape from the slavery-like bondage of
‘silken fetters’ and ‘soft captivity’ only to succumb to the reality of wintry adversity
which ‘forbids [her] to aspire’ because her work, a compelling metonymy for the poet
herself, is ‘unequal.’”83 Although fetters are, in fact, chains and soft captivity seems
reminiscent of enslavement, Wheatley is not describing her real captivity here. Fancy
does not serve as a metaphor for inequity or even an anthropomorphic revisioning of
Wheatley’s conscious.
Instead, Fancy anthropomorphizes a woman whose eyes are stricken,
overwhelmed by the attention of the loving object for whom she searches and yet also
stimulated by the attention. While her eyes are rendered useless bt the stresses of
attraction, her senses bind her to her love. That love may possess the silken fetters, that
literally hook fancy’s attention but they may only captivate the roving Fancy if and when
her senses choose to acknowledge the advances of the loving object. That is to say, the
phrases, “all the senses bind” which follows “whose silken fetters” refer to Fancy’s
senses which have the ability to tighten their hold of the limp silky fetters that hold and
bind the loving object (ll. 10).84 Because there is no definitive pronoun to suggest that the
senses belong entirely to Fancy, Wheatley leaves open the possibility that they may
82
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
Michele McKay and William J. Scheik, “The Other Song in Phillis Wheatley’s ‘On Imagination.’”
Studies in the Literary Imagination 27.1 (March 1994) 72.
84
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
83
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belong to the loving object as well. This ambiguity signifies a mutuality that exists
between Fancy and her loving object. That is to say, both are bound to one another by a
captivation that acknowledges the symbiosis that maintains their relation. It is that
captivation—“soft captivity” (ll.12)—which helps sustain their love and prevents Fancy
from her early roving behavior.85 This “soft captivity” is not cumbersome, but rather,
wanted and expected.
Amidst the joys and rapture of this developing relationship, Imagination reenters
in the mind’s eye of the poetic voice. With Imagination as her guide and Fancy’s guide,
they, all together,
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th’empyreal palace of the thund’ring God,
We on they pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind (ll. 15-18).86
Fancy soars by her lover’s side into the air in search of the “bright abode,” the palace of
God. Imagination leads them to sights unseen, previously unimagined and there they can
leave their present universe behind and:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th’unbounded soul (ll. 19-22).87
Their mental optics rove to new worlds that exist only in the mind’s eye and in
contradiction to reality. There, Wheatley, Fancy and her lover live unbounded—that
85
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
Wheatley “On Imagination” 36.
87
Wheatley “On Imagination” 36.
86
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unboundness does not challenge the status quo but rather creates a space in which they
can construct their subjectivities and situate themselves within a self-defined community
and life. Here, if only momentarily, Fancy and the poetic voice become one, atop
Imagination’s pinions or wings, “…surpass[ing] the wind” (ll.17).88
Abruptly, winter halts this euphoric flight. Once winter befalls, these previous
delights become “frowns to Fancy’s raptur’d eyes” (ll. 23).89 As quickly as love and its
collective imagination stills Fancy’s roving, this metaphorical seasonal shift saddens her.
The rapture inspired by love is smothered by the cold air and frost of winter’s dim light.
The bitter cold of the air and the weight of ice upon the senses of Fancy symbolizes the
loss of the earlier intimacy. She is no longer light/in love enough to surpass the wind on
Imagination’s pinions. Her silken fetters have become “iron bands,” temporarily
immobilizing (ll. 25).90 Even though this brief moment appears to disrupt the joys of
earlier stanzas, Fancy, with the help of Imagination, envisions a landscape in which “The
fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;/The frozen deeps may break their iron
bands,/And bid their waters murmur o’er the sands” (ll. 24-26).91 The “may” of each
sentence invokes the possibility of change; Fancy does not have to remain glum or
burdened by the frigidity of winter’s presence.
Her Imagination restores the rapture through the use of metaphor and illusion.
This rapture emerges with the possibility implied by the “may” and as a response to the
growth of seeds planted in the flourishing field, and to the thawing of water, allowed to
flow over sandy beaches. The “may” restores hope—the hope that compels the growth of
88
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
90
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
91
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 36.
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the forests, the rain from the sky and love between two lovers. This hopefulness counters
the loss of love that winter represents. Consequently, that loss does not consume Fancy
because Imagination forcefully and willingly counters that sadness with the restoration of
spring. In this moment, Imagination intervenes not as a monarchy but rather another
feminized personification of God. She is the Creator who initiates the seasons and the
passing of time: “Such is thy pow’r, nor are thine orders vain,/O thou the leader of the
mental train” (ll. 33-34).92 As leader of the mental train, Imagination, with her powers of
joyful deception, momentarily heals the wounds conjured by the frostbites of winter and
lost love. There is a reunion, a return to love as Wheatley’s poetic voice continues to
describe the landscape that Fancy imagines. Flora—flowers—and Sylvanus—trees—can
reunite to decorate the forests with fragrant smells, “flow’ry riches” and leaves; “Show’rs
may descend, and dews their gems disclose,/And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose” (ll.
31-32).93 The movement of water, the blossoming of roses and fragrant, “flow’ry riches”
invokes a fluidity that mimics and imagines springtime, reproduction and growth while
also functioning as a metaphor for the maturation of a young woman and the erotic
responses of an aroused woman. Fancy undergoes this maturation and becomes this
aroused woman. Comforted by the reality of springtime and embraced by the wetness of
growth and the possibility of sexual maturation, Fancy becomes revitalized in spite of the
cold winter that literally surrounds her. Immersed in imagination, Fancy “might now her
silken pinions try,/To rise from earth, and sweep th’expanse on high” (ll. 41-42).94 Her
body is heightened and arisen by the imaginative possibilities that allow her to transcend
the neglect implied by the cold winter.
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Wheatley, “On Imagination” 37.
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 37.
94
Wheatley, “On Imagination” 37.
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Although rooted in the Fancy’s mind’s eye, these images are not premised upon a
fallacy but rather upon a reality that transcends the literal. The restoration of arousal and
blooming ability—symbols of life—to the young Fancy represents Wheatley’s own
maturation processes. This maturation references both the growth of her faith in God and
her physical maturation to adulthood. Wheatley imagines, in the interaction between
Fancy and her loving object and between Flora and Sylvanus, her self participating in
these experiences of love. The object of her love is God, as Himself and as his secular
manifestations in nature and as man. By bringing together Fancy and Imagination,
Wheatley invokes God and her self in dialogue with one another. Just as in “Thoughts on
the Works of Providence,” Wheatley invokes God as her ideal listener, as an intimate
partner. He brings her the imagination that silences and dispels her angst, allow her to
undergo a transformation that mimics the transition from winter to springtime. This
transformation leaves Wheatley yearning for the continuation of this pleasurable
experience:
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay (ll. 48-53).95
There is a reality that distracts Wheatley from these imaginative moments with Fancy in
love. Both the “winter” and “aspire” seem to compel her to reluctantly “leave the
pleasing views,/Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse” (ll. 48-49). Scholars Michele
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Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” 37.
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McKay and William Scheick read this moment as the expression of Fancy’s frigidity—a
frigidity imposed upon her by Imagination. As a result, Fancy’s song finds additional
strength in these last lines by way of “an affirmation by denial;” Imagination denies
Fancy the opportunity to access those images of pleasure and subsequently becomes
silenced. 96
Wheatley’s aim is not to affirm by denial. This winter recalls the winter of the
previous stanza. This invocation does not leave room for the intervention of Imagination.
Imagination cannot restore beauty to this winter; Fancy cannot find flight and Wheatley
cannot find her muse. Wheatley’s choice of the words “winter” and “aspire” gesture
towards the reality of Wheatley’s struggle with her health. Her decision to use “aspire”
not only makes reference to the desire to aspire as a poet but also to breathe. Wheatley
strategically uses this verb to represent humility but also to address her inability to
breathe as an asthmatic. Wheatley makes reference to her condition in a letter to Obour
Tanner: “…but this acquaints you that I am at present indisposed by a cold, & Since my
arrival have been visited by the asthma.”97 Her struggle with breathing becomes a
metaphor for her struggle with faith. Winter as a manifestation of God in nature
symbolizes His power and His power to silence her and prevent her aspirations (read her
breaths). She reluctantly has silenced their dialogues; her ideal listener, her intimate
partner leaves her side, and instead “northern tempests damp the rising fire/They chill the
tides of Fancy’s flowing sea” (ll. 51-53).98 There is no longer the pleasure she formerly
associated with their dialogues and imagined through her representations of Fancy and
96
Michele McKay and William Scheick, “The Other Song in Phillis Wheatley’s ‘On Imagination” 79.
Phillis Wheatley, “To Obour Tanner in New Port.” 30 October 1773. 148.
98
Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” 37.
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Imagination. Consequently, without this dialogue, without God, Wheatley “cease[s] then,
my song, cease the unequal lay” (ll. 53).99
*
Despite the somber silence that ends this “On Imagination,” Wheatley’s two
poems, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” and “On Imagination” capture an
important yet overlooked relationship in her life—that is her loving and pleasurable
relationship with God. Both poems work together to express the joy of Wheatley’s
faithful and inspired life. This recognition fills Wheatley with an empowered eroticism,
which awards her a complete and coherent sense of self and a faith in her self. This erotic
emerges with the expression of her faith. God seemingly responds to this faith in nature
and with every waking moment of Wheatley’s life; they feel and love together, unified by
their dialogue. Her voice, her words initiate the call for the creative eroticism that Audre
Lorde later defines as the life force that lives within women and that Paul Tillich
understands to be so much a part of faith. In “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,”
Wheatley conceives of the “works of providence” as they affect her and reinforce her
faith—from the sun rising to the growth of wings upon her so that she might also rise to
the nightly dreams in which God represents Himself as man. She imagines a self that
participates and enjoys in these works and the love of God. In this process and affirmed
by faith, Wheatley writes love as she experiences the pleasures that the depth of her faith
produces. The quotation from Toni Morrison’s Beloved captures a concern that Wheatley
seemingly attempts to negotiate throughout her poems—that is the place and role of
pleasure and love in self-affirmation. Wheatley learns to love herself because she
imagines God not as an abstract figure but rather the manifestation of love and as her
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Wheatley, “On Imagination” 37.
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“ultimate concern.”100 Consquently, God represents all things and all feelings and in
particular pleasure. Even as Wheatley struggles with her faith in the final lines of the
poem, the creative power of her poetry produces spaces in which God fulfills her. Her
body becomes her soul as she participates dialogue that inspires her writing—the
dialogue that Carla Kaplan suggests women writers often crave. God is her only
respondent and her most powerful encourager. So empowered, Wheatley becomes her
own “ultimate concern”—that is, the spirit of God within her.
100
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith 1.