Three Poems of Phillis Wheatley: An Argument that Patriotism Manifests in Dissent
Over the summer, I took an American Lit class at Wofford College with Dr. Neighbors. One of the authors we studied was Phillis Wheatley and the encryptions she embedded in her poems. Below I’ve included the essay I wrote for the class on three of her poems.
Though Phillis Wheatley is not an enfranchised stateswoman, she is a faithful follower of freedom, and an advocate for a guilty but redeemable state. Through religion, she argues for abolition, comparing God’s infinite and equal love to a state’s duty to protect its people, citizens and outcasts alike. Her poems dissent from traditional views while reminding readers that dissension for freedom’s perpetuance is, in fact, conventional of Americans. Using God and patriotism, Wheatley advocates for the enslaved and for refining America.
In Wheatley’s poem “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” she compares God’s influence to light and God himself to the sun. He is, “the monarch of the earth and skies.” God shines light, but has the power to blind, and disappears at regular intervals. In godless times, men are responsible for wielding love, hate, and the reason that justifies either. Wheatley writes this poem to say human institutions (like America) are created by people and therefore just as flawed. God wishes to forgive rather than punish, guide not blind, and Wheatley asks for reform rather than destruction of her country, a patriotic stance.
Wheatley is critical of God’s alleged protection, exemplified in her statement, “The sable veil, that Night in silence draws.” Since sable is used to denote not just blackness, but a black person, she could be comparing God’s absence to seeming abandonment of the enslaved. If night is without the sun, dark, then the black race is without God’s protection, Wheatley says; God stops watching at night and turns a blind eye. She feels that America has also abandoned her and faith in pursuit of avarice; in turn, God abandoned America for its unrepented sins. “And are Thy wonders, Lord, by men explored,/ And yet creating glory unadorned!”
Wheatley feels a lack of providence; however, rather than assuming God turned his back on the enslaved, she could believe instead that night is temporary and day is imminent. Her captors are afraid of looking to God for fear of being blinded (America is afraid of furthering His glory because it is in pursuit of its Earthly kingdom). Once they find God again, America will truly adopt all of God’s children, no matter their race. “O’er beings infinite His love extends.”
Slavery is explicitly mentioned as a problem of America’s when Wheatley writes “Destitute of heat and light,/ This world would be the reign of endless night: in their excess how would our race complain,/ Abhorring life! how hate its lengthened chain!” If night is godless, and slavery is a place of darkness, Wheatley says that to enslave is to condemn people life devoid of virtue — enslavers are damned in death and the enslaved are damned in life. To avoid damnation, America must expel this sin and lament freedom. Wheatley wants to save America as God wants to save His children. Humans bask in God’s light, but inside each “human frame, then too that ever active bounty shines.” God’s light can not be constrained, nor can his will. Because Wheatley is a follower of Christ, she is allowed the same immunity as every other Christan — his light will protect his adherents even in the night: “And all is peaceful but the brow of care.” With the restored protection of God, how can America fail? And Wheatley doesn’t want America to fail, she wants it to succeed, because if it succeeds, then it is good and just and right, or at least aspires to be.
When humans see the sun, they know it is time to wake; now Wheatley asks that those who see the light will follow the schedule of the sun (God) and His plan. “Again, gay Phoebus, as the day before,/ Wakes every eye but what shall wake no more […] Today, O hearken, nor your folly mourn/ For time misspent, that never will return.” She asks a join of God’s patriots and America’s to expose the foolish endeavor of holding people captive. She demands action. The same estrangement shared with God is also the cause of divorce between a patriot and his nation — lack of faith in God, and lack of faith in our fellow mortals. “The power the same that forms a ray of light,/ That called creation from eternal night.”
Human substance relies upon free will. God leaves just as the sun during the night, but only to withdraw his counsel temporarily to assess our wits and worthy. He asks humans to compensate via learning what He did not give in conscience. He wants us to be good to be good, not to be good for Him — otherwise, our sacrifices are not genuine. “As reason’s powers by day our God disclose,/So we may trace Him in the night’s repose […] What power, O man! Thy reason then restores, So long suspended in nocturnal hours?” America’s substance relies on the brave and the free to help the weak and the captive, and when we are loving, we are reasonable. Humans die slowly with hate, but are sustained and led to a quick release by potent love. Hate is a knife, and love is a stroke.
There is nothing more faithful to American values than freedom under the wishes of God. Wheatley expresses this and a want for unity and consonance of humanity. She calls for conversation between what is reasonable and what is loving, and asks whether the two coincide. “Thus Love pronounced, and Reason thus replied.” She writes that Love begs Reason to let this “causeless strife subside,” and while some interpret this to mean a wish to take refuge in heaven one day, Wheatley could be referring to a specific Earthly struggle, such as slavery. Slavery is not reasonable nor is it divine and therefore a sin and vice America needs to expel. It is Wheatley’s hope that if she can forgive her captors for arbitrary bias, then they can forgive her for shining a light on all those who remain in darkness. She is a faithful Republican firstly because she is asking for people to unify for the effort of freedom.
“To His Excellency General Washington” is another prominent example of Wheatley’s activism, except it is more obviously patriotic than “Thoughts on the Works of providence.” Wheatley’s wish for the success of “Columbia” is obvious in her mentions of victory decorum (olive and laurel), and her praise of the army in lines like “The grace and glory of thy martial band./ Famed for thy valor and for thy virtues more.”
War rallies people, and Wheatley believes that this might be a good chance to assert the fact that enslaved or free, the patriots of America are fighting for the same goal. She says, “The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!” She uses the term “race” as a social construction that unifies people of a similar culture rather than using it as a biological term to divide the very same.
She also supports the stance that if freedom can not be accessed, it must be fought for. Her use of bright in the sentence, “In bright array they seek the work of war,” demonstrates a positive look on impending war.
Her comment on the destruction of Britannia (Great Britain) is revealing in the lines, “Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,/ While round increase the rising hills of dead. Ah! Cruel blindness to Columbia’s state.” Firstly, the personification of the two nations causes the reader to view a government’s war like a brawl between two people. When looking at America and Great Britain as two people, it is clear that one person trying to rule another is just as crazy as a nation an ocean away trying to govern another. People are oceans away from one another. She considers herself a patriot of the human race, only more narrowly of America.
Finally, Wheatley’s poem “To the University of Cambridge, in New England” makes a clear argument that knowledge is the only way to reach true autonomy of the soul — to choose God, and to choose America (and a righteous one) in a thoughtful way is the only way one will live “Life without death, and glory without end.” While Wheatley does not have the opportunity to experience life in a vast way because she is black, she must live longer through her poems so that she may eventually be free and understood. Her civil disobedience to live a life proportional to the view of her critics and captors is one of the most American traits about her. Like the persecuted Jesus, Wheatley does not wish to obstinate, again and again, justify herself, or submit to meanness because of her circumstances. She says, “He hears revilers, nor resents their scorn:/ What matchless mercy in the Son of God !/ When the whole human race by sin had fallen,/ He deigned to die that they might rise again.”
To live with conviction and to die with cause is important to Wheatley, and both must be accomplished with purpose and deliberation. Learning, “scan[ing] the heights,” and knowing what a person is fighting for is just as important as the actual fighting. People do not learn for the sake of learning, so they should not simply fight to fight, and the goal should always be honorable, otherwise, war becomes a waste of humanity, faith is moot, and patriotism is a term of propaganda.
