Phillis Wheatley's On Being Brought From Africa To America

Phillis Wheatley, born in 1753, wrote the poem, “On Being Brought From Africa to America” in 1773, at the young age of 20 years old. Wheatley was an African American, and a woman, and she is known as a true American poet and a pioneer. Wheatley was well-educated, which was unusual for both women and African Americans at this time, and her education gave her many tools to write the powerful works she wrote. Wheatley’s works tend to be subtly argumentative, and that is what I’d like to demonstrate and analyze in my explication of “On Being Brought From Africa to America.” In the first two lines of this poem, Wheatley chooses to communicate her ideas using words riddled with implications. On the surface, she literally describes her experience

She declares that both Christians and African Americans who are “black as Cain” can be educated and can gain eternal life (lns. 7-8.) These final two lines are where Wheatley’s message really shines through. She shows her argument here, and she backs up her argument with evidence of how educated she is. Referencing Cain from the Bible makes Wheatley seem more knowledgeable about her religion, and that gave her credibility, which is something Wheatley definitely (and unfortunately) needed as a young, black woman writer. And by saying Cain was “black” due to his sin of killing his brother shows that Wheatley fully understood both Cain’s story and also how people viewed her race. But the subtle knife twist Wheatley leaves us with is the rhyming of Cain and “angelic train.” This is especially fascinating to me because Cain is seen by Christians as such a negative idea while the angelic train is such a positive idea, and by juxtaposing these two simply by rhyming them, she uses her words to echo their meaning, saying that even the blackest of black people can join in eternal life. And I think that literary technique is incredibly powerful as well as