Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics

Chapter 3. Wheatley’s “Long Poem” and Subsequent Considerations

Chapter 3 Wheatley’s “Long Poem” and Subsequent Considerations Critics of the British romantics are fond of focusing attention on the so-called Long Poems of romantic authors—for example, Wordsworth’s Prelude or Keats’s Endymion. Such “Long Poems” serve as substantial expressions of what we wish to call “romantic.” As three of Wheatley’s poems, taken together, do assuredly give shape to her theoretics of the imagination, we may accurately refer to these three works collectively as her “Long Poem.” While we have often touched upon the poems that make up Wheatley’s “Long Poem,” now we examine “On Recollection,” “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” and “On Imagination” as a unit. As well, we make occasional excursi into other Wheatley texts as the analysis demands. Wheatley adroitly attests that she is thoroughly engaged with the poetic process—that is, with the act of creating a poem—in “On Recollection,” a poem wherein she demonstrates her subtle turn toward interiorization, signaling the first period of her poetic maturity and abandonment of her earlier unsuccessful struggle to find full acceptance with the Boston crowd. This lack of acceptance may well have prompted her revision of “On Recollection” into the excellent, interiorized portrait she gives of her personal struggle during the horrid Middle Passage that brought her to America (on the slaver, the Phillis, recall). The first version of this poem dates from late November to early December 1771; the superior revision Wheatley chose to include in her 1773 Poems. In order to accomplish the five-stress iambic line of heroic verse, Wheatley opts to open “Recollection” with the older form of memory’s name, “Mneme,” rather than choosing the four-syllable, less ancient “Mnemosyne.” Hence Wheatley suggests her sophistication as a classicist. This faculty, of course gendered female, is, according to Wheatley, one of power. Recognizing Mneme 46 Wheatley’s “Long Poem” and Subsequent Considerations as an “immortal pow’r,” Wheatley calls up “Thy pow’r” (l. 7), “thy pow’r” (l. 38) again, and “her pow’r,” in order finally to assert her own power in application of this faculty; it is, after all, the power of her own memory that summons “from night” “the long-forgotten” (l. 7). Upon first encounter, this powerful faculty “sweetly plays before the fancy’s sight” (l. 8). To Wheatley this play becomes most manifest as “nocturnal visions” that Mneme “pours” into the mind, wherein an “ample treasure” of separate memories registers as “secret stores.” Mneme’s “stores” arrange themselves as a “pomp of images display’d” that give “to the high-raptur’d poet” assistance in the construction of her poems. Of great significance is that Wheatley insists that this treasure trove of images occupies “the unbounded regions of the mind.” This insistence establishes that this poet’s memory, which knows no bounds, is free to explore without restraint—that is, bereft of the chains of slavery. Such a perspective here points directly to Wheatley’s liberation poetics. Interestingly, Charron had earlier held that “Memory acts not at all but is purely Passive” (Charron, Stanhope ed. 19), this passage possibly serving as a source for Coleridge’s description of fancy/memory in chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria (305). To the renaissance skeptic, imagination “collects together the Ideas and Figures of Things”; at this early point in Wheatley’s evolving poetics, her enthusiasm for memory’s “immortal pow’r” leads her to ascribe to Mneme what she would soon hold to be the responsibility of fancy. Later she would invest memory with less “pow’r.” In “Recollection,” nevertheless, the poet names memory “The heaven’ly phantom [who] paints the actions done / By ev’ry tribe beneath the rolling sun” (ll.17–18). Wheatley is going to present, then, a sweeping panorama that condemns vice and praises virtue. “Virtue” brings to her mind sounds “Sweeter than music to the ravish’d ear,” which recall to her the “entertaining strains” of Virgil’s Latin eclogues, “Resounding through the groves, and hills, and plains” (ll. 22–24). From this representation of idyllic pastoral, the poet shifts quickly, but apparently innocuously, to the realm of vice in which memory unveils “each horrid crime” attended by “Days, years misspent” conjuring “a hell of woe!” This woeful hell summons “the worst tortures that our souls can know” (ll. 27–30). After a casual reading, one is inclined to think, because the poet declares that her memory causes these horrid crimes to return, hence provoking her “to be asham...