- Phillis Wheatley Dreams in Latin
The pen is the pike of leisure, it digs its supperout of chain-dirt. Tityrus, Virgil's shepherd, tells Meliboeusthat only a god could provide the leisure they enjoy.My rest from labor cries out in English couplets,reverent and marble, enough to make Pope weep:sullen hunchback, easy satirist. He calls my haunts, distant friends.He cannot write my Essay on Man. I stack evidence at night.If I were with those shepherds I would kiss the Latinfrom their faces. Speak to them until morning.
What servus have I become, chained to what villa door?The poets are in the study behind the heavy Roman curtainsbut only the painters gawk at me.They are drunk on my features. Their wine spills into the rain-poolof the grand house. This is no Boston. I could shove such versesinto these men they would swell like stuffed Suffolk Pheasants.A boat. Terence is sailing. African. Slave. Poet. His look is distant.He unlocks his chains. They slip from his tired flesh.His pen has fallen into the ocean, it swells like a fish.
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum putoI am a human too, and no alien. My arrival was by design.In my dream, Terence boards a boat. He is alone,weeping that he will never return from this last voyage.His pages are tucked away somewhere. Safe from the hazards that follow his body.You will write a tunnel out of this world, he tells me, and be free.His sails fill with visions: the rebuke of that weary Virginian widower,his mouth full of French and broken promises. My dying children.The poverty. The books never published. He holds his hand up.Comprehendo I hiss. I know. I know. I choose freedom. And salt tears. I am awake. [End Page 2]
Timothy Duffy is a teacher, scholar of Renaissance Poetry, and poet in Connecticut. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Entropy, The Hawai'i Review, The Cortland Review, and Longleaf Review. He is founder and editor of 8 Poems Journal.