The elegies of Phillis Wheatley are unique. In their expressions of multiple messages that conceal the slave-poet’s tragic plight, they are quintessentially American. On one level, her funeral songs reflect the Puritan culture in which she achieved fame. On another level, however, Wheatley’s elegies reflect her African past and her own slave present. 1 In both respects, her manuscript elegy to Charles Eliot, now at the Massachusetts Historical Society, offers us a useful example of how the poet’s verse conveyed multiple meanings.

The first stanza reveals a multilayered mosaic. Charles’s flight, for instance, begins caught between two planes of existence, or as she explains in lines 1 and 2:“Thro’airy realms, he wings his instant flight,/To purer regions of celestial light.” Although most Puritan elegists would have started in heaven, Wheatley’s begins midstream. In the middle of flight, she went on to note, Charles observed the universe in all of its splendor:“Unmov’d he sees unnumber’d systems roll/Beneath his feet, the universal whole”(3–4). For Phillis’s coterie of readers, these lines demonstrate not only her mastery of elegiac form, but also the remarkable home-schooling she received in the Wheatley household that included lessons in science. 2 These lines also reveal something of the poet’s peculiar station in colonial New England. An accomplished woman in her own right and an enslaved African in America, Wheatley’s depiction of the infant’s journey breaks with Puritan tradition and provide the poet an occasion to speak of her own particular station in life. Neither completely a slave nor a free person, she too is caught in the middle.