Beginning to 1820: Short Answer Quiz

Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”


  1. Who is Wheatley’s audience in this poem? Describe the person whom you take to be addressed by this poem, what it hopes to persuade that person of, and how it goes about persuading her or him.

  1. Many of the adjectives that Wheatley uses in this poem could be construed to apply to the “pagan land” of Africa; the poem proceeds, for example, from “pagan” in the first line to “angelic” in the last. But they may also apply to her skin color, as if she had somehow bought into some “benighted” or degraded innate nature of Africans, which needs to be “refined.” How do you see Wheatley’s description of her own spiritual state prior to her conversion? How do you see diction working in the poem to accomplish this religious rather than racial project?

  1. In choosing to write in the fashion of eighteenth-century poetry, Wheatley also becomes saddled with the use of symbolism that would be familiar to her readers. Although she prefers the use of the adjective “sable” to describe her skin, for example, she knows her readers will associate that blackness with something “diabolic.” Describe how Wheatley uses “black” in her simile “black as Cain.”

  1. Consider what you know of the Enlightenment, especially in terms of poetic appeals to reason and sentiment. In what ways does this poem appeal to the reader’s fellow feeling? In what ways is it a charge to think rationally about the speaker’s situation? The speaker’s involvement of her own personal conversion history, for example, contrasts strongly with the quotation marks that set apart “Their color is a diabolic dye” in line six.



First Name:
Last Name:
Your Email Address:
Your Professor's Email Address: