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Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers
control the weather and the tides, its enormous presence in the sky, and its position as the celestial body that centers and orders the planetary system. The 18th-century sublime poet John Dennis employs the same metaphor of the Sun and God: “The Sun occurring to us in meditation gives the idea of a vast and glorious body . . . and the brightest material image of the divinity” (reported in Shields 193). To compare the “solar rays” with God’s love and benevolence, Wheatley imagines the effect of their absence: “Without them, destitute of heat and light, / This world would be the reign of endless night” (33–34). “Endless night” refers not only to the literal consequence of the Sun’s absence but also to a metaphorical result, a state of spiritual depravity. In the absence of God and the Sun, Wheatley considers cataclysmic results: “What pestilential vapours, frought with death / Would rise, and overspread the lands beneath?” (39–40). The “limitless vision” of Wheatley’s extended metaphor parallels Joseph Addison’s defi nition of grandeur expressed in the Spectator: “Our imagination loves to be fi lled with an object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its capacity” (reported in Shields 190). The critic John C. Shields believes that “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” participates in the 18th-century notion of the religious sublime, “the expression of the enthusiastic passions in predominately Christian language and images” (189). The means to attempt an understanding or knowledge of God occurs in the poem through the power of reason: “As reason’s pow’rs by day our God disclose” (83). “As she construes them, the faculties of imagination and reason are virtually synonymous” (Shields 196–197). It is Wheatley’s defi nition of imagination that provides her with the faculty of perceiving the sublime, in this case, the overwhelming power and presence of God. Shields makes careful note of Wheatley’s separation of “imagination” from “fancy,” which appears in the poem in the speaker’s dream state “when action ceases and ideas range / licentious and unbounded o’er the plains” (86–87). Because the stuff of dreams is mundane and taken up with
earthly rather than heavenly love, it is relegated to “Fancy.” To train the mind to contemplate the religious sublime, Wheatley recommends that upon waking from Fancy’s “giddy triumph,” one should “let thy fi rst thoughts be praises to the skies” (98). This act of devotion might lead one to a more profound contemplation of God. Shields compares Wheatley’s use of the sublime to Immanuel Kant’s, stating, “Both in Kant and in Wheatley, the inexorable attempt of the human mind to grasp totalities and the equally inexorable failure to do so incites the feeling of the sublime” (197).
For Discussion or Writing 1. Wheatley writes “Ador’d for ever be the God unseen” in the fi rst stanza of her devotional poem. Consider why an unseen God contributes to the poem’s sublime quality. 2. How does the absence of any self-identifying line or phrase in the poem contribute to or impede the poem’s sublimity? 3. Compare Wheatley’s devotional poem to those of A NNE BR ADSTREET, who likewise professes her religious faith in her poetry.
“To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works” (1773) Critics and historians alike have identified the subject of this occasional poem, S. M., as Scipio Moorhead, the slave of the Reverend John Moorhead. Moorhead, who was pastor of the Church of the Presbyterian Strangers, was one of the reputable men of Boston who held the investigation of Wheatley that ended in an attestation of her authorship of the poems that were subsequently published in England. Encouraged by his mistress, Sarah Moorhead, who taught art and drawing, Scipio Moorhead pursued art and was commissioned to draw the likeness of Phillis Wheatley that appears on the frontispiece of her book of poetry. This poem appears in Wheatley’s 1773 publication Poems on Various Subjects.