America

While protesting England’s injustices, the poem’s speaker also celebrates the virtues she attributes to America and the promising future the country could have. In doing so, the speaker presents America as a place that could both bring glory to England while also representing a new, more enlightened way of life.

From the opening of the poem, the speaker idealizes America as a place that is—or has the potential to be—a land of freedom, success, and merit. The speaker claims that “New England first a wilderness was found” (Line 1) by the earliest settlers, with “wilderness” conjuring up a sense of untamed landscapes and potential threats. This wilderness was filled with “savage monsters” (Line 3) that had to be driven “from field to field” (Line 3) to bring the new country under control, thus converting it from a “wilderness” (Line 1) into a place of cultivation and, it is implied, civilization. The speaker presents this colonization process as something decreed by fate, asserting “’twas destin’d” (Line 2) that these events should occur. In celebrating the colonists’ triumphs over the “wilderness” (Line 1) and even imbuing America’s rise as a destiny fulfilled, the speaker presents America as a new country that has always been fated to succeed.