On Being Brought from Africa to America

The tradition of neoclassicism requires of its proponents a deep familiarity with Latin, Greek, and religious texts, among other academic, philosophical, and scientific learnings. As scholarly allusions, rational thought, logic, and objectivity were the poetic standards of the time, a formal education was absolutely essential. As evidenced by the poems in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis Wheatley valued intellectual and spiritual pursuits as the subjects of her work. Her poem, “To the University of Cambridge in New England,” expresses a desire for a more challenging academic atmosphere and her literary allusions, both classic and biblical, reveal the breadth of her knowledge. “On Being Brought from Africa to America” is no exception to this: The poem explores the theme of education through the lens of Christianity, though it goes well beyond religious implication.

The poem makes a narrative arc from ignorance to awareness in its first four lines. The speaker maintains she was a “benighted soul”—a person lacking intellectual opportunity—before being “taught” by mercy “to understand” (Line 2). Personified within the Christian context, mercy is granted to the speaker because she was stripped of that which she truly deserved: freedom.