I haven't exactly figured out how or why just yet, but I have really come to appreciate poetry since the start of American Lit. It could very well just be because I have really enjoyed all the poetry we have read so far? Maybe it's the fact that, unlike most of the poetry classes I took in high school, we don't beat them over and over again with a hammer.

In any case, I can now add Phyllis Wheatly as a "like" to my slowly growing list of poets. I really enjoyed her poem "Thoughts on the Works of Providence." This stanza especially jumped out at me:

Creation smiles in various beauty gay,

While day to night, and night succeeds to day:

That Wisdom, which attends Jehovah's ways,

Shines most conspicuous in solar rays:

Without them, destitute of heat and light,

This world would be the reign of endless night:

In their excess how would our race complain,

Abhorring life! how hate its lengthened chain!

From air adust what numerous ills would rise?

What dire contagion taint the burning skies?

What pestilential vapors, fraught with death,

Would rise, and overspread the lands beneath? (pg. 423-24)

I just found this stanza to be very hypnotizing. I love the way in which she describes the differences and benefits between day and night and the beauty that comes with each, and then uses them both to point it back to God's graciousness.

I wish Wheatly would have lived longer. It would have been very interesting to see what sort of writer she would have turned into. She was so influential as both a woman and African American writer. I read somewhere that she only lived to be about 31, so imagine what else she could have done had she lived longer!

I found this picture of her on Google:

It was interesting because it was the only one of her I could find that didn't have her sitting with her hand at her chin and a pen in her hand.

I also found this picture of a statue of her in Boston:

But, of course, this has the image I described before. I'm discovering a common theme here....

It's curious that I haven't heard more about her. She is described as an incredibly influential writer, and yet I do not ever really recall hearing about her anywhere. The only thing was, when I was in middle school, I read a somewhat biographical yet still fictitious book about her life that I vaguely recalled while we were discussing Wheatly in class. (The whole time in class I could NOT remember what the book was called and it was driving me crazy, but thanks to Sarah Odens, who coincidently also read the book, the problem has been solved. If you're curious about it, check out her blog because it rocks!)

I'm curious enough about Wheatly that I think I'm going to make it my goal to learn more about her. Wish me luck!