Phillis Wheatley - Boston, MA
Posted by: 
neoc1
N 42° 21.028 W 071° 05.001
19T E 328408 N 4690791
Poet Phillis Wheatley is one of three women honored at the Boston Women's Memorial on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall between Gloucester St. and Fairfield St. in the Back Bay of Boston.
Waymark Code: WMKYVB
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Date Posted: 06/17/2014
Views: 3
Phillis Wheatley was born in Senegal, west Africa, and brought to Massachusetts as a seven year old child slave on the slave ship The Phillis. She was a literary prodigy, became a prolific poet, and, was the first African-American woman to be published in America.
A 59" x 50" x 32" bronze, ground level statue of Phillis Wheatley by Meredith Gang Bergmann is part of the Boston Women's Memorial that was installed on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall in 2003. Phillis Wheatley is sitting sideways on a granite bench and leaning an a large granite block. She is wearing a long dress and wearing a bonnet. Her left hand is propped against her chin and she is holding a quill in her right hand.
The inscription next to the quill reads:
In every human breast God has implanted a Principle
which we call love of freedom
It is impatient of oppression
and pants for deliverance
The same principle lives in us.
Letter to the Reverend Samson Occom February 14, 1774
The front has one her her poems:
Imagination: Who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the sweetness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode
Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind
And leave the rolling universe behind
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies and range the realms above
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole
Or with new world amaze th'unbounded soul
One side of the granite block is inscribed:
Phillis Wheatley
ca 1753 - 1784
Born in West Africa and sold as a slave
from the ship Phillis in colonial Boston
she was a literary prodigy whose 1773 volume,
Poems on Various Subjects Religious
and Moral was the first book published by
an African Writer in America.
Another side of the granite block is inscribed:
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
To The Right Honorable William
Earl of Dartmouth