A Response to Phillis Wheatley’s, To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America, &c.
...that he need not question her because the common good and love of freedom can only be truly understood by someone who has faced the worst society has to offer and had their freedom stripped away. She then tells of her enslavement in Africa and uses poignantly harsh language such as, snatched, excrutiating pangs, molest, sorrow, steel soul, seize and misery, all in a four line period (25-29). Finishing her story Wheatley then seemingly rises from her bowed position to figuratively stare the Earl in of Dartmouth in the eyes and say, “how dare you”. She does this in the subtle yet telling manner of asking the defiant however almost rhetorical question in lines 29 and 30. The question sounds more or less absurd to even be asking permission to have the desire for freedom and prosperity for all people. In retrospect lines 21 and 22 then become set up lines in which Wheatley seems to understand the Earl’s doubts but at the end of the stanza the reader is left with an impression of total callousness on behalf of the Earl for having those doubts, which Wheatley set up, and needing an explanation. This defiant, “how dare you”, attitude, which is set up in the 3rd stanza is continued strongly in the forth stanza in line 35, “To sooth the griefs, which thou did’st once deplore” and again in 37-38, “To all thy works and thou forever live, not only on the wings of fleeting fame”. Wheat...