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The Poems of Phillis Wheatley


Wild in her woe, with grief unknown opprest
Sigh follows sigh deep heaving from her breast.
Too quickly fled, ah! whither art thou gone?
Ah! lost for ever to thy wife and son!
The hapless child, thine only hope and heir,
Clings round his mother's neck and weeps his sorrows there.
The loss of thee on Tyler's soul returns,
And Boston for her dear physician mourns.
When sickness call'd for Marshall's healing hand, 
With what compassion did his soul expand?
In him we found the father and the friend: 
In life how lov'd! how honour'd in his end!
And must not then our Aesculapius stay
To bring his ling'ring infant into day?
The babe unborn in the dark womb is tost,
and seems in anguish for its father lost.
Gone is Apollo from his house of earth,
But leaves the sweet memorials of his worth:
The common parent, whom we all deplore,
From yonder world unseen must come no more,
Yet 'midst our woes immortal hopes attend
The spouse, the sire, the universal friend.

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The Poems of Phillis Wheatley

To a Gentleman on His Voyage to Great Britain for the Recovery of his Health

While others chant of gay Elysian scenes,
Of balmy zephyrs, and of flow'ry plains,
My song more happy speaks a greater name, 
Feels higher motives and a nobler flame.
For thee, O R——, the muse attunes her strings,
And mounts sublime above inferior things.
I sing not now of green embow'ring woods, 
I sing not now the daughters of the floods,
I sing not of the storms o'er ocean driv'n,
And how they howl'd along the waste of heav'n, 
But I to R—— would paint the British shore,
And vast Atlantic, not untry'd before:
Thy life impair'd commands thee to arise,
Leave these bleak regions and inclement skies,
Where chilling winds return the winter past,
And nature shudders at the furious blast.
O thou stupendous, earth-enclosing main
Exert thy wonders to the world again! 
If ere thy pow'r prolong'd the fleeting breath,
Turn'd back the shafts, and mock'd the gates of death.

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