Point of View

This poem is written from a first-person present-tense perspective. The use of first-person is quite common in poetry. Here, it is particularly important because it grounds the poem in the experience of a single character. This forces Wheatley’s presumed white audience to reckon with the humanity of the speaker as a Black person. Because the speaker is so directly depicted in the poem through the choice of first person, it is more difficult for readers to ignore the fact that the speaker is a human being, just like them.

However, the use of first person also introduces an interpretive problem into the poem’s history. In poetry, it is important to recognize that there is a distinction between the speaker and the poet. However, marginalized poets are often not given that courtesy, with the assumption being that they are not speaking from a universal...