2025 Conference Objects and Essays

‘No more for him the streams of sorrow pour’: Teaching Mourning, Critiquing Classics, and Alternative Epistemology in Phillis Wheatley’s Elegies

Elzie, Sophia

Published in 1773, Phillis Wheatley’s volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was one of the first publications by an African American writer. Enslaved at the time of publication, Wheatley’s poems are often read for their potential subversiveness or their engagement with classical texts. In recent years, scholarly interest in her funeral elegies, addressed to bereaved individuals, has experienced a resurgence. In this paper, I read Wheatley’s epyllion “Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from a View of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson” alongside her elegy “A Funeral Poem on the Death of C. E. an Infant of Twelve Months.” Through close readings of these two poems within the context of Wheatley’s volume, I argue that taken together, they present a coherent instructional program for how to grieve. Niobe represents the emotional, intuitive griever. In the elegies, through engagement with stylistic elements of didactic poetry, the poet gives instructions for how to perform grief instrumentally. Wheatley offers a coherent program for mourning that advocates for an instrumental rather than intuitive approach to grief, an approach that allows an individual to move forward rather than share Niobe’s fate of petrification.