On Imagination

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1773

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Winter

For an Indigenous African such as Wheatley, winter in New England, the “northern tempests” (Line 51), was no symbol. It was a real-time challenge as a grim season that could last months. “Winter,” the poet/speaker says, “frowns” on “Fancy’s raptur’d eyes” (Line 23). That winter momentarily yields to the power of the poet’s imagination in Stanza 5 feels like a dazzling triumph for the unchained fancy. Gone are the bleak skies, the relentless snowfall, and the chilling air—suddenly, the poem breaks out in a lush garden world of flowers and trees, a dazzling symbolic landscape both real and unreal. The world breaks the “iron bands” of winter, and the poet celebrates an unfamiliar freedom.

However, within a handful of lines, “austere” (Line 50) winter reasserts its chill. Winter thus symbolizes the buzzkill of the real-time world. For Wheatley, winter surely represents the conditions of her enslavement that her flights of fancy can never entirely overcome. Massachusetts, after all, is not going anywhere.

The season of winter as a concept also speaks to a broader reading. Winter symbolizes any tragedy that people must endure—people who find grateful refuge, even momentarily, in the consolation of the imagination despite knowing that their real life will reassert itself. After all, to try to stay in the conjured spring, to draw on Wheatley’s symbolic language, would be irrational.

Wings

As if on wings (“pinions” [Line 17]), the imagination, the speaker exclaims, soars about the world, surpasses the very wind, and scales “th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God” (Line 16) that is the heavens themselves. Wings symbolize the energy of the imagination and its ability to defy rather than surrender to the real-time world.

For Wheatley’s era, flight itself was impossible save for birds. Flight was a symbol: a potent suggestion of unrealize-able, unattainable power and the dream of humanity to break free into the heavens. The imagination makes possible that dream because in the imagination, the poet can defy limits, transcend the moment, and survey amazing “new worlds” (Line 22).

The symbol can be cliche for contemporary readers. In the nearly three centuries since Wheatley composed “On Imagination,” flight has lost much of its magic. Today, in a world of hovering drones, bustling airports, and routine space flights, flight is no longer a symbol. It is difficult to tap into Wheatley’s sense of the wonder of soaring above the world, a part of and yet gloriously apart from it. In the poem, wings suggest the dream of transcending reality and the grand reach of the freed imagination. Flight suggests the “unbounded soul” (Line 22).

In the closing stanza, the poet/speaker acknowledges the inevitability of the imagination closing its “silken pinions” (Line 41) and humbly ending its “rise from the earth” (Line 42). Ascent, for Wheatley, implies inevitable descent. The grand flights of fancy, however, are not diminished because they are momentary.

The Queen

In the poem, the imagination ultimately surrenders to the real world that it cannot entirely defy. Yet the imagination has power. In the opening stanzas, the speaker compares the imagination to an “imperial queen” (Line 1). For Wheatley’s culture, the monarchy, whether in tales and folklore of antiquity or in the geopolitical world of her era, symbolized the power to get things done. Monarchs were hardly figureheads.

This is a challenging concept for a contemporary reader. Today, queens are dowager characters in historical dramas on television or feisty power-hungry women who rule over elaborate alternate worlds of giants and dragons in fantasy books. More familiarly, queens have become harmless, manufactured celebrities with ceremonial powers and who exist largely as the vulnerable targets of predatory paparazzi. This was not so in the 1700s. For Wheatley, queens were the movers and shakers of history itself.

Wheatley uses the figure of the imperial queen to symbolize the ability of the imagination to get things done and produce artifacts of value, elegance, and permanence. Writing against the perception inherited from the Neoclassical poets she otherwise admired, Wheatley distinguishes her perception of the imagination from reckless daydreaming or the child’s game of playing imaginary games in imaginary worlds.

Like queens, the imagination is empowered and, in turn, accomplishes things—the “wond’rous acts” that create “beauteous order” (Line 3) in artifacts that defy time and offer satisfying structures. Poems or paintings, concertos or novels, these artifacts defy the chaos and confusion of the real-time world by offering objects of sublime order and beauty that “attest” to “how potent” is the “hand” (Line 4) of the artist. Even if the artist must return from those flights of fancy that inspire creation, even if the artist is enslaved within the iron bands of the here and now, the creations themselves remain, summoned into being like imperial queens directing empires.