On Imagination

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1773

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Power of the Imagination

The imagination is the “imperial queen” (Line 1), the dominant and controlling expression of the mind. The poem celebrates the power of the imagination to engage reality and create from it marvelous works that reflect the energy and creativity of the artist: “Imagination! Who can sing thy force?” (Line 13). The speaker embraces the power of the imagination to free the mind and allow it to soar beyond the limits of the real world. The imagination directs both the intellect and the heart. The imagination can propel the willing mind and eager heart through space and time and soar into the “rolling universe” itself (Line 18).

“The unbounded soul” (Line 22) liberated by the imagination can catapult beyond the limits of the real-time world and find its way into glorious mindscapes fashioned by the imagination itself. This is more than carefree daydreams or harmless fantasies. Unlike the limited perception afforded by the mind or the selfish energies of the passions, the fancy can open up entire new worlds in which the poet sees a reality undefined by the real world. Fancy “rise[s] from the earth, and sweep[s] the expanse on high” (Line 42). Although the poem suggests how, within the free-ranging energy field of the imagination, Wheatley can break free of her enslavement, the imagination suggests a much broader theme: the tonic release that the imagination offers from any bleak and oppressive reality (Smith, Eleanor. “Phillis Wheatley: A Black Perspective.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 43, no. 3, 1974, pp. 401-07).

Within Wheatley’s argument, the unbridled imagination transcends winter. The forbidding, dark world of ice and snow blossoms within the fancy into green trees and colorful flowers. For Wheatley, an African native exiled to the wintry world of New England, this theme suggests the power of the imagination to provide the afflicted, sorrowful, and downtrodden with some measure of comfort, consolation, and hope.

The Limits of the Imagination

After conjuring the stunning images that the freed imagination offers, gorgeous vistas of sudden springtime in blossom, the poet closes the poem with a return to Boston in wintertime. “Austere” (Line 50) winter returns and chills the energy of the fancy in stillness. The speaker understands the pressures of re-entry and the inevitability of conceding the limits of the imagination: “I must reluctantly leave the pleasing views” (Line 48). In the end, the speaker is a reasonable, rational being who understands that the tonic rush of the imagination cannot ultimately reshape reality itself.

This acknowledgment tempers the poem’s affirmation of the imagination. When Wheatley composed “On Imagination,” she was a poet, certainly, but also an enslaved poet. Using the metaphor of the inevitability of dawn breaking and ending the gorgeous dreams of the night, Wheatley closes the poem with the melancholy acknowledgment of the limits of the imagination. Her poetry, she concedes, can only unevenly compete with the bleak conditions of her reality. She returns to herself and to the conditions that made the immodest, soaring flight of the imagination so wondrous in the first place.

The Collision of Worlds

In the third stanza, the speaker asserts, “Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies” (Line 9). This cements the poem as a conflict between here, Boston, and there, Africa. This poem becomes a piece of African diaspora; the two-centuries-long campaign by white Europeans to use the dark-skinned peoples of Africa, the Pacific Rim, and the Caribbean dispersed them from their homelands, never to return, to be used as labor to build the financial stability of new settlements in North America.

At the emotional heart of Wheatley’s poem is not the confident affirmation of the power of the imagination nor even her humble concession that, in the end, the imagination cannot redo reality. Instead, the emotional core of the poem is the witness testimony of a woman-child torn from a life, world, and family that she now barely remembers. “On Imagination” is a poem about dislocation, displacement, and a mind struggling to understand what even the most sympathetic contemporary readers would struggle to understand: the story of a child kidnapped, taken from her family, chained into the hold of a ship, dragged to a world she never even suspected existed, sold into chattel slavery and given a strange name, and then compelled across two decades to pretend that the white family who enslaved her was somehow hers and that this world was somehow hers—all legally.

For her entire life, Wheatley lived as a stranger in a strange land, and she refused many of the accommodations that other enslaved people found: acceptance, despair, the comforts of religion, doomed acts of resistance, and self-destruction. She found her consolation in a library, in the sturdy worlds conjured by words, and became a poet who could use her imagination to construct such worlds.