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Ode To Neptune Phillis Wheatley Analysis

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At one point in this first semester of English 11, we studied poems written by African American slaves and I found a poem that I genuinely enjoy by Phillis Wheatley called Ode to Neptune. The poem is, at first glance, about her master’s wife Susanna’s crossing of the Atlantic to Britain. However, the underlying theme that I detected is apropos to Phillis’s own life experiences. The poem begins with a compelling description of nature’s wrath, Phillis personifies the storm as Aeolus, the Greek king of winds. The speaker commands Aeolus to “be still” and cites him as a “tyrant” as he coerced the wind, which is similar to how the white men had enslaved Phillis. As Susanna crosses the ocean, like the slave ships did, personifications of the

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