Will someone talk to me about this wild moment in Phillis Wheatley’s “On Messrs Hussey and Coffin” when she breaks her couplets with a prose (?) wish? I can’t think of anything like it in period poetry. Can you? Has anyone written on this?!
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Eric Wertheimer suggests she “ends by breaking off her poetic conundrum with a prose apostrophe to God, in which she despairs of her ability to satisfy the goal of ‘tracing the Mark divine’ in this meditation on near loss.’” The shift from couplets to prose as a mark of despair?!
Wendy Raphael Roberts suggests she “unexpectedly halts the poetic form to insert her own testimony as an aspiring revival poet.” Rather like the lay interruptor of a sermon, “the poet intrudes on her own poetic voice which to this point has been pluralized.” Prose = more personal?!
Virginia Jackson is characteristically brilliant: the 1st person in this “collapse into prose” is less “an expression of any one person’s thoughts or feelings” than a “conditional ‘I’ [that] fogs and muddies and obscures the plain opposites that the preceding couplets so delicately hold in place”
I still don’t quite know what to do with this though! I really would love to see other examples of a poem with a kind of prose or prayer interlude! I can think of prose pieces that dash off a bit of original poetry, but this is different…
I do LOVE Jackson’s point that, “In a way, this is the emancipation from pentameter couplets that Wheatley’s modern lyric readers have always wanted to see her achieve, but it turns out that the couplets aren’t what constrain this poet’s verse after all”!
It might be significant that this was (a) an early poem, and (b) printed in an out-of-town newspaper not necessarily with Wheatley’s knowledge. She didn’t include it in her book. The interpolation might not have been her intended presentation.
When you look at it, it's sort of the inversion of a prayer to a muse at the beginning of an epic. It also implicitly had that self-deprecation that she deploys at other points about her humility as a poet. 🤔
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