Boston Women’s Memorial
2003
bronze
59” x 50” x 32
Wheatley, a slave in colonial Boston, was our first published African-American poet. Her pose is derived from the the only extant image of her, a profile portrait engraved for the frontispiece of her book of poetry.
Boston Women’s Memorial
2003
bronze
59” x 50” x 32
Here, Wheatley represents youth and Imagination. A stanza from her poem On Imagination is inscribed on her pedestal, ending with visionary imaginative power and freedom:
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze the unbounded soul.
Boston Women’s Memorial
2003
bronze
59” x 50” x 32
On her pedestal:
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatched from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery moved
That from a father seized his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
