Ode to Neptune

Phillis Wheatley was a teenage enslaved girl in colonial Boston who somehow became the first published African-American poet in history. This ode is her plea to the sea god Neptune, written as a young girl of fourteen or fifteen, petitioning for mercy toward the enslaved Africans she watched being transported across the Atlantic. In classical Greek and Roman meter, in the language of her enslavers, a child who owned nothing and controlled nothing begged for basic humanity. The poem remains staggering: a display of prodigious literary mastery wielded not for personal glory but as the only weapon available to her. Wheatley learned to read and write in a household that owned her body, then turned that education into an act of quiet, desperate advocacy. Whether she was writing to the actual ship captain John Adams or using Neptune as a literary device for divine intervention, the effect is the same. Here is a voice that history nearly erased, speaking across centuries about the Middle Passage and the impossible courage of speaking truth to power from the position of absolute powerlessness.