Lyssa Henry

I have never been the kind of person that liked poetry. I have nothing against those who write poetry, but I never really enjoyed it. I could not figure out why people thought it was so deep and meaningful, but this week I read some poetry I can truthfully say I enjoyed.

Phillis Wheatley was an astounding writer that took her life and created her own art out of it. She wrote poems about many things that happened to her throughout her life, like being taken from Africa and seeing people die. She had been through a lot, but her poems still seemed hopeful and even somewhat optimistic despite the traumatic origins and experiences.

The reason I think I could get mentally involved with these poems was that Wheatley wrote them in ways that made the experiences she had sound relatable. She was descriptive enough that I could personally remember feeling the same way or imagine what the situation felt like. To me, that is what makes someone a good writer. When they can take me somewhere other than my dorm room; when they can take me past reading something on my phone that my professor assigned me to read, I know that the author really knew what they were doing when they wrote what they did.

If I had to choose a favorite of the poems I read this week by Phillis Wheatley, it would have been “A Hymn to the Morning,” which was about the beauty of the morning and the sunrise and how it feels to be up for another day. Mornings are already beautiful to me, so I appreciated this poem a lot more than the others. Not because it was better than the others were, but because I could relate to it. Sunrises to me are like a hug from God and an assurance that He believes I am important and worth a beautiful piece of art such as that sunrise, and reading the poem “A Hymn to the Morning” made me feel as if Phillis Wheatley could have also had a similar view of sunrises.

If anyone that shared an opinion with me on poetry ever asked me if I had read something that made me question my true feelings about it, I would tell them that Phillis Wheatley wrote things that truly touched me in ways I never knew poetry could.