31 pages • 1 hour read
To His Excellency General Washington
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Elision
Elision is the omission of a syllable or sound in a word; this is indicated by the eliding apostrophe and serves the purpose of changing the way a word is pronounced to better fit a given metrical scheme. Commonplace in 17th and 18th century—as well as neoclassical—poetry, elisions are a mainstay of the inherited form and the aesthetics of classical and neoclassical poetry Wheatley was working to evoke. The presence of elisions in “To His Excellency General Washington” offer their own aesthetic value to a page, instantly self-identifying in the style of old masters. In the poem, Wheatley uses elision to keep the music of her lines even, allowing the lines to maintain a predictable pulse throughout. As metrical traditions have been challenged by blank verse—which is currently the most common form of poetry—elisions have become a novel artifact owing to an earlier age of writing.
Alliteration
Wheatley’s specific diction choices have a profound impact on the poem. Within the poem’s sonic textures, Wheatley frequently employs alliteration, the doubling of consonant sounds in words close to one another on a line:
When Gallic powers Columbia's fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace (Lines 30-31)[.]
Such a metrical choice adds to the sing-song nature already intrinsic to Wheatley’s couplets, while interweaving with the poem’s consonance and assonance. By repeating the leading consonant sounds in words, it makes the sounds and textures of the poetry more pleasing, or euphonic. The result is a sonic tableau of spoken English, its rhymes and valleys of unstressed sounds, and its alliterative peaks of emphasis.
Tone
In poetry, word choice affects the central feeling of a poem, a reader’s initial reaction, and even the way it takes up space on the page. A lower or informal register—featuring references to popular culture, relaxed language, and more white space—can make a poem feel more approachable, relatable, or humorous, giving the impression that the reader is being welcomed into a piece of writing. In her high (or formal) register, Wheatley resists more pedestrian syntax and diction in favor of more difficult constructions. By doing so, she reinforces the grandeur of her subject, which is the tone her allusions to Hellenistic myth seek to build. By adding this sense of difficulty, Wheatley forces readers to look closer, and think with more focus to extract meaning. Difficulty in a poem can also speak to the weight of its subject matter.
Media Res
In “To His Excellency General Washington,” Wheatley uses the epic tradition of media res to tell of America’s history of valor. In her allusion to ancient warrior culture, Wheatley swaps the famous skirmish at Troy for the French and Indian Wars—a series or conflicts that spanned nearly a century of combat in North America—when she writes, “One century scarce perform'd its destined round, / When Gallic powers Columbia's fury found” (Lines 29-30). By alluding to this skirmish, Wheatley is claiming the colonies’ own epic history of battle.
Used in various forms of dramatic storytelling, literature, and plays, media res is a technique in which a story begins in the middle of the action after the story’s inciting incident has already taken place. Among the most famous examples of this is John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, which begins with the poem’s main character, Lucifer, already fallen from heaven following his defeat in a war he lead to overthrow the Christian god. In “To His Excellency General Washington,” the poem begins after the fighting has started and Washington has already been named leader and chief of the nation’s first Continental Army. This alone is not enough to constitute media res, but Wheatley’s flashbacks and mention of the French and Indian Wars calls back to the colonists initial skirmish against imperialist powers and marks that as the beginning of the dramatic conflicts that led its characters (namely General Washington) into the action of the story.
Unlock all 31 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Phillis Wheatley
