The Divine Sun in American Poetry: Wheatley's "Thoughts on the Works of Providence" and Bradstreet's "Contemplations" Anonymous College

In her 1773 poem, Thoughts on the Works of Providence Phillis Wheatley considers God’s power through the solar system of the Sun and Earth’s rotational relationship. Almost a hundred years prior to Wheatley’s neoclassical poetic style, Anne Bradstreet would examine the Sun, and its relationship to God and humanity on Earth with equal scrutiny through the fourth and seventh stanzas in her 1678 poem, Contemplations. Their poems mark out the symbolic importance of the Sun in early American poetry as representative of a Christian God and his divine power through rays of emitted light. Although their poems bear certain symbolic similarities, it is also important how Wheatley’s religious poem, and her portrayal of God’s role in the natural world, is influenced by the new scientific knowledge and sociopolitical changes emerging from the American Revolution and the Enlightenment.

Wheatley opens the second stanza by representing the Sun as a “vast machine” (768). In these lines, she vividly describes the arcing movements of the Earth’s rotational patterns around the Sun’s glowing center point. The Sun, which is controlled by God’s unseen hand, is described as having “twice forty millions” miles in height. Wheatley’s astronomical...