Grief arrives in this poem as weather, and consolation as medicine. Phillis Wheatley addresses a father mourning his daughter "beneath the cypress-shade," and for eight lines she gives him orders rather than sympathy. Let Recollection "take a tender part," she says, so that memory can "assuage the raging tortures of your heart," "still the wild tempest of tumultuous grief," and "pour the heav'nly nectar of relief." Grief is storm, torture and wound all at once, and memory, usually the thing that hurts a mourner, is recast as the cure. The line "Suspend the sigh, dear Sir, and check the groan" is gentle but firm, the voice of someone who has decided to be useful.
The poem then does the remembering it has just prescribed. The daughter's mind is "free from scornful pride," never withheld "its aid to indigence," and sought "unfailing charity, unbounded love." Wheatley praises her for what she gave to others, not for beauty or rank, so the comfort is moral as well as sentimental. The father is asked to see a life well spent.
Then the poem takes off. The daughter "unreluctant flies," "cuts the azure plain," and "mounts, and leaves the rolling globe behind." These verbs are all speed and ease, a deliberate counterweight to the heaviness of the opening. The imagery mixes sea and sky: earth is a "dusky shore," heaven is a plain she cuts through almost like a ship, and it is the place "where life's tumultuous billows cease to roar." The word "tumultuous" was used earlier for the father's grief, and here it describes life's troubles in general. His private storm is given a place where storms end. Light and dark carry the same contrast, with the "dusky" earth set against "the fair sunshine of celestial day."
The form supports this steady persuasion. Wheatley writes in heroic couplets, rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter that close each thought neatly, like small arguments snapped shut. Some rhymes depend on older pronunciation or look like near-rhymes today, such as "prove" with "love" and "come" with "tomb." In this text, "laid" falls onto a line of its own and breaks the shape of the first couplet. That looks like a layout slip rather than a design.
The most striking move comes when the speaker claims, "I hear her from the realms above," and the daughter speaks for herself. She turns to her "fond parents" and asks how quickly they would "each sigh, each fear dismiss" if they could see her bliss. Then comes a complication. Earlier we were told she "has ceas'd to languish, and forgot to mourn," yet now she admits, "As far as grief affects an happy soul, / So far doth grief my better mind controul." Heaven is not quite free of sorrow, because her parents' mourning still reaches her. This makes the consolation cleverer. The father's grief is now the one thing troubling the dead, so mourning less becomes an act of love.
Two small details sharpen the pathos. Twice the poem rhymes "return" with "mourn," first when the daughter once wished that Leonard, her husband, might come back and again in her speech about someone she secretly wishes to return. The repetition shows how closely grief is tied to wishing for the impossible. The second wish names its subject only as "T-----!", a name reduced to a dash, which matches the discretion of the initials in the title. The poem closes with an instruction, as it opened with one, but the command has changed. Instead of "suspend the sigh," the father is told to "converse with heav'n, and taste the promis'd joy" in his "ev'ning-hours," a phrase that also hints at the evening of his own life.
Wheatley was brought from West Africa and enslaved in Boston, and she became the first African American woman to publish a book of poems. The poem never mentions this, but it adds to what it achieves. Writing to an "Honourable" gentleman in the polished idiom of English verse, she takes the role of comforter, even lending a voice to the dead. The authority of the poem comes from tenderness, control of form and spiritual confidence.