Death gets the first word, and Phillis Wheatley makes it sound like a tyrant holding court. "GRIM monarch!" she begins, and the poem keeps Death on its throne for the next eight lines. Its victims are "vassals" of its "sway," and the grieving beg in vain from "the sovereign of the grave." This vocabulary of kings and subjects makes grief feel like oppression: a ruler who is never heard to say "Enough," whose "flinty heart" is untouched by youth, learning ("science") or love. The dead man, a "young physician" called Leonard, adds a sharp irony, since a man whose work was to hold death off has been claimed by it.
Then the poem turns to its real task, comforting the "fair mourner." Judging by the title, this is an occasional poem, written for a particular bereaved woman, and the text tells us nothing about her beyond her grief. Its central claim is that death's power is real but temporary. Wheatley does not rush to this comfort. She first gives the grave its full weight: Leonard's eyes are "clos'd," his senses held by "heavy fetters" in a "never-waking sleep." Then comes the poem's longest stretch, a single sentence running through four couplets and driven by the repeated "till." Time ceases, stars fall "in dire confusion," and nature's "last groan" rends the "azure sky." The scale is deliberately huge. Only after the whole universe has ended does the payoff arrive, in the emphatic "Not, not till then," when the soul reclaims "a divine immortal frame."
The form supports this. The poem is written in rhyming couplets of ten-syllable lines (heroic couplets), a tidy, balanced form that suits argument and consolation. Most couplets close their thought neatly, as in "Nor youth, nor science, not the ties of love, / Nor ought on earth thy flinty heart can move." The "till" passage runs on across several couplets, so the reader has to wait for the sentence to finish, just as the dead must wait. Some rhymes, like "love/move" or "wind/behind," sound imperfect now, but they were acceptable to the poetic conventions of her time.
The turn comes at "But see the softly-stealing tears apace / Pursue each other down the mourner's face." The soft s-sounds and the image of tears chasing one another make a small, human moment after all the cosmic wreckage. From here the speaker shifts from describing to commanding: "cease thy tears," "bid ev'ry sigh depart," "cast the load of anguish," "arise," "look," "fix thy view," "Thyself prepare." The poet becomes a guide, and the direction of the poem changes with her. The first half points downward to dust, the grave and fetters. The second points upward to "skies," to Leonard who "mounts," and to the "hills of light," which answer the earlier "vale of night."
The poem also splits Leonard in two. His body is a "cold shell," sleeping until the end of time, while his "active soul" is already "fleeter than the wind," leaving earth behind. That split is the logic of the consolation: what the widow mourns at the graveside is only the shell. The ending gives Leonard a power that Death's "vassals" never had. He no longer lies passive but "welcomes" her and moves toward her embrace. Love is not cancelled but upgraded, since heaven offers "pleasures more refin'd, / And better suited to th' immortal mind."
The poem matters partly for its craft, with a confident command of the elegy's conventions, and partly for its author. Wheatley was enslaved, and she is remembered as the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry. Here she writes to a lady in the voice of a spiritual guide who gives orders and offers her reader the last word on death. The poem overturns the grim monarch of its opening line, since by the final couplet the dead man has escaped Death's kingdom and is waiting to receive the person he loved.