Grief is the first thing Wheatley gives us, and she gives it twice. "O'erwhelming sorrow now demands my song: / From death the overwhelming sorrow sprung." The second line repeats the first almost word for word, as if the mourners were stuck circling the same feeling. The poem then moves, couplet by couplet, toward the opposite word. By the last line the repeated term is "immortal," and the poem's whole job is to carry the reader from one to the other.
The title shows who is being addressed, a lady and her children, and the text suggests the person who has died is the husband and father. The poem mentions "the fond parent's breast," the "unhappy mother," a weeping brother and "hapless sisters," and speaks of "his gen'rous bounty." That detail also widens the circle of mourners to "the poor," who "droop" for a dead benefactor. One line compresses the loss neatly: "In one death what various comfort dies!" A single death takes away a friend, a companion and a provider all at once.
The poem is written in iambic pentameter rhymed couplets, the stately form that suits public consolation. The rhymes often carry the argument. "Lies" pairs with "dies," and "fed" with "dead." The consoling half of the poem rhymes "wind" with "behind" and "unknown" with "crown," so the dead man's escape is built into the sound. A few rhymes are imperfect ("join" and "brine," "return" and "mourn"), and they fall in the passages where grief is still unsettled. One couplet is split by a gap on the page: "Of virtue's steady course the prize behold!" is separated from its rhyme, "What blissful wonders to his mind unfold!" The pause works like a held breath before the vision of heaven.
Water drives the imagery. Early on, grief is liquid: "flowing tears," "the crystal brine," and later "briny show'rs." Against this Wheatley sets a startling picture of the body, where the "sanguine rill" (the blood) "Forget[s] to flow, and nature's wheels stand still." The blood is a little stream and the body a machine, and both have stopped. The mourners' tears are the only flow left. When she tells them to stop, she turns the water imagery around: "No more for him the streams of sorrow pour, / But haste to join him on the heav'nly shore." The sea of tears becomes a sea to be crossed, and the dead man is already standing on the far side of it. Earth is described as "clay" and "ground," while he travels "upon pinions swifter than the wind." The poem keeps contrasting what is heavy and wet with what is light and quick.
The poem's boldest move is its argument that continued mourning is a wrong done to the dead. "Still do you weep, still wish for his return? / How cruel thus to wish, and thus to mourn?" A consoling poem might simply have comforted the family. Wheatley instead reasons with them. If he has left "mortality's sad scenes behind" for "glories richer than the monarch's crown," then wishing him back means wishing him out of happiness. The rebuke is gentle, since she names their love as the cause ("your best-belov'd"), but it is still a rebuke.
There is also a small moment of modesty in the middle. After describing his "blissful wonders," the speaker stops herself: "But of celestial joys I sing in vain: / Attempt not, muse, the too advent'rous strain." She admits that her art cannot reach heaven, and the admission makes her confidence elsewhere more convincing. She can describe grief and give advice, but she leaves the heavenly vision to her readers' faith. The ending then gives them something to do in place of weeping: "On harps of gold to tune immortal lays, / And to your God immortal anthems raise." Sorrow is replaced by song, and the speaker who began by saying sorrow "demands my song" ends by handing the singing to the mourners.
Part of the poem's interest lies in who is speaking. Wheatley was an enslaved woman in colonial Boston, and here she speaks with the steady authority of a comforter, using commands such as "behold," "see," and "know" to a grieving lady. Whatever the exact occasion, the poem shows a writer fully at home in the elegiac conventions of her time and confident enough to turn them into an argument. The poem's lasting force comes from how its images do that work. The tears that start as a flood end as a path to the heavenly shore.