Phillis Wheatley's elegy for an infant, known only by the initials in its title, begins in grief and ends in an order to stop grieving. It moves in three stages: the mourners' sorrow, an imagined exchange between a parent and an angel, and a final lecture on why the parents should accept their loss. Its central idea is that grief, however natural, has to give way to trust. The child has been taken to a better place, and human beings have no standing to put divine wisdom on trial.
The opening is built from absences. "No more the flow'ry scenes of pleasure rife," the speaker begins, and the phrase returns in "No more with joy we view that lovely face" and "No more shall smile, no more shall raise its head." The baby is defined by what has stopped: the smile, the lifted head. The line "Groans answer groans, and sighs to sighs reply" is shaped like the mourning it describes, with one half of the line echoing the other as the mourners echo each other. The poem then turns on Death itself, who has a "dart" and "dread attendants," and puts to him a string of accusing questions. "Could not his innocence thy stroke controul, / Thy purpose shake, and soften all thy soul?" is a startlingly direct challenge, and the simile that follows is gentle but bleak. The child is "like a branch that from the tree is torn," and the four adjectives that pile up in "prostrate, wither'd, languid, and forlorn" seem to droop down the line.
The form is the heroic couplet, rhymed pairs of roughly ten-syllable lines, with rhymes such as face/grace, heart/dart and torn/forlorn. The couplet gives the poem a feeling of balance, and the balance suits an argument. It is not perfectly smooth. The opening pair, "rife" and "eyes," does not rhyme, and one line has to break mid-word ("o'er-/spread") to fit. Twice the poem swells into a triplet. The first comes as the parent asks where James has gone ("hear," "where," "air"). The second closes the poem ("hand," "command," "stand"), and the extra line works like a gavel coming down.
The turn comes when the speaker lets the parent speak: "Where flies my James?" Even here the poem hedges, with "I seem to hear" and "Methinks." The comforting answer from the cherub is clearly imagined, a consolation the speaker supplies rather than reports. Once the angel has spoken, the speaker takes over, and the tone changes. "Cease your complaints," the speaker says, then "Cease to accuse the Ruler of the sky," and finally "Enough--for ever cease your murm'ring breath." The poem that allowed itself to ask whether Death could be moved now forbids the parents to ask anything of heaven.
Death is rewritten along the way. He begins as a killer with a dart, but by the end the parents are told to "converse with Death" as a "friend," not a "foe," because he carried the child "to the port of happiness unknown." The child's journey is imagined as flight earlier ("wings his passage thro' the yielding air") and as a sea voyage later, and the "port" gives the loss a destination. The language of ownership grows stronger too. The baby is a "treasure which you call your own" and a "gift of heav'n intrusted to your hand," something to "resign" at "the divine command."
That ownership vocabulary pays off in the last line, which borrows from the courtroom: "Not at your bar must sov'reign Wisdom stand." Having told the parents not to "accuse" God, the poem now says the court they imagine does not exist. This ending is neat, but it is also forceful. The sharp questions put to Death are never really answered, only overruled. That tension is much of what keeps the poem alive, because the lament is too well written to be entirely cancelled by the consolation.
Part of the poem's significance lies in who wrote it. Wheatley was an enslaved woman in Boston, yet she handled the polished, formal couplet style of her day with complete confidence. A modern reader may also hear extra weight in phrases like "call your own" and "resign at the divine command," since she herself was legally someone's property. That is a reading, not evidence of her intent, but it gives a quiet poem an unsettling undertone.