“Phillis Wheatley's First Effort”

Extract

Biographical Research at the Massachusetts Historical Society has Discovered in The 1773 Diary of Jeremy Belknap (1744-98), a Congregationalist clergyman, what is likely a text by Phillis Wheatley that predates any known before now. Belknap's diary is interleaved in Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack. For the Year of Our Lord, 1773. The last page includes a twenty-word poem in Belknap's hand that he identifies as “Phillis Wheatley's first Effort———-AD 1765. EE 11.” Belknap transcribes the text twice. The first version is in three lines, as if he could not decide whether it was prose or poetry, with an inserted two-word phrase placed above the first line and located by a caret below it:

Unto Salvation

M^rsThacher's Son is gone_̂ her Daughter too

so I conclude

They are both gone to be renewed