Themes, symbols, and motifs come alive when you use a storyboard. In this activity, students will identify themes and symbols from the poem, and support their choices with details from the text. With a storyboard, students can quickly and easily track the evocative Wheatley uses throughout the poem.
Each line of the poem contains religious words to subtly convey the speaker’s tone, attitudes, or beliefs. The repetition clearly fixes religion as a central theme of the poem's major themes. Wheatley explicitly informs the reader how she was saved and what she sees as the implications.
A recurring structure in the poem is Wheatley’s use of capitalized italics to emphasize words. She uses them for “Pagan”, “Savior”, “Christians”, “Negros”, and “Cain”. These words contribute to the poem’s strong contrasting imagery between light and darkness.
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Student Instructions
Create a storyboard that identifies recurring themes in "On Being Brought From Africa to America". Illustrate instances of each theme and write a short description below each cell.