A Rebus, by I. B.

I. B. · in Phillis Wheatley · Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral · 1773

I

A bird delicious to the taste,
On which an army once did feast,
Sent by an hand unseen;
A creature of the horned race,
Which Britain’s royal standards grace;
A gem of vivid green;

II

A town of gaiety and sport,
Where beaux and beauteous nymphs resort,
And gallantry doth reign;
A Dardan hero fam’d of old
For youth and beauty, as we’re told,
And by a monarch slain;

III

A peer of popular applause,
Who doth our violated laws,
And grievances proclaim.
Th’ initials show a vanquish’d town,
That adds fresh glory and renown
To old Britannia’s fame.

Where this text comes from

First published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

The volume prints the poem as “A Rebus, by I. B.” and the poem after it is Wheatley’s “An Answer to the Rebus, by the Author of These Poems”, so the book itself states that this one is by another hand. The initials are the whole of what the page gives. Scholarship identifies I. B. as James Bowdoin (1726–1790), who also signs the volume’s prefatory Attestation; that identification is consensus rather than anything the book says, which is why it is marked uncertain. The record files under phillis-wheatley because the poem belongs to her volume and ids are permanent.

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-14.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/phillis-wheatley_poems-on-various-subjects-religious-and-moral, poems-on-various-subjects-religious-and-moral.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (3)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L18.

Cite this poem

Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784). “A Rebus, by I. B..” First published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/phillis-wheatley/a-rebus-by-i-b/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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