Review
=====
Title: Six Poems by Joseph Smith : A Dimension of Meaning in the Doctrine and Covenants
Author: Colin B. Douglas
Publisher: Temple Hill Books
Genre: Poetry, and scriptural exegesis
Year Published: 2015
Number of pages: 129
Binding: Paperback
ISBN10:
ISBN13: 978-1-4341-0383-3
Price: $14.95
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
This is a hybrid book, a blend of scriptural exegesis, poetic manifesto and close critical reading of poems — that is, what the author believes to be poems by Joseph Smith. I share that belief. I have known Douglas’s work in poetry for twenty years or more, since he started sending poems to Sunstone when I was that magazine’s poetry editor. Ten years ago, I proposed a session for the Sunstone Symposium on “The Poet Joseph Smith.” I was surprised to get a reply suggesting that I could share that session with Colin B. Douglas. Although I knew him through his poems, I had no idea that he shared my feelings that Joseph Smith could best be understood as a poet — like Isaiah, like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Nahum and all the rest, including the John who wrote Revelation.
Belief in the prophetic role of the poet infuses Douglas’s own poems, and he has been working through his study of Smith’s revelations toward a new practice of his own craft. It is crucial to understanding his poems (two volumes of which have recently appeared) that one understand his reading of Joseph Smith’s poems. He begins his introduction thus: “My thesis is that these selections from the Doctrine and Covenants are impressive poems and that to be fully understood they must be read as such.”
In his introduction, Douglas draws on a distinction he attributes to Suzanne K. Langer and Eliseo Vivas (and there is a list of works cited at the end of the book): the poems “mean *presentationally* as well as *discursively*, by ‘how they say’ as well as by ‘what they say’, by saying what they say in a particular way and a particular context.” To that end, Douglas presents sections — mostly entire sections — of Doctrine and Covenants reformatted as verse, then appends to each section a commentary. He reformats the words in lines of varying length, adopting as his guide the concept of sense-lines introduced in textual criticism of the Bible, and adopted by Royal Skousen in his editing of *The Book of Mormon : the Earliest Text* (New Haven : Yale University Press, c2009). His comments there also apply to Douglas’s work: “Anyone opening this volume will immediately be struck by this sense-line format, that is, the way the lines of the text are broken up according to phrases and clauses” (Editor’s Preface, xlii).
Douglas also alters punctuation when it illuminates meaning. He can do this with becoming modesty because none of these sections were written by Joseph Smith: all of these sections were dictated by him, to scribes, who wrote them down, and the punctuation is almost always theirs. Here again, Skousen’s use of sense-lines aids in understanding the need for them. In that same Editor’s Preface, in commenting on his use of sense-lines, Skousen notes that “the punctuation in all printed versions of the Book of Mormon is a later addition to the earliest text. I therefore wanted to keep these grammatical intrusions to a minimum. Obviously, some punctuation is necessary for reading, but sense-lines can do a lot of the semantic work without adding a profusion of commas, semicolons, dashes and parentheses.” (xliii)
That applies to most of the punctuation in Doctrine and Covenants, if the letter from Liberty Jail is any guide. So Douglas presents first the reformatted text taken from that letter, with the reformatting doing a lot of the semantic work, and then his analysis of what, in his introduction, he calls “their full presentational nature,” wherein “they achieve an aesthetic unity that qualifies them to be called poems.” In this he is as concerned with that aesthetic unity as with the “didactic purposes” which “cannot be ignored.” He does not ignore them, but his focus is on verse first. And Douglas displays a modesty befitting one who is willing to edit the word of the Lord: “The commentaries that follow are elementary exercises in poetry explication, the extent of my ambition being to call attention to the fact that these tests reward a ‘literary’ reading and merit closer attention by more adequate readers. The explications are cast in the language of an old critical creed, but it is, I trust, a creed not wholly outworn, and it is the one in which I was suckled. It seems suitable, indeed necessary, for elementary work on ‘the works of Joseph Smith’ that should have been done and surpassed many years ago.”
The commentary on a given poem follows that poem, and ranges widely through almost every possible critical approach — and thus runs up against one of the flaws of Douglas’s presentation: he refers to his reformatted text by verse numbers, but he has not included them in his reformatting. This makes it necessary to read his commentary with the Doctrine and Covenants open on the table beside you. It is a small annoyance, but nonetheless an annoyance. He could have put the verse numbers in a separate column to the left of each verse, as Skousen does; or he could have subscripted them to the front of the first word in each verse, and made his commentary more easily understood while barely intruding on the verse.
An example of his re-working is in order at this point. To my mind, the most challenged and challenging of his versifications is his work with the 121st and 122nd sections. This is the poem as re-presented:
Doctrine and Covenants
121:1-25, 122:1-9
i
O GOD, where art thou?
and where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?
How long shall thy hand be stayed,
and thine eye —
yea, thy pure eye —
behold from the eternal heavens the wrongs of thy people
and of thy servants,
and thine ear be penetrated with their cries?
Yea, O Lord, how long shall they suffer these wrongs
and unlawful oppressions,
before thine heart shall be softened toward them
and thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them?
O Lord God Almighty,
maker of heaven, earth, and seas
and of all things that in them are,
and who controllest and subjectest the devil
and the dark and benighted dominion of Sheol:
stretch forth thy hand,
let thine eye pierce,
let thy pavilion be taken up,
let thy hiding place no longer be covered,
let thine ear be inclined,
let thine heart be softened
and thy bowels moved with compassion toward us,
let thine anger be kindled against our enemies,
and, in the fury of thine heart,
with thy sword avenge us of our wrongs.
Remember thy suffering saints, O our God,
and thy servants will rejoice in thy name forever.
ii
MY SON, peace be unto thy soul;
thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment,
and then, if thou endure it well,
God shall exalt thee on high;
thou shalt triumph over all thy foes.
Thy friends do stand by thee,
and they shall hail thee again,
with warm hearts and friendly hands.
Thou art not yet as Job:
thy friends do not contend against thee,
neither charge thee with transgression, as they did Job;
and they who do charge thee with transgression,
their hope shall be blasted,
and their prospects shall melt away
as the hoar frost melteth before the burning rays of the rising [sun.
God] hath set his hand and seal
to change the times and seasons
and to blind their minds,
that they may not understand his marvelous workings;
that he may prove them also
and take them in their own craftiness;
[also, that the things which they are willing to bring upon others
and love to have others suffer,
because their hearts are corrupted,]
and may come upon themselves to the very uttermost;
that they may be disappointed also,
and their hopes may be cut off;
and, not many years hence,
that they and their posterity shall be swept from under heaven,
that not one of them is left to stand by the wall.
Cursed are all those that shall lift up the heel against mine anointed,
and cry they have sinned when they have not sinned before me,
but have done that which was meet in mine eyes,
and which I commanded them;
but those who cry transgression
it because they are the servants of sin
and are the children of disobedience themselves;
and those who swear falsely against my servants,
that they might bring them into bondage and death —
wo unto them; because they have offended my little ones:
they shall be severed from the ordinances of mine house.
Their basket shall not be full,
their houses and their barns shall perish,
and they themselves shall be despised by those that flattered them.
They shall not have right to the priesthood,
nor their posterity after them from generation to generation.
It had been better for them
that a millstone had been hanged about their necks
and they drowned in the depth of the sea.
Wo unto all those that discomfort my people
and drive, and murder, and testify against them.
A generation of vipers shall not escape the damnation of hell;
behold, mine eyes see and know all their works,
and I have in reserve a swift judgment,
the season thereof, for them all;
For there is a time appointed for every man,
according as his works shall be.
The ends of the earth shall inquire after thy name,
and fools shall have thee in derision,
and hell shall rage against thee,
while the pure in heart,
and the wise,
and the noble,
and the virtuous,
shall seek counsel,
and authority,
and blessings
constantly from under thy hand;
and thy people shall never be turned against thee
by the testimony of traitors;
and although their influence shall cast thee into trouble
and into bars and walls,
thou shalt be had in honor;
and but for a small moment
and thy voice shall be more terrible in the midst of thine enemies
than the fierce lion,
because of thy righteousness;
and thy God shall stand by thee forever and ever.
If thou art called to pass through tribulation,
if thou art in perils among false brethren,
if thou art in perils among robbers,
if thou art in perils by land or by sea,
if thou art accused with all manner of false accusations,
if thine enemies fall upon thee,
if they tear thee from the society of thy father and mother
and brethren and sisters,
and if with a drawn sword thine enemies tear thee
from the bosom of thy wife
and of thine offspring,
and thine elder son,
although but six years of age,
shall cling to thy garments, and shall say,
“My father, my father, why can’t you stay with us?
O, my father, what are the men going to do with you?”
and if then he shall be thrust from thee by the sword,
and thou be dragged to prison,
and thine enemies prowl around thee
like wolves for the blood of the lamb,
and if thou shouldst be cast into the pit
or into the hands of murderers
and the sentence of death passed upon thee,
if thou be cast into the deep,
if the billowing surge conspire against thee,
if fierce winds become thine enemy,
if the heavens gather blackness
and all the elements combine to hedge up the way,
and, above all, if the very jaws of hell
shall gape open the mouth wide after thee,
know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience
and shall be for thy good.
The Son of Man hath descended below them all;
art thou greater than he?
Therefore, hold on thy way,
and the priesthood shall remain with thee,
for their bounds are set;
they cannot pass.
Thy days are known,
and thy years shall not be numbered less.
Therefore, fear not what man can do,
for God shall be with you forever and ever.
In his commentary on this poem, Douglas calls part (i) of this poem a prayer by Joseph Smith, & part (ii) a reply to the prayer, offering Smith comfort. The prayer part is fairly straightforward, beginning and ending with an address to God that would not be out-of-place in one of David’s psalms. And for one striking feature of this prayer, Smith may have been drawing on his familiarity with the psalms: the metaphor of the pavilion. In Psalms 27 and 31, the pavilion is a place of refuge for David — “For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion” (27.5) — and “them that fear thee” (31:20). This is not how the metaphor is used in the prayer. Douglas accounts for that kind of adaptation in his introduction: “I submit that, for hermeneutical purposes, it is more helpful to understand some things about scripture by treating it as written not by God but by men in response to their experience with God…. when he speaks to men, in order to be understood by them, he must necessarily speak according to their understanding; and therefore, at least indirectly, the human mind through which revelation comes to the rest of us necessarily has a part in shaping it.”
Bearing that in mind, I would read this poem in three parts: the prayer for vengeance, a rebuke to Smith’s call for vengeance (starting at ii), and, starting with the words “The ends of the earth shall inquire after thy name,” a blessing of comfort (a.k.a. Section 122). It seems to me that the Lord reproves Joseph with exactness, or sharpness, in that second excerpt from Section 121 — I say the second because the words “My son, peace be unto thy soul” are separated in the letter by three manuscript pages from the end of the prayer. Nor is Douglas the only editor to manipulate the text for publication: when it was included in the Doctrine and Covenants, in 1879, the editors cut out half of the clause leading up to “My son…” The clause reads, in part: “and when the heart is sufficiently contrite then the voice of inspiration steals along and whispers my son, peace be unto thy soul,” a part of the text clearly in Smith’s voice.
Those editors — Orson Pratt and other of the Apostles — recognized that three-part structure recurring twice, at least; the second time, it occurs in the overall structure of the three sections, with the 123rd Section answering that prayer as in part ii above, but this time speaking to the Church at large, offering a set of practical instructions to the Saints that commanded them to replace the sword with the pen.
But now I’ve started into my own area of study. Clearly the editorial process that gave us these three sections of Doctrine and Covenants rewards study. The entire Doctrine and Covenants rewards further study of the kind Douglas calls for in his introduction. But despite minor factual errors, this is a very good start at taking these revelations seriously as literature, and Joseph Smith seriously as a poet.
Douglas has recently begun a series of blog posts on “The Dawning of a Brighter Day,” the website of the Association for Mormon Letters (at https://www.associationmormonletters.org/), to clarify his critical stance and to expand on the commentaries. You can find them under the heading “Being a Restorationist Writer, and the Quest for the Infinite.” He has posted 5 entries so far, and I’m certain he would welcome any comment you might care to make. I welcome his posts as a means of engaging in serious literary criticism. But he has also had published two volumes of his own poems, and they will reward your careful reading even more. Watch for my reviews soon in this space.