D&C 93 as a Poem — 2
*****Again, in this post I am largely quoting myself from Six Poems. For the sake of the coherence of this series, I really cannot avoid it.
*****Section 93 is a dramatic poem (as, say, Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a dramatic poem). In the first line, a “stage manager” steps out and introduces a character: “Verily, thus saith the Lord.” Then another character, “the Lord,” walks onto the stage and delivers a monologue that is revealing of a dramatic situation and of character, and of a structure of reality within which both have their existence.
*****Section i of the monologue treats of the supreme unity toward which the mortal servant-friends of section iii are laboring; section iii treats of the creative complication of the Spirit/Absolute in inferior selves that seek reunion with the Spirit/Absolute; section ii relates to both i and iii by revealing the true identity of those servant-friends as manifestations, creative in themselves, of the Spirit/Absolute (and thus also the multiplicity in unity of the Spirit/Absolute—their both-and relationship), as children of God, and also the path by which reunification, at a higher level of complexity and thereby at a greater richness of being can be obtained by the yet imperfect mortals of section iii—mortals who may yet fail in their quest, and in that possibility of failure resides a dramatic tension.
*****A dynamic of countermotion (the term used by John Ciardi in How Does a Poem Mean?) that creates and resolves certain tensions within the text operates among the three parts, with one fulcrum (Ciardi’s term) between ii and iii, and another between i and ii. Section i reaffirms and expands the doctrine taught in John 1–14, but not so far as to break appreciably with traditional Christian doctrine. Then, in section ii, it is as if the Lord says by implication, “You have already known much of what I have just told you, but now let me give you a deeper understanding of things.” That countermotion is signaled by a change in style, in the increased frequency of chiasm (I will take that up further on) and in the concentration of short, aphoristic versets through which a new metaphysical understanding is indicated. At the fulcrum between ii and iii, the Lord suddenly shifts to calling certain individuals’ attention to the fact that they are falling short of the requirements for entering into the divine unity, and there a tension, a counterthrust, is created, as failure to obtain the proffered blessing suddenly becomes a real possibility; but the tension is quickly relieved by the hope implied in the final words—to see God, as promised in the first lines upon certain conditions, is still a real possibility, and that is where the text ends, on hope. That passage is more relaxed, more conversational, with longer, looser lines and versets, after the intensity of section ii. Section iii almost trails off from the theme of unity, as particular instructions and admonitions are given to certain individuals, but it is brought abruptly back by the very last verset: “and all this for the salvation of Zion.” Zion, in the works of Joseph Smith, is a society in which the inhabitants are “of one heart and one mind” in Christ (Moses 7:18)—the last word of the text thus both gives it closure and ties it back to the theme of unity and thus closes a circle that begins with the first section. There is another fulcrum, the main one in this text, at that last word, Zion. It has come “out of nowhere,” suddenly suggesting a great expansion on the theme; but, though it points back to the beginning of the work, it also points forward to something more that is not developed. It stands between what comes before and a pregnant silence. That dramatic moment is framed by a larger drama. Concentrated in the microcosm of section 93 is the whole drama of “the great plan of happiness” as it is being worked out in the history of the world through the lives of every mortal person—primeval unity of man with God; initial alienation with birth as God’s “spirit children”; a deeper and potentially more complete alienation by sin that may occur anywhere along the way from spirit birth to the resurrection, i.e., in premortal life, in mortality, and in postmortal life; and hope offered through the atonement of Christ, the final outcome being held in suspension awaiting the exercise of human agency. As a character in the drama as it is played out on the imaginary stage, the Lord first presents himself as the equal of the Father, vastly superior to man; at the end he is conversing in a relaxed manner with his friends—he is the risen Lord who prepared a meal on the shore of the Galilee and invited his friends to join him, but knowing that the response to that invitation will be an exercise of their own agency, that agency having been acknowledged within the poem as being bound up in the nature of existence itself. At the beginning, he is the remote and all-powerful God of Genesis 1 who brings a world into being by his word alone; at the end he is the God of Genesis 2 who works with his hands in mud to create man and walks and talks with him in the Garden; who are, of course, the same God, under different aspects, and a not quite omnipotent God who himself hangs in hopeful suspense awaiting the exercise of human agency. It is the tension of these polarities, with their crossmotion between the poles, with final resolution deferred but hope offered in the last word, that underlies and fundamentally structures, and thus unifies, the whole work. In these crossmotions—which are presented as occurring within the mind of God, revealing a dramatic moment in the life of God himself—section 93 rises from mere rhetoric to the status of poem, to something described by Cleanth Brooks: “It is in terms of structure that we must describe poetry. . . . The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings” (The Well-Wrought Urn, pp. 194–95).
*****The dramatic structure is cast within another kind of structure, the mirror-image parallelism known as chiasm. Chiasm is exemplified in a simple way by these phrases from Samuel Johnson (in “The Vanity of Human Wishes”: “by day the frolic, and the dance by night,” which may be presented diagrammatically as follows:
2) by day
***1) the frolic
***1) and the dance
2) by night
Much work has already been done to identify chiastic structures in the Doctrine and Covenants. I am heavily indebted to H. Clay Gorton, Charles Francis King, Richard C. Shipp, and William H. Brugger for identifying and laying out the chiasmic patterns in the entire Doctrine and Covenants in detail, and I do not wish to duplicate their work, to which the reader is referred, in these pages; a more general approach must serve here.
*****Ten chiasms occur in section 93. It is notable that no chiasms occur in part iii, where a generally more relaxed conversational attitude is suddenly assumed; the absence of that structuring contributes to the relaxation. All of the chiasms occur in the two sections where doctrine is concentrated, and most of them, six of the ten, occur in the section that presents new doctrine. They serve to concentrate the attention where the most important teaching is to occur. The ten chiasms with their central points (somewhat paraphrased) are as follows:
Chiasm 1, verses 4–5: Christ (in whom the Father dwelt) dwelt in the flesh among the sons of men.
Chiasm 2, verse 6: the fulness of John’s record, testifying of “fulness” of Christ’s glory, is yet to be revealed.
Chiasm 3, verses 12–14: Christ continued from grace to grace until he received of the fulness.
Chiasm 4, verse 15: the Holy Ghost descended upon Christ in the form of a dove.
Chiasm 5, verses 21–22: Those who are begotten of Christ become partakers of the glory of the Firstborn.
Chiasm 6, verses 23–26: untruth is of the devil.
Chiasm 7, verses 27–28: Obeying the commandments of God is necessary to obtaining a fulness of truth.
Chiasm 8, verses 29–30: Intelligence and the “truth” that it knows exist eternally (there is therefore no escape from the consequences of rejecting truth)—and I set forth this chiastic structure here, putting in bold face the key words of the respective elements, as an example of how these work in the Doctrine and Covenants:
(4) Man was also—in the beginning—with God;
****(3) intelligence,
*******(2) or the light of truth,
**********(1) was not created or made,
**********(1) neither indeed can be [created].
*******(2) All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself,
****(3) as all intelligence also,
(4) otherwise there is no existence
Chiasm 9, verses 31–32: Truth is offered to all men, but many reject it.
Chiasm 10, verse 35: A human “temple” that defiles itself by rejection of truth, by disobedience, will be in some sense “destroyed.”
*****That is a coherent summary, in the central elements of the chiastic structures, of the probationary nature of human mortality, and a thematic summary of section 93. It seems notable that this device for emphasizing main points is used most intensively in the section that presents the greatest doctrinal development, and that that section is in the physical center of the whole composition; and moreover that a chiasm within that section, chiasm 8, in which the doctrinal message is most distilled, is the rhetorical center of the whole composition—everything before it leads up to it, everything that follows flows from it. I am unable to argue that there is any organic relationship between the paraphraseable idea of each chiasm and the form as such of the chiasm (though that does not mean that chiasm as such does not “mean” something presentationally; I will return to that point in a moment), but when one “gets the hang” of reading it, a chiasm supplies a certain aesthetic pleasure in its symmetry, a sense of completion in going deeply into something and returning to come to rest.
*****It should also be noted that there is more to chiasm than rigid symmetry in the ascending and descending elements. Below are the corresponding ascending and descending elements of the chiasm in 93:4–5 matched together in what reveal themselves to be two-verset, parallel lines, exhibiting elaboration and intensification in the classic biblical style, the view on the way out being not exactly the view on the way in:
the Father because he gave me of his fulness . . .
and the works of him were plainly manifest.
and the Son because I was in the world . . .
I was in the world and received of my Father,
and made flesh my tabernacle . . .
and dwelt among the sons of men;
*****Other kinds of parallelism—syntactic, verbal, and semantic—are employed to effect in section 93. As is well known, parallelism is the most characteristic prosodic device of biblical poetry, and section 93 remains within that tradition, but it overflows the biblical conventions. By such couplets as “he hath put my brethren far from me, / and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me” (Job 19:3), biblical verse particularizes, intensifies, defines, expands, and advances narrative, in small increments, as Robert Alter describes its uses in The Art of Biblical Poetry. Alter recognizes certain constraints of such parallelism: “The two basic operations of specification and heightening within the parallelistic line lead to an incipiently narrative structure of minute concatenations, on the one hand, and to a climactic structure of thematic intensifications, on the other” (pp. 62–63). He observes that “a poet who felt moved, let us say, to celebrate the teeming variety and vastness of the human and natural landscape would . . . need a kind of poetic vehicle that was more expansive, allowing for free-flowing catalogues and effects of asymmetry and improvisation—would need, in short, something like Whitmanesque free verse” (p. 62). Joseph, in fact, has moved on to such a vehicle, though not having become quite so free as Whitman. Frequently, moreover, any kind of parallelism altogether breaks down as in this line, in which the versets group together only because they are clauses or phrases in the same sentence:
And it shall come to pass that,
***if you are faithful,
***you shall receive the fulness of the record of John.
That fact causes true parallelisms to stand out, emphasizing the importance of passages, as they do occur, as in verses 1–4:
It shall come to pass that every soul
***who forsaketh his sins,
***and cometh unto me,
***and calleth on my name,
***and obeyeth my voice,
***and keepeth my commandments
shall see my face
***and know that I am,
and that I am the true light
***that lighteth every man
***that cometh into the world,
and that I am in the Father,
***and the Father in me,
and the Father and I are one—
***the Father because he gave me of his fulness
and the Son because I was in the world
***and made flesh my tabernacle
***and dwelt among the sons of men.
Into that one long sentence is packed a great deal of information about what is required for a mortal to come to know God, all as a complex, unified thought, with series of syntactically parallel phrases all hung on the initial “It shall come to pass that.” Something similar occurs in verse 53, with the prepositional phrases hung on “to obtain a knowledge of history”:
and to obtain a knowledge of history,
and of countries,
and of kingdoms,
of laws of God and man,
Elaborations of this sort through syntactical parallels in a kind of list are characteristic of the Doctrine and Covenants. In the case of section 93, these series of parallel short phrases are imbedded among passages of longer lines or shorter parallel series, or a combination of both, which has the effect of calling attention to them and concentrating the mind on a certain theme.
*****Interlinear parallelism is as important in section 93 as intralinear, unifying and ordering thought through longer passages. Note the series of parallel phrases introducing stanzas: “And John saw and bore record” (verse 6), “And I, John, bear record” (verse 11), “And I John saw” (verse 12), “And I, John, bear record” (verse 15), “And I, John, bear record” (verse 16). The same use of parallelism occurs in part iii.
*****Richard C. Shipp, in “Conceptual Patterns of Repetition in the Doctrine and Covenants and Their Implications,” finds theological significance in all these types of parallelism, and I quote him here in essential concurrence. Schipp observes (p. 157) that (and the italics are all his) “repetition of concepts occurred to a high degree” (in the sections that he examined), that “the repetition was structured . . . into patterns of symmetry,” including both “reverse repetition” (chiasm) and “direct repetition.” He further observes: “The patterns gave to the revelations an esthetically pleasing sense of beauty, symmetry, and design. Each revelation became a ‘symphony of words.’” He suggests that the parallelisms were “a means of incorporating a ‘built-in system of commentary’ within each revelation,” that by them “context may be established, clarifications may be made, meanings may be illuminated, definitions may be given,” and (p. 158) that “‘Punctuation’ was inherently incorporated within the revelations through techniques of pattern structuring.” He proposes that by these structural patterns the texts “convey eternal symbolism” (p. 149), they “bear record of a higher reality” (p. 150). He proposes that by means of chiasm they are “made to bear record of God as the First and the Last—the Last and The First,” and that by them “the Lord has revealed that the pattern incorporated into all things by the power of His spirit is ‘that the first shall be last, and that the last shall be first’ in all things” (p. 150). He further proposes that, in what he calls “The Historic Chiasm,” “there is an eternal basis for the patterns of reverse repetition which appears in the revelations of the Doctrine and Covenants. That basis is seen in the history (from the beginning to the end) of planet earth and her inhabitants . . . The ’focal point’ of ’The Historic Chiasm’ was the point at which the earth and mankind began their ascent back into the presence of God from whence they have fallen. The ’turning point’ of the history of this earth was THE ATONEMENT OF JESUS CHRIST” (pp. 151–52).
*****Then there is the matter of cadence. When section 93 is read aloud as I have laid it out typographically, with a pause, longer or shorter, at the end of each verset, it demonstrates a rhythmic quality, a cadence, a pattern in the stress on words and the rise and fall of pitch and volume in the voice. This cadence is sufficient justification for calling it “poetic,” for, as Barbara Hernstein Smith observes, “As soon as we perceive that a verbal sequence has a sustained rhythm, that it is formally structured according to a continuously operating principle of organization, we know that we are in the presence of poetry. . . . and we respond to it accordingly . . ., expecting certain effects from it and not others, granting certain conventions to it and not others” (Poetic Closure, p. 23). Smith further observes: “One of the most significant effects of meter . . . in poetry is simply to inform the reader that he is being confronted by poetry and not by anything else. . . . Meter serves, in other words, as a frame for the poem, separating it from a ‘ground’ of less highly structured speech or sound.” The language of section 93 is not metered, but it is cadenced, following natural patterns of speech and breath, probably in part a consequence of the way in which it was composed and delivered, dictated thought unit by thought unit. That cadence performs the same function as the stricter rhythm of meter, to “frame” the text, to unify it and give it a life of its own, as something separate from its surroundings. A comparison of the style of these poems with the language that surrounds them in the primary sources confirms that the poems are indeed set apart from their surroundings.
*****Cadence combines with vocabulary and phraseology to give section 93 a biblical “feel,” but it is employed creatively in a manner that approaches skillfully employed modern free verse. One of its uses is to express meaning by variation from the regular or expected pattern. For example, the versets of the first three verses are terse, tight, to the point. Then, when the subject turns to “fulness,” they become more relaxed, longer—more “full.” In that relaxation is a sense that the Son has come to rest in the Father, and the Father in the Son. That pattern of terseness, tightness, followed by fulness and relaxation, is repeated in 7–14 and 15–17, which also end with the notion of fulness. Verses 18–20 also treat of “fulness,” but in this case the “fulness” of syntax comes in the middle, making it possible to use the “punchier” shorter lines to emphasize “grace” (and it surely is no accident that the word grace gets prominence of place as the final word of that section). This same contrast is used in the overall structure of the text: after the relatively intense doctrinal instruction of the first two parts, the speaker seems to relax a bit and assume a more conversational tone with those whom he calls his “friends.” The versets of part iii are longer, looser. The conversational tone is further enhanced by the parenthetical digression in verses 45–46, after which the broken thread of thought is taken up again by the repetition at the beginning of verse 47 of the initial words of verse 45.
*****Modulation within versets and lines is illustrated by verses 2–3:
And that I am the true light
***that lighteth every man
***that cometh into the world;
and that I am in the Father,
***and the Father in me,
Stress falls naturally on “I” and “true light,” tying them together; but somewhat less on “true light,” leaving the greatest stress on the “I” that refers directly to Christ. In the next verset, the greatest stress falls on the first syllable of “lighteth,” emphasizing the “light” that is a key to the unity with God promised in this text; then lesser but equal stress falls on the first syllable of “every” and “man,” emphasizing that each and every individual born on the earth receives the invitation to unity with God. In the next line, “I” and “Father,” and “Father” and “me,” respectively, demand equal stress, emphasizing the oneness of Father and Son.
*****Verse 5 contains an odd construction in English (though I am told that it is quite normal in Hebrew), “and the works of him were plainly manifest.” “His works” would be more idiomatic in English; but that would tend to place the emphasis on “works,” and the construction that is given appropriately emphasizes “him,” the Father.
*****Finally, this:
And the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a dove
***and sat upon him,
In the relaxed amplitude of the first verset, there is a feeling of floating as the dove descends, ended by the somewhat abrupt finality of the short second verset as the dove comes to a stop.
*****I sign off here for now, having pointed out major structural elements of section 93—the dramatic and the parallelistic—and next time will take up certain aspects of the poem that might loosely be called “cultural.”
Thoughts?
SOURCES CITED (THOUGH NOT ALL IN PART 2)
Airmet, Douglas E. “Mormon Poets Talk about their Craft.” The New Era, 5:8 (Aug. 1975): 44 – 49.
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Poetry. Basic Books, 1985.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Brugger, William H. Section 76 as Literature in the Doctrine and Covenants. Master’s
*****thesis, Brigham Young University, 1993.
Ciardi, John. How Does a Poem Mean? Part Three of an Introduction to Literature.
*****The Riverside Press, 1959.
Douglas, Colin B. Six Poems by Joseph Smith: A Dimension of Meaning in the Doctrine and Covenants. Waking *****Lion Press, 2015.
Gorton, H. Clay. Language of the Lord. Horizon Publishers, 1993.
King, Charles Francis. The Doctrine & Covenants Completely Restructured (Including
*****Chiasm). 2d ed. rev. Charles Francis King, 2000.
Petersen, Roger K. Joseph Smith Prophet-Poet: A Literary Analysis of Writings Commonly
*****Associated with His Name. Doctoral Dissertation, Brigham Young University, 1981.
Shipp, Richard C. Conceptual Patterns of Repetition in the Doctrine and Covenants and their
*****Implications. Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1975.
Smith, Barbara Hernstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. The University of
*****Chicago Press, 1968.