Joseph Smith was imprisoned in the jail at Liberty, Missouri — across the Missouri River from the equally ironically-named Independence — from 1 December 1838 through 6 April 1839, along with five others: Caleb Baldwin, Alexander McRae, Sidney Rigdon, Hyrum Smith and Lyman Wight.[i] During that time he received visitors, including members of his family, and corresponded with members of the Church, personally and officially. He was treated more generously in Liberty Jail than he had been in the Richmond County courthouse, but it was still imprisonment, and he was still penned with 6 adult men into a basement roughly 14 feet square, while awaiting trial.
“Liberty Jail” has become for Mormons the equivalent of a Zen koan — a teasing, instructive paradox that we can haul out of the flames of affliction, turn this way and that in the tongs of a secret mysticism, admire as a well-crafted and concise puzzle, and return to the crucible, satisfied that there is more there than meets the eye. That the crucible in which it was refined more nearly resembles a compost heap doesn’t bother us, because the best-known expression of the mystery that is Liberty Jail — the 121st and 122nd sections of Doctrine and Covenants — shine out of the close confines of that dreary habitation like a self-igniting conflagration, a spontaneous combustion not unknown in the gardens where we most often encounter compost heaps. And at the heart of the paradox, admired perhaps but unexamined by most of us, is the letter from which those sections were taken.
That those two sections of Doctrine and Covenants, along with the 123rd section, could be extracted from a long letter dictated by Joseph on 20 March 1839 — shortly after his second attempt to break jail, and almost a month before his successful escape from custody — shows how valuable the long, slow process of rotting in darkness was to the Prophet, and how fertile that composting process had made him. Joseph did not himself extract those sections for canonization, although he could have, in the time remaining to him. Those three sections deserve extensive analysis, which they will get in my next post. But there is much more in the letter that deserves consideration, particularly in my quest to discover the poet Joseph Smith.
In this excerpt, for example, notice how Joseph’s feelings of betrayal intertwine with his feelings of inadequacy for the task given him:
Again, outward appearance is not always a Criterion
for us to Judge our fellow man
but the lips betray the haughty and over bearing
imaginations of the heart — by his words
and his deeds let him be scanned.
Flattery also is a deadly poison —
a frank and open Rebuke provoketh a good man to Emulation
and in the hour of trouble he will be your best friend,
but on the other hand it will draw out all the corruption of a corrupt heart —
And lying and the poison of asps shall be under their tongues
and they do cause the pure in heart to be cast into prison
because they want them out of their way —
A fanciful and flowery and heated imagination be aware of
because the things of God Are of deep import
and time and experience and careful and ponderous
and solemn thoughts can only find them out.
thy mind O Man, if thou wilt lead a soul
unto salvation must stretch as high as the utmost Heavens
and search into and contemplate the lowest
considerations of the darkest abyss,
and Expand upon the broad considerations of Eternal Expance —
he must commune with God.
How much more dignified and noble are the thoughts of God,
than the vain imaginations of the human heart —
none but fools will trifle with the souls of men —
how vain and trifling have been our spirits,
our Conferences our Councils our Meetings
our private as well as public Conversations
too low, too mean, too vulgar, too condescending,
for the dignified Characters of the Called and Chosen of God,
according to the purposes of his will
from before the foundation of the world.
To hold the keys of the mysteries of those things
that have been kept hid from the foundation until now
of which some have tasted a little
and which many of them are to be poured down from heaven
upon the heads of babes, yea the weak
obscure and despisable ones of this earth.
Therefore We beseech of you brethren that you bear with those
who do not feel themselves more worthy than yourselves,
while we Exhort one another, to a reformation
with one and all, both old and young, teachers and taught
both high and low — rich and poor — bond and free — Male and female.
let honesty and sobriety, and candor and solemnity,
and virtue, and pureness, and meekness, and simplicity,
Crown our heads in every place,
and in fine become as little Children
without malice guile or Hypokrisy:
and now Brethren after your tribulations if you do these things,
and exercise fervent prayer, and faith in the sight of God Always
26he shall give unto you knowledge by his holy spirit —
yea by the unspeakable gift of the holy-Ghost —
that has not been revealed since the world was until now[ii]
Notice how, in the clause “thy mind O Man, if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation must stretch as high as the utmost Heavens and search into and contemplate the lowest considerations of the darkest abyss,” Joseph prefigures sections 121 and 122 of Doctrine and Covenants. I had planned to address Sections 121, 122 and 123, and the editorial process that produced them, in this post, but as so often happens with this blog I have found myself sidetracked by another interesting bauble, and since my purpose here is to pursue the question of Joseph Smith’s poetic speech, I would like to close today with an excerpt from a letter from Joseph’s wife Emma, which she wrote on 7 March and he received on 19 March, along with letters from his brothers Don Carlos Smith and William Smith, and from Bishop Edward Partridge. I call you to enjoy the rhythms of Emma’s writing (she wrote, rather than dictated, the letter):
I shall not attempt to write my feelings altogether,
for the situation in which you are,
the walls, bars, and bolts,
rolling rivers, running streams, rising hills,
sinking vallies and spreading prairies that separate us,
and the cruel injustice that first cast you into prison
and still holds you there, with many other considerations
places my feelings far beyond description.
Was it not for conscious innocence,
and the direct intervention of divine mercy,
I am very sure I never should have been able to have endured
the scenes of suffering I have passed through,
since what is called the Militia, came into Far West….[iii]
Those of you who have followed in verse for a while will know my feelings about alliteration and the promise it holds for poetry, especially a new Mormon poetry. Emma’s use of it here seems to me not only conscious and literary but very effective, and I can’t help wondering if Joseph, in replying to the previous day’s letters, wasn’t influenced by its rhythms and by the sense of distance from his wife and children. Emma may well have been Joseph’s greatest literary influence, as well as his final teacher.
But hold on, I hear you say: isn’t this just another instance of wishful thinking on your part?
Your turn.
[i] The summary presented here of Joseph’s time in Liberty Jail comes largely from Dean Jessee’s editorial notes in Personal writings of Joseph Smith. — Revised edition / compiled and edited by Dean C. Jessee. — Salt Lake City : Deseret Book ; Provo, Utah : Brigham Young University Press, c2002 (hereafter Personal writings). The broad outlines are consistent with Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith : rough stone rolling and Donna Hill’s Joseph Smith : the first Mormon. My comments about conditions in the jail are my own conclusions.
[ii] The letter appears on pp. 429-446 of Personal writings. This excerpt is taken from pp. 436-437. I have, however, normalized much of the spelling (though not capitalization) and supplied my own punctuation — mostly as em-dashes — along with, of course, the line breaks. The subscripted number 26 indicates the start of verse 26 of Doctrine and Covenants 121, in which the word “he” is replaced with “God.”
[iii] Personal writings, p. 429, in the headnote to the letter discussed above.
It’s interesting how differently I tend to read Joseph and Emma’s words when they’re arranged in lines like this. It makes me more aware of the poetry that probably was deeply embedded in the more oral culture of the early to mid nineteenth century, and that spills over into its written products. It’s something I *should* be aware of — particularly since, unlike many readers (as I’ve been informed by others), I tend to “hear” the words aloud in my head when I read them on a page. Thanks, Dennis, for making this all the more noticeable.
Reading through the Doctrine and Covenants when I was younger, the impression I got was of revelations coming fast and thick through the exciting time of Joseph Smith’s lifetime. One of the insights from Bushman’s work was that for them at the time, it wasn’t necessarily that way: months at a time, and then a paragraph or two of revelation, preciously celebrated and shared. In this case, we tend to elide the months of imprisonment: the slow mouldering of the compost pile (to use your metaphor) before Joseph was broken down enough for something precious and brilliant to spring forth.
We forget that Joseph & Emma Smith lived in what was still an oral popular culture. When his mother relates his telling stories of the Nephite and Lamanite worlds, she is recording the most common way of passing information along in that culture, although that oral culture, like the magic world-view, was passing into the new era Joseph was born for. And we forget the same thing about the Hebrew poets, whose works were written down to preserve them, but have the cadence and rhythm of speech, of heightened and metaphorical communication.
That’s the same kind of culture that Beowulf was preserved in, and most likely by a poet who had heard the story performed and wanted to record it.
My story for the Mormon Lit Blitz this year centers around the members of a Japanese Mormon noise band called The Darkest Abyss in an alternate history where the Saints ended up in Hokkaido rather than the intermountain West.
Or in other words: I find that the poetry of the D&C keeps being a wellspring for the fiction that I write.
Well, I have to concur with that, Wm. It seems to me that the poetry of D&C is more noticed in the recall of what has struck our fancy than in the initial encounter. I am constantly surprised by what other people cite as memorable, but only because I had not remembered it first.