Best-Loved Poems of the LDS People Edited by Jack M. Lyon, Linda Ririe Gundry, Jay A. Parry, Devan Jensen Deseret Book, 1996. ISBN: 1-57345-212-2 Suggested retail price: $23.95 (US) Audience: General audience, particularly people preparing "Church talks and lessons on nearly any subject" (preface)
Reviewed by: Harlow S. Clark

I Might Be Envied By a King, But Not a Poet Laureate

You might expect a book with the words "Best Loved Poems" in the title to be a collection of bad poems, like those anthologies you have to buy a copy of if you want them to print your poem. The title makes no claim to being the best poems of the Latter-day Saints (there are more poems by Mick E. Mouse's cousin Anon than by LDS people) and people often love poems for reasons that have not much to do with the literary value of the poems. I may be wrong about that. In the last section of his prize-winning series "Mormon Poetry Now" Dennis Clark suggested that the reason people read horrible didactic poetry in talks and sermons is that even bad poetry requires compression of the language, compression which heightens the effect of the message. It is, in fact, a hallmark of the bad didactic poetry we hear in church that it is almost always metrically perfect, which may be one of the reasons Leslie Norris told our 20th Century British Poetry class that perfect poems are always minor poems. One implication of Dennis's comment is that we recite bad poetry in church not because we have no taste, but because we recognize that the gospel message is important enough to need expression in heightened language, language more elegant or eloquent than what we normally use. Any compression or heightening of the language is preferable to none. (Similarly, I was worrying one day about the didactic fiction we see so much of and my muse said to me, "Be glad that Mormons have such high regard for fiction as to use it to teach the Gospel" [paraphrased a bit]).

One of the reasons I asked to review this book is that I was curious as to the editor's perceptions of the best-loved poems of my people. They state their principle of selection in the preface, and the book might more accurately be called Best Loved Poems of the LDS General Authorities, as it "was compiled in an effort to bring together in one place the poems most frequently quoted by General Authorities in general conference." And they're all there, including "My Chum," beloved of Thomas S. Monson, about the boy who "stood at the crossroads all alone . . . set for a manly race," President Monson's other favorite, "I am The Christmas Spirit," and Lorenzo Snow's "Man's Destiny," with these two stanzas about life's race:

Still, 'tis no phantom that we trace
Man's ultimatum in life's race;
This royal path has now been trod
By righteous men, each now a God:

As Abra'm, Isaac, Jacob, too,
First babes, then men -- to gods they grew.
As man now is, our God once was;
As now God is, so man may be, --
Which doth unfold man's destiny.

In browsing the book (my tolerance for bad poetry isn't great enough to allow me to read it straight through, and it is designed as a reference book, poems arranged topically with notes at the end of each section referring the reader to other topics), and thinking about our use of poetry in worship, it occurs to me that the use of poetry in worship makes our culture anti-Platonic, at least in one sense. I won't develop this idea here, but in Plato's Ion Socrates' chief objection to Ion as a participant in political life (the life of the polis of Athens) is not so much that he's a poet as that he claims to write under inspiration. Socrates' objection isn't, like Thom Duncan's, that Ion is trying to sell poetry by claiming inspiration, but that inspiration is inherently unreliable because inspiration doesn't inhere, like reason, but comes from outside the poet, perhaps at the poet's prayer, but not at his command. It's worth noting, then, that this book is a compilation of poems loved by people who claim not only the right to lead, but inspiration, and who often deliver their message through poems[1].

Though I wouldn't buy this book for my own library, it has many delights, including parodies of some of the best loved poems, like these two verses of Anon E. Mouse's sendup of Kipling (How does one kipple, anyway?) "If You Can Smile."

If you can smile when things go wrong
And say, "It doesn't matter,"
If you can laugh off care and woe
And trouble makes you fatter;

If you can keep a happy face
When all around are blue --
Then have your head examined, Bud,
There's something wrong with you!

There are also two parodies of William Ernest Henley's "Invictus." I particularly like the way Dorothea Day handles the second verse in "My Captain":

In the fell clutch of circumstance
    I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
    My head is bloody but unbowed
      --Henley

Since His the sway of circumstance,
    I would not wince nor cry aloud.
Under the rule which men call chance
    My head with joy is humbly bowed.
      --Day

There are lots of delights in the book, like Jay A. Parry's "You, Simeon, Spirit-Filled," with lines like "Newborn, helpless, a God in infant's flesh," and "He who washes soul from soil," and the fourth stanza of Unknown's "The Pioneers" where the rhyme for line 1 occurs not at the end of line 3, but the beginning of line 4:

Faith to light their dreary way,
    Truth to brighten miles they trod'
In the shelter of the Rockies
    They were free to worship God.

And I suppose that's what this book is about, not poetry, but the language people use in worshipping. I can still hear President Benson's shaky high-pitched voice singing Evan Stephens' song, which my father also sang in Primary

A Mormon boy, a Mormon boy,
    I am a Mormon boy
I might be envied by a king,
    For I am a Mormon boy.

Harlow Clark

1. Ion's spiritual descendants, of course, villify Plato for kicking poets out of the Republic. Whether he was anti-poet or not is a matter of debate: Jim Faulconer insists that Plato only wanted to exclude lying poets, not poets who tell the truth, and David Yarn told our History of Philosophy I class that one way of reading The Republic is as a satire (a warning) of what a society would be like that subjected all values to one value, even if that one value were justice. I am more fascinated, though, by Plato's attitude toward inspiration than toward poets. I don't know as anyone has ever done a reading of the Ion as a debate about the attempt to keep religion out of politics, but I may one day.