Another Cheer for Poetry in the Scriptures

Elder Maxwell has been on our minds even more than usual this year at the Maxwell Institute. 2026 marks the 100^th anniversary of his birth (July 1926) and the 20^th anniversary of the creation of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU. It has been—and will be for the rest of the year—an important time of remembering and reflecting and celebrating.

But what has been on my mind most recently is Elder Maxwell’s funeral—and especially what President Gordon B. Hinckley said at that funeral. It was late July 2004, and it was only three months after Marjorie Hinckley’s death. President Hinckley almost couldn’t help wearing on his sleeve the deep anguish that he was still feeling over the recent death of his wife, and that all came through in the funeral remarks that he directed specifically to Elder Maxwell’s widow, Colleen. There is something striking to me about just how raw and real President Hinckley’s comments were—maybe unusually so in what we’ve come to expect in our funeral services:

At funerals we speak words intended to give comfort. But in reality, they afford but little comfort. Only those who have passed through this dark valley know its utter desolation. To lose one’s much-loved partner with whom one has long walked through sunshine and shadow is absolutely devastating. There is a consuming loneliness which increases in intensity. It painfully gnaws at one’s very soul.¹

It’s President Hinckley’s honest admission that words of intended comfort “in reality . . . afford but little comfort” that I can’t stop thinking about. I’m grateful that he gave expression to what all of us have likely felt in a time of deep mourning: words, so often, fall flat.

And that’s why I want to offer a resounding second to the motion that Phil Barlow raised in his Maxwell Institute blog post on Ecclesiastes just two weeks ago. Phil’s essay is so good that I recommend everyone go back and read it again. And then I want to offer another cheer for the power of poetry in the scriptures—and a special “hooray!” for the chapters in Isaiah we’re reading this week.

Here’s one of Phil’s great lines: “In its authentic expression, poetry is not mere verbal decoration. Instead, it transforms the emotional and aesthetic character of diverse scriptural passages, revealing their power, awakening minds and hearts to the good and the true, the powerful and the beautiful.” And “poetry,” Phil reminded us, “can partake of the sublime, conveying the taste, feel, pleasure, and idea of the sublime.”

What has struck me as I’ve been thinking about Isaiah 35 and Elder Maxwell’s funeral at the same time is that poetry can also somehow accomplish what President Hinckley admitted most of our words of intended comfort cannot.

Poetry can rise above ordinary speech in its power to console.

I’ll readily admit that I need to think much more about why that is so, but to me, right now, it’s sufficient to say that it’s somehow self-evident. It’s something that we just intuitively seem to know.

At least one part of that power has to be the way poetry transcends triteness. No matter how well intended our expressions of consolation might be, we all feel just how trite those expressions taste in our mouths as we’re mumbling them. We want to say so much more than we feel like we have the ability to convey—and often we end up wishing we had said less than we did.

But poetry—in its extra-ordinariness, in its unexpectedness, in its metaphors and similes and images that detach it from everyday-ness—leaps over that “trite” barrier and carries us to a different place. Poetry seems to be “the consecration of language”—that’s how my colleague Kristian Heal captured it so well in a recent conversation—in the way it uses “everyday language in arresting and unexpected settings.” And heaven-inspired poetry seems to speak spirit to spirit, to communicate truths that are too big to merely explain or analyze.

Poetry in the scriptures is simply alive in a different way, and what it breathes is hope.

I’ve been thinking of lines like these from Isaiah 35 in the context of a setting like Elder Maxwell’s funeral:

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose (Isaiah 35:1, KJV)

Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees (Isaiah 35:3, NRSV)

Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear!” (Isaiah 35:4, NRSV)

Here is your God (Isaiah 35:4, NRSV)

He will come and save you (Isaiah 35:4, KJV)

Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing (Isaiah 35:6, KJV)

And the burning sand shall become a pool (Isaiah 35:7, NRSV)

No lion shall be there (Isaiah 35:9, KJV)

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads (Isaiah 35:10, KJV)

Sorrow and sighing shall flee away (Isaiah 35:10, KJV)

I’m also struck that President Hinckley himself made a poetic turn in the direction of that same kind of hope in his funeral remarks, right after admitting how much the devastating loneliness he was feeling “gnaws at one’s very soul.” This is where he went next:

But in the quiet of the night a silent whisper is heard that says, “All is well. All is well.” And that voice from out of the unknown brings peace, certainty, and unwavering assurance that death is not the end, that life goes on, with work to do and victories to be won. That voice quietly, even unheard with mortal ears, brings the assurance that as surely as there has been separation, there will be a joyful reuniting.²

I’m more and more convinced that what that quiet voice whispers to us—reminds us of—really is, when it comes down to it, poetry. And I’m more and more convinced that when we really immerse ourselves in the poetic passages in scripture and let them wash over us, we feel a lift, a buoyancy, that comes from being understood—and from understanding the world—in ways that we can’t put into ordinary words.

Notes

1. The audio and printed versions of President Hinckley’s comments are slightly different. In the audio recording of the funeral, President Hinckley can be heard to say, “At funerals we speak platitudes intended to give comfort. Only those who have passed through this dark valley know its utter desolation.” But the printed text of his remarks has it as it is above: “At funerals we speak words intended to give comfort. But in reality, they afford but little comfort. Only those who have passed through this dark valley know its utter desolation.” President Hinckley repeated these same lines (as the printed text has it) in a devotional to the workers of the Jordan River Temple just four months later, in November 2004, and he introduced the passage as coming from his remarks at Elder Maxwell’s funeral. I’ve used those lines here since they seem to communicate best the message President Hinckley intended when he used the word “platitudes” in his spoken remarks.

2. This passage is also from President Hinckley’s remarks at Elder Neal A. Maxwell’s funeral.