The Wonder of Scripture with Leslee Thorne-Murphy
Introduction: A Poetic Interpretation of Scripture
A very kind and generous introduction, and I appreciate it very much. And I’m glad to be here today. And I’m glad to talk to you about something that I have really found fascinating, and I hope that I can communicate some of that with you. So I’d like to talk today about a poetic interpretation of scripture, one I think most, if not all of you, will be familiar with. It’s the hymn, “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief,” page twenty-nine in our hymnal.
When it was first published though, it was not actually intended to be a hymn. And it had a different title, “The Stranger and His Friend.” This is a copy of its first publication when it was produced as what was called a broadsheet. This is a single piece of paper about the size of a half sheet of our paper. And it would look to us like a very sturdy type of tissue paper. The author, James Montgomery, listed his scriptural inspiration for the poem right at the top of the page: three verses from the New Testament—Matthew chapter 25, verses 35, 36, and 40. Today, I’d like to take a look at the poem as an interpretation of these scriptures within its original publication context.
James Montgomery: Wayfarer, Poet, and Prisoner
Montgomery was a noted poet and hymnist in his time and place. And he’d taken a really interesting path to get there. He was born in Scotland to Irish parents who were Moravian. The Moravians had descented from the Catholic Church long before Luther nailed his Theses to the door. And they maintained very tight-knit communities wherever they settled. In 1777, when Montgomery was five years old, his parents brought him from Ireland to England and enrolled him in a school in a different Moravian settlement called Fulneck, the Fulneck Settlement. It had a boarding school that could give him a good, solid Moravian education. Within a few years, his two brothers had joined him at the school, and his parents had left to serve as missionaries.
They went to Barbados as missionaries, and he actually never saw them again. They eventually died there. When Montgomery completed his education at Fulneck at the age of twelve, he trained for a time as a teacher. And the leaders of the settlement cast lots, as was their practice, to see whether he should go to Germany to be trained as a minister, which had been his parents’ desire. Alas, the lots did not fall in his favor.
So he was assigned as an apprentice to a baker. However, Montgomery longed for different things, and when he was sixteen, in the words of his first biographer, “On a fine Sunday morning, having packed up a few things, including his manuscript poetry, he slipped away from the house and soon found himself on the high road.”1 In other words, he ran away. He ran away, heading for London in pursuit of the life of a poet. He had, as he put it later, quote, “the clothes on my back, a single change of linen.” He didn’t take his nice suit because he had not yet earned enough money to pay for it, to justify taking it. So he had “a single change of linen and three and sixpence in my pocket,” he said.
As he journeyed over the next days and months and even years, various strangers took pity on him and gave him work and a place to sleep. He spent time working in a shop in a town called Wath, made his way to London sometime later and worked for a bookseller and printer, and eventually used these skills to become a newspaperman in Sheffield, back up in Northern England. There, he was assistant to the editor of The Sheffield Register, a politically radical newspaper. The problem was that this was the 1790s, and that was not an easy time to be a political radical, especially in the print world in the United Kingdom. The French Revolution had occurred just a few years earlier, and governments across Europe were on high alert. The editor of the paper Montgomery worked for, in fact, eventually fled to the US. It was quite an escape, as they narrate it, leaving Montgomery to run a dangerous paper and take care of the editor’s three maiden sisters, which he conscientiously did. He changed the paper’s name to the much more romantic Sheffield Iris and toned down its politics quite substantially. This worked to a certain extent.
However, in 1795, Montgomery was charged with sedition for agreeing to print a broadside—like his poem had been printed on—a broadside with a poem about the fall of the Bastille, which was dangerously radical in his climate. He was convicted, and he spent three months in prison in York. A year later, he was back in prison, this time convicted of libel, for writing an article criticizing leaders for calling out the militia to suppress a political protest. Both times, though, he considered himself innocent of wrongdoing, and he turned his time in prison, it turns out, to good account, writing a volume of poetry.
Thirty years later, when Montgomery wrote “The Stranger and His Friend,” he was an established, well-known, and well-respected citizen of his city. He was on the board of nearly every educational, cultural, medical, and literary society in town. He helped to establish Sunday schools, which were literacy initiatives at that time. He chaired the local infirmary, which provided medical care for the working poor. He agitated for better working conditions for chimney sweeps. He had applied for and received readmission to the Fulneck Moravian congregation, though he did not live in their settlement after that. And he was known and respected as a poet, corresponding with such luminaries as William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, who was the poet laureate at the time. From a more stable and comfortable position, he could look back on the time when he was a wayfarer, when he had been a stranger seeking friends, and when he had been imprisoned for what he considered unjust reasons. So, let’s see how these things play out in the poem itself.
Matthew 25 and “The Stranger and His Friend”
Montgomery indicated that he based the poem on these three verses from Matthew 25, as we have seen. As you’ll recall, Christ gives these scriptures as he is describing what will happen, quote, “when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him” (that’s in verse 31). In this scene, all nations will be gathered and the Son of Man will pass judgment, sorting individuals to his right and to his left. And he tells the people who moved to his right that they will inherit a kingdom because, and then he gives verses 35 and 36: “For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”
So these verses contain qualifications for being the type of people who will dwell with Christ. As we can see, most of the verses of Montgomery’s poem line up with these scriptures.
The Poem’s Form and Central Relationship
The poem is written in seven stanzas of eight lines each, or octaves and the lines are in iambic tetrameter, so an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, da-da [emphasis placed on second “da”], repeated four times. The rhythm has some variation in the poem, but he follows the rhyme scheme of A, B, A, B, C, C, D, D, strictly. Octaves with this rhyme scheme are common in a folk form of poetry from Italy called the rispetto. (Sorry to those who could pronounce that much better than I can.) These poems are traditionally about romantic love, honoring a beloved woman.
But Montgomery’s rispetto has a few twists. It is about love, though not of the romantic variety. Interestingly, the common hymn title foregrounds one actor in the poem, a poor wayfaring man of grief. This would be in keeping with paying respect to a loved one, though this time with a spiritual twist: The poem shows one’s devotion to Christ. The poem’s original title, though, invites us to see the poem as an interaction between two people who learn to love one another, a stranger and a friend. It’s a variation on a rispetto, and it invites us to focus on the relationship between these two people.
The First Encounter: Bread, Charity, and Reversal
Let’s take a look at their first encounter, which actually happens in the second stanza:
Once, when my scanty meal was spread,
He entered; not a word he spake,
Just perishing for want of bread.
I gave him all; he blessed it, brake,
And ate, but gave me part again.
Mine was an angel’s portion then,
For while I fed with eager haste,
The crust was manna to my taste.
So, we know from the first line that the speaker only had a scanty meal. We are not dealing with someone who has ample to share. This seems to be a domestic space where they are, though we have no details. We only know it was a space where one would lay out one’s meal to eat. Most of this first line is made up of an adverbial clause, a dependent clause modifying once, and with a verb in passive voice. The meal had already been spread.
The action comes at the beginning of the second line. “He entered.” Let’s pause here for just a minute. What happened to Christ knocking and us opening the door? As in Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” In Montgomery’s poem, we have a stranger who enters unbidden into what is apparently a domestic space where one is eating. That is an incredibly presumptuous act that would surely test anyone’s hospitality and that makes us reconsider how Christ comes to each of us.
In the third line, we see how the speaker perceives this intruder. He is perishing from hunger. How does the speaker know that the man is perishing? After all, the man does not speak. He makes no verbal request at all. It is up to the narrator to observe this intruder, to perceive the need, and to provide.
And what is the speaker’s reaction? It appears to be an instantaneous act of charity. He gives the intruder all of his meal.
What does the stranger not do? He doesn’t gobble it down. The man’s perishing from want of food. Instead, we get an instantaneous reversal of roles. It’s in the middle of the line, separated not even with a period, only with a colon. The stranger enacts a communion, a sacrament. He turns the dry crust into manna. And it is the speaker who feeds with such eager haste as though he or she is perishing for want of bread.
Dramatic and Situational Irony in the Poem
Now, Montgomery uses the same basic pattern in the second through the fifth stanzas. We get a contemplation—a deep contemplation on a phrase from Matthew 25, envisioning a scene enacting the scripture. Then we have a speaker offering charity. And we have—sometimes that’s in the form of goods, sometimes it’s in the form of services. And we have a reversal. And then we have the stranger offering charity in turn. This pattern is based on dramatic irony, where the reader knows the secret that the narrator doesn’t know, and the pleasure of the story lies in seeing the character discover the same knowledge.
After all, Montgomery has given us the scripture references from Matthew 25. We know perfectly well that this is going to be the story of someone serving Christ by serving someone who is hungry. Yet, Montgomery goes beyond the typical form of dramatic irony by suggesting situational irony as well. This is when there is an outcome that is unexpected to both reader and to character. Christ, in Matthew 25, says that the people fed the hungry. He does not say that the hungry turned around and fed them. But based on an orchestration of Hebrew and Christian scripture buttressing Montgomery’s illustration, any faithful and devout follower would recognize the truth in the reversal. Christ provides for us much more than we could ever provide for him. In other words, Montgomery’s poem makes us think harder about these scriptures he uses as its starting point.
Scriptural Meditation and Sacred Imagination
Montgomery appears to be putting into practice spiritual meditation in the form advocated by St. Ignatius of Loyola, who advised his followers to envision the place and time of spiritual events and even to imagine oneself there. He says, “The composition will be to see with the sight of the imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want to contemplate. I say the corporeal place, as for instance, a Temple or Mountain where Jesus Christ or Our Lady is found, according to what I want to contemplate.”
So, Montgomery imagines himself into the scriptures. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch, what would it have been like to have been there? In the next verses, Montgomery engages all of the senses. In verse three, the narrator sees the wayfarer and rushes to his aid. In the fourth verse, he hears the wayfarer. And in the fifth, he finds the wayfarer and describes the tactile touch of rendering charity.
In doing so, I think Montgomery addresses the verses of Matthew 25 that he leaves out of the scriptural references that headed his poem. He notes verses 35 and 36, and then 40. The verses in between them are these: “Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?” These questions provide the mental space that Montgomery uses to explore the surrounding scriptures. One of the things that poetry does best is to invite us into this realm of imagination, to explore—to push against the experience that we already know and invite the Lord to inspire us.
The Prison Stanza and the Revelation of Christ
One of the places where Montgomery presses the hardest against the scriptures that he’s using is in the last two stanzas of the poem. These two stanzas work together in a variation on the charitable-act, reversal-charitable-act pattern that he had established. By this time, the two protagonists have already had four episodes of contact and have rendered each other charity in profound and life-saving ways. In the sixth stanza (the first one here on the left), we come to Montgomery’s contemplation of the phrase from verse 36 that must have spoken strongly to his own heart as well as to that of Joseph Smith when he had this hymn sung to him in Carthage Jail: “I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”
Montgomery began composing this poem, in fact, when he was on a stagecoach on his way to York, where he had been imprisoned so many years earlier. In the stanza, Montgomery forefronts a visual encounter with the imprisoned man: “In pris’n I saw him next.” The man has been unjustly condemned, apparently sentenced to death, accused of being a traitor by lying tongues. The stanza, though, is all about friendship. In fact, it is the only stanza in the entire poem where the word friend, or friendship rather, occurs. And it is the first time in the entire poem that the stranger actually speaks to the narrator. In the narrator’s words,
“My friendship’s utmost zeal to try,
He asked if I for him would die.”
We recognize the scripture that Montgomery is referencing here, in particular from the Gospel of John 15, verse 13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” When the narrator commits to being this type of friend, the magic happens, literally.
In a moment, the stranger, and this is the only time in the poem that the wayfaring man is identified as the stranger of the title, started from disguise. It’s not just a reversal as in the other verses—it’s a literal revelation. The Savior reveals himself and calls his friend by name.
From Simile to Metaphor: Christ as the Stranger
In casting his dramatic narrative in this way, with the Savior revealing himself from disguise, Montgomery plays with the figurative language of Matthew 25. This last stanza, the seventh, corresponds to verse 40: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto [one of] the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Christ gives his listeners a simile. A simile is a comparison typically using like or as. For example, your eyes are as blue and as deep as the sea. The adverb inasmuch plays that role here.
Christ tells his listeners that when they had fed the hungry, it was as though they had been feeding him. But Montgomery changes this from a simile to a metaphor, when something actually stands in for something else: Christ stands in for the poor. Perhaps this goes even beyond metaphor. Montgomery envisions this discovery as a dramatically staged event. His poem, indeed, is written as a dramatic monologue up until this point. The speaker has narrated each successive scene until the last three lines, when Christ actually speaks. This means that at the culmination of the poem, Christ speaks in first person to the readers as well as to the narrator, as well as to his friend, in the hopes that they are his friends as well. In this way, the narrative form invites all of us in.
The Ladies’ Bazaar and the Leeds Dispensary
Now, reading the poem as a drama with characters that are costumed and disguised and that have actions and roles to play, lines to speak, et cetera, leads us to take a look at its original publication context. The broadsheet indicates that the poem was composed for the Ladies’ Bazaar in aid of the Leeds Dispensary.
Now, Leeds is a city in northern England, not too far from Sheffield. The dispensary had been established there just three years earlier to provide outpatient care for the working poor, for the poor and the needy residents of the area. And the demand for its services had been so great that its costs had consistently outpaced its income. This was long before the UK had established a national healthcare system, and the official government system for distributing aid to the poor at this time was based on legislation and practice from, I kid you not, 250 years earlier. This earlier system simply didn’t work—[cough] excuse me—this earlier system simply didn’t work in the newly booming cities of the Industrial Revolution. And both Leeds and Sheffield were right in the heart of industrializing England, with all the technological innovation and demographic shifts that spawned incredible wealth and commercial power but that rendered the industrial workers exceptionally vulnerable.
People like Montgomery put a lot of time and income into establishing and running these institutions. They were philanthropic organizations meant to serve those who were most at risk. The dispensary at this point needed to clear a debt of nearly 600 pounds, a very large amount at the time. None of the traditional fundraising efforts that had been attempted by the institution’s governing committee, including gathering subscriptions, going to its main benefactors, putting out appeals, et cetera, none of them had been successful. But, in the midst of an industrializing free market system, what almsgiving couldn’t accomplish, surely commerce could.
Charity Bazaars, Performance, and Proxy Service
Thus we get to one of the newest fundraising techniques of the time, a ladies’ bazaar. Just a few years before this, charitably minded women began terming sales of their handmade crafts “charity bazaars,” and began staging them on an increasingly grand scale. The idea was to set up and run a temporary market, selling donated handicrafts, commonly known as “fancy work,” and giving all the proceeds to a particular charity. This method became one of the most lucrative means of charitable fundraising throughout the nineteenth century.
Since charity bazaars were almost exclusively organized and staffed by women, it provided them a public voice in a broad range of nineteenth century reform efforts and, therefore, in the fraught political developments surrounding reform interests. As the lyrics to a popular song suggested, “When your church requires a steeple and your funds are all run out, you should get up a bazaar. It is marvelous the way in which the money flies about in an up-to-date bazaar.” And I should mention that this carried on into the twentieth century. In fact, many of your mothers, grandmothers, [and] great-grandmothers probably ran Relief Society bazaars. They went up until about the 1960s.
Bazaars brought in purchasers from the wider community in addition to subscribed members and their acquaintances, thus expanding an organization's support base and raising awareness of its cause. The Leeds Dispensary Bazaar was organized by the well-to-do ladies of the town [and] headed by the mayoress, or the wife of the mayor herself, Mrs. Thomas Beckett.
As the women gathered in the city’s music hall, they and their volunteers transformed what was typically used as a gallery space into a marketplace. They set up long rows of tables. (You can—this is not a picture of their bazaar, but it is a picture of something that would have been similar a couple decades later.) So along the sides, they’ve got long rows of tables that they’ve decorated and made into stalls that look like different shops.
They decorated these shops regularly, spread out their goods. They covered the walls with fabric and put up evergreen festoons everywhere. It was an event. It was something fun to attend. When the bazaar opened at eleven o’clock [on] Tuesday morning, their hopes—these women’s hopes—were not disappointed.
In spite of inclement weather, the event attracted what its supporters boasted was, “one of the most numerous and brilliant assemblages ever collected in Leeds for purposes of taste, fashion, or amusement.” There were refreshments to purchase. There was a military band to provide entertainment, and one, quote, “lady presided at a fortune telling machine and dispensed the destinies of all who crossed her hand with silver with witching grace and gravity.” There was a decidedly carnivalesque atmosphere to social interactions at a charity bazaar. Classes mixed and mingled as well-bred women took on the working-class roles of saleswomen.
Financially, this bazaar was a great success. It raised over 1,480 pounds, completely clearing the debt, with plenty to add to the dispensary’s coffers. In the midst of all the gaming and playfully competitive salesmanship, three hundred copies of Montgomery’s poem were offered for sale, each priced at one shilling—a very high price.
Was Montgomery Critiquing Bazaar Culture?
If we understand the poem, then, as an occasional piece written and published for a particular occasion or event, it becomes even more fascinating. After all, no direct service for the poor and needy happened at the bazaar, even though direct and generous charity is in every stanza of the poem. The event certainly raised substantial funds that would contribute to healthcare for those most at risk. It was a social event that brought together the most wealthy and powerful of the community to exhibit that wealth and power in public performance and generous spending.
The women who staffed its stalls were indeed offering their service, but in a manner that advertised their prominence by labeling the stalls with their names, allowing them to exhibit their ability to allocate ample leisure time to the fancy work they each had contributed, and giving them an opportunity to develop and exercise a skill set in community leadership. Those who attended the bazaar demonstrated their civic-mindedness by spending as much as they could afford in making purchases that were also donations. And those of them [who] were [of] modest means surely also enjoyed the opportunity to gather alongside people who were typically well beyond their social circles. There was much useful work that happened at the bazaar. But this work did not consist of direct acts of service for those most in need in the community. Indeed, the only portion of the community that most likely was not at all represented at the event was the poor and needy.
Charity as Exchange, Identity, and Need
By writing a poem specifically then about acts of service to those most in need to be sold at this bazaar, was Montgomery critiquing a fundraising system that was as much about social jockeying and public display as it was about charitable service? Possibly, though there are other ways of looking at it. At the bazaar, influential ladies of the town temporarily took on the role of shop vendors, fortune tellers, and refreshment waitstaff.
Typically, the women staffing each stall at a bazaar would coordinate their costuming and adopt aggressive sales tactics, willing for a few hours each day of the bazaar to playact unaccustomed roles. As organizers, these women provided donations for the bazaar, and, as saleswomen, they received and solicited donations in proxy for the charity recipients themselves. Shoppers at the bazaar may have come from a variety of social circumstances. All of them would interact with the ladies of note, and all purchasers would receive a charitable donation (the goods they were purchasing, donated by the organizers), in exchange for their own charitable donation (the price that they paid). The logic of the charity bazaar was based on cyclical models of donation and exchange, all facilitated by temporary role-playing.
Like the bazaar organizers and attendees, the two characters in Montgomery’s poem make charitable donations and exchange identities as benefactors and charity recipients. It may well be that the poem does contain a critique of philanthropic culture as exhibited at the bazaar where it was sold. However, the poem’s dramatization of proxy charity aligns with the functioning of a bazaar as much as it critiques it. Montgomery explores the role of charitable work in the concept of Christian judgment in a way that insists all must consider themselves both recipient and donor in turn.
As an extension of this logic, he makes a decided statement on considering everyone, including even the wealthiest patrons attending the bazaar, as needy in their turn, accepting a symbolic charitable donation with every bazaar purchase they made. Montgomery apparently considered the poem to be ideal for bazaar culture. Our special collections library here at BYU holds a copy of the broadside printed on a different color of paper with the simple dedication: “Composed for a ladies’ bazaar.” In all likelihood, Montgomery had a good number of these printed and donated them when he received requests from other ladies’ committees.
A Pattern for Scriptural Meditation
In composing the poem, Montgomery brought together key elements of encountering and exploring scripture. He took just three brief scriptures and gave them ample thought and contemplation. He envisioned himself within the story told by those scriptures. He drew upon his previous experience and all he had learned from it. And he brought to bear the richness of his knowledge of other scriptures to amplify his vision. Then, he gave this interior world life in the form of a poem.
And he situated that creative endeavor within the social workings of his own day at the bazaar. I believe this gives us a pattern to follow: dwelling upon a scripture long enough to envision ourselves as part of it, drawing upon our personal experience and spiritual understanding to inform that interior vision, and allowing the Lord to dwell with us in it; then, as inspiration leads, putting that vision into some sort of written or other artistic form, whether that is simple notes in a scripture or a beautiful hymn or a painting or a structure, so that we can revisit it and see how that meditation and inspiration might shape our encounters with the world and its wayfarers. Thank you. [applause]
Questions and Answers
And I should say thank you all very much for coming. It’s really awesome to see you guys here. So thank you for taking the time. And I think we have a few minutes for questions if anyone would like to discuss anything, know more, or want to ask other people what they think on these matters as well.
Question: What Happens in the Final Stanza?
[Audience: I have never dwelt so long on the last stanza, and so I’m wondering, it’s [unintelligible]; in light of the fact that there isn’t a reversal, Jesus just says “don’t be afraid”; how do you read that last stanza, do you think he’s—the friend, is called to go through with it? Is he gonna die? Does he actually change places, or is that besides the point?]
That is a really good question. In other words, is there an escape from the prison? What happens here? We don’t know. And so I don’t know how to answer that about what I think.
I do think, though, that if we go back to the original scripture itself, I think after studying this poem, I found it all the more intriguing that that’s one of the examples Christ gives. Visiting people in prison just doesn’t seem to me as common a charitable act to perform as feeding someone who is hungry. And so some of the symbolic implications of that I think are worth dwelling on.
I assume that at the end of this poem, the vision is transformed, and the stranger and his friend would be free to go about their non-disguised, now fully loving ways. However, it would make an amazing movie to imagine that not happening. And what would happen after this? Yeah, excellent question.
Question: How Did the Poem Become a Hymn?
[Audience: Could you talk about how the—it was received as a hymn or when it started to spread out and [unintelligible] make its way out in this—]
Yeah. You know, Michael Hicks wrote a really great article for BYU Studies that talked about how it would have made its way into hymnals and gotten to Nauvoo and to the Prophet and . . . is it John Taylor who sings it? I can see your heads nodding, yes. And so I refer you to that for really good information about how it really spread into the US. But what I can speak to is Montgomery himself and his hymn writing and how this functioned for him and the people around him.
Montgomery actually was a very prolific poet. If I might say, perhaps a bit too abundantly prolific. In other words, you kind of have to sort through his poems to find the real gems. I think this is a gem.
One of my absolute favorites, from Montgomery, though, is another hymn that we have in our hymnal, which is “Prayer Is the Soul’s Sincere Desire.” And that, I believe, he actually published as a hymn. He published hymns in the first Anglican hymnal. He published full hymnals himself. And he adapted the Psalms in his own psalter, which would have been intended to be rhythmic in English so that you could sing them. So, he took hymns very, very seriously. To my knowledge, this was not included in any hymnal that I have found in his lifetime. But I haven’t done all of that research.
Interestingly enough, I visited Sheffield and went to some of the archives that hold his material, and I also visited his memorial. His original grave has been moved, but there’s a memorial statue that was at his original grave that’s now next to Sheffield Cathedral. And—“Prayer Is the Soul’s Sincere Desire” is actually printed in full on the base of that statue. So it must have really meant something to him. Yeah.
Question: How Can Non-Poetry Readers Engage Hymns Deeply?
[Audience: I’m a poetry person and I love poetry about scriptures, this [has been] a feast for me, thank you. How do you recommend introducing into these concepts, these ideas, this way of pondering deeply, to someone who’s not a poetry person?]
Excellent question. You know, I must admit that before I discovered the—came across the broadsheet in our Special Collections library and realized this was “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief,” and I was so excited and thought, What in the world is going on here? I thought the first publication of this poem was twenty years later. I had never taken the time to really dwell on the hymn. And I don’t think that I had ever, honestly, I must admit, I had never processed that Christ was the poor wayfaring man of grief and not all the people surrounding him and not Joseph Smith. I think that I had just always kind of sung it in sacrament meeting and moved on to what was next in sacrament meeting. So I can tell you what I have started to do since I delved more deeply into this particular hymn and realized my own mistake in encountering the poetry that is baked into our observance. And that is I keep the hymn book open, or I keep the hymns open on my phone.
So during the sacrament service, I keep the sacrament hymn open, and I take the time to actually dwell on it. In the temple, where, in addition to having scriptures scattered about, they often have hymnals, and I’ve started picking one up every once in a while and turning to a hymn and just kind of taking time in the place and space where in our faith tradition we really make the quiet mental space for ourselves to contemplate in the temple—I’ve started doing that.
So, I can tell you that my best recommendation is teach a class where you can actually lead people through studying a poem in depth, or simply show in your own practice that these poems are something that can be dwelt on even after the singing is done. I would be curious to know, though, what you would recommend.
[Audience Response: Same.]
Cool. [laughter] Thank you.
Question: Was Bazaar Literature Common?
[Audience: Was this a common thing at a bazaar? Or, I mean, I guess there’s that question but also just are there—what are other influences of bazaar literature that we might not be aware of that we have now or how much of it has charity themes? I dunno, I have a number of questions [unintelligible].]
Yeah, thank you. You know, it’s funny because when I started doing research into charity bazaars and the literature that surrounded them, both depictions of them in fiction and then literature that was published to be sold at them, I expected to find more poems like Montgomery’s, which is a really rich poem, but also just, honestly, can I say, really cheesy little poems about, you know, serving sweet kittens that were lost. (Yes, there were bazaars held to fund homes for lost and starving dogs and cats.) I expected to find a lot of very didactic and very moral fiction. And I found a lot of that.
I was really interested, though, in finding how much parody and satire was in this literature. And that’s why Montgomery’s is fascinating because I think it is a little bit of satire—not satire, it’s not quite the right word. He is critiquing, I think, bazaar culture to a certain extent. But a lot of bazaar literature was written by people putting together these bazaars who made fun of themselves. And it’s really very funny. They mock themselves for doing something so silly as to donate stuff, to then be sold, and then give away the money. I mean, really, why don’t you just give the donation in the first part? They talk a lot about the self-serving nature of charity bazaars.
This made my look into social reform fiction all the more interesting because I was wanting to figure out why, during the Victorian period in the nineteenth century and early twentieth in general, literature took itself so seriously as being able to help amend the ills of the world. And this helped me think through how they were both trying to do that sincerely and also realizing the failings, I guess: How our best efforts sometimes turn upon themselves. And they were much more savvy and self-aware and I think wise than I had started out thinking they would be. Yeah, thank you.
And it looks like it is time for us to go, but thank you all very much. It was great to have a discussion with you. [applause]
1. Samuel Ellis 1864, Life, Times, and Character of James Montgomery, Sheffield: Leader and Sons, Printers, 7
