New Witnesses for God (Volume 3 of 3)

by B. H. Roberts

After Elder Pratt the most prolific of the early poets in the Church, and one who perhaps caught most truly the genius of the work and reduced it to poetic expression, was W. W. Phelps. He contributes the following inspired by the Book of Mormon.

O, stop and tell me, Red Man,
Who are you, why you roam,
And how you get your living;
Have you no God, no home?

With stature straight and portly,
And decked in native pride,
With feathers, paints and brooches,
He willingly replied:

"I once was pleasant Ephraim,
When Jacob for me prayed,
But O, how blessings vanish,
When man from God has strayed!

Before your nation knew us,
Some thousand moons ago,
Our fathers fell in darkness,
And wandered to and fro.

And long they've lived by hunting
Instead of work and arts,
And so our race has dwindled
To idle Indian hearts.

Yet hope within us lingers,
As if the Spirit spoke,
He'll come for your redemption,
And break your Gentile yoke,

And all your captive brothers,
From every clime shall come,
And quit their savage customs,
To live with God at home.

Then joy will fill our bosoms,
And blessings crown our days,
To live in pure religion,
And sing our Maker's praise."

Of our later poets Elder Orson F. Whitney, of the Council of the Twelve, has most celebrated the Nephite volume of scripture in his great poem "Elias." One canto (VI) is wholly devoted to the Book of Mormon under the caption "From Out the Dust." In this Canto Elder Whitney treats the whole theme of America as a land of promise—

The Old World, not the New,—this soil misnamed;
Cradle of man and grave of nations vast,
Whose glory, wealth, and wisdom had outfamed
The mightiest of known empires, present, past;
The land where Adam dwelt, where Eden cast
Forth from her flaming gate the fateful pair
Who fell that man might be; a fall still chaste,
Albeit they sinned, descending death's dread stair
To fling life's ladder down, Love's work and way prepare.

Of the decrees of God respecting the land, he writes.

The God of freedom, God of justice, swore
No tyrant should this chosen land defile;
And nations here, that for a season bore
The palm of power, must righteous be the while,
Or ruin's avalanche ruin on ruin pile.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Race upon race has perished in its pride,
And nations lustrous as the lights of heaven
Have sinned and sunk, in reckless suicide,
Upon this soil, since that dread word was given.
Realms battle-rent and regions tempest-riven;
The wrath-swept land for ages desolate;
A wretched remnant blasted, crust, and driven
Forth by the furies of revengeful fate;
Till wonder asks in vain, What of their former state?

Wouldst know the cause, the upas-tree that bore
The blight of desolation? 'Tis a theme
To melt Earth's heart, and move all Heaven to pour
With sorrow's heaving flood, as when supreme
O'er fallen Lucifer, the generous stream
Of grief half quenched the joy of victory.
Mark how the annals of the ages teem
With repetition? Time, eternity,
The same have taught; but, few, alas! the moral see.

There is a sin called self, which binds the world
In fetters fell, than all save truth more strong;
A sin most serpentine, round all men curled,
And in its fatal fold earth writhes full long;
Crime's great first cause, the primal root of wrong,
Parent of pride and tree of tyranny.
To lay the axe doth unto thee belong.
Strike, that the world may know of liberty,
And Zion's land indeed a land of Zion be!

The poet treats successively the Jaredite and Nephite occupancy of the western world in the same noble strain of poetry. He closes the Jaredite period with these verses, celebrating the last acts of the two survivors of the Jaredite nation, Ether the Prophet, and Coriantumr the last of the Jaredite kings.

Usurping treason seized the civic helm,
Wrong trampled right, and justice, judgment, fled.
Then strife, division, hosts to battle led;
The prophets, mocked, lift warning voice in vain;
A blood-soaked continent, a sea, of dead,
And of that mighty nation, fallen, self-slain.
A prophet and a king, a solitary twain.

That prophet saw the coming of the Lord
Unto the Old, the New, Jerusalem;
Saw Israel returning at His word
From wheresoever His will had scattered them;
The realm's wide ruin saw, and strove to stem.
That king, sole scion of a slaughtered race,
Casting his blood-stained sword and diadem,
Lived but to see another nation place
Firm foot upon the soil, then vanished from its face.

The advent of the Nephite colony is told in the following manner.

Again athwart the wilderness of waves,
Surging old East and older West between,
Where the lone sea the flowery Southland laves,
And crowns o'er many climes the Chilean queen,
Braving the swell, a storm-tossed bark is seen.
From doomed Jerusalem, to Jacob dear,
Albeit a leper, groping, blind, unclean,
Goes forth Manasseh's prophet pioneer,
Predestined to unveil the hidden hemisphere.

His lot to reap and plant on this far shore
The promise of his fathers. Joseph's bough,
From Jacob's well, the billowy wall runs o'er.
Abides in strength the archer-stricken bow,
Unto the utmost bound prevailing now,
Of Hesper's heaven-inviting hills. Bend sheaves
Of Israel, as branches bend with snow,
Unto his sheaf as mightiest; and as leaves
For multitude, the son the great sire's glory weaves.