The One With Mary, Queen of Scots
Metaphysical Conceit in Orson F. Whitney's Elias
The following passage comes from Canto Seven of Orson F. Whitney’s Elias—An Epic of the Ages (lines 2013-2019):
Wave after wave rolls o’er the shining sand Wave after wave breaks higher up the strand, With all of weal or woe the ages send. As sundered ocean tides that shoreward tend, Now past and future o’er the present pend, Till on the narrow isthmus sea meets sea, And time no longer parts eternity.
This is a nice metaphysical conceit, or “analogy between spiritual qualities and physical objects.”
In this section of poem, an isthmus separates two seas. Over time, the waves of both seas move higher up the narrow strip of land between them. Eventually, the isthmus, the present, disappears, and the seas are reunited. The eternity that exists on one side of time is merged with the eternity that exists on the other. Time is no longer (D&C 84:100).
Whitney’s conceit, of two seas returning to one another, and forming a whole, has elements of John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.1
In Donne’s poem, the two souls of lovers are compared to the two ends of a drawing compass, which though they move apart from one another, are nonetheless fixed together at the center.
Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do. And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.
Donne’s last line, “makes me end where I begun,” feels similar to Whitney’s conceit, and is a common theme Whitney touches on throughout Elias. Time dissolves. The isthmus is gone. The “end” of eternity melds with the “beginning” of eternity. Past and future combine into an eternal present.2
Donne’s last line also reminds one of T.S. Eliot’s opening line from The Four Quartets’ East Coker: “In my beginning is my end.” I wrote about this line in a substack post last month, commenting on how it is a theme that regularly appears in LDS works.3
A prominent LDS work that also touches on this theme is Joseph Smith’s King Follett Discourse.4 There Joseph says:
I take my ring from my finger and liken it unto the mind of man—the immortal part, because it had no beginning. Suppose you cut it in two; then it has a beginning and an end; but join it again, and it continues one eternal round.5 So with the spirit of man. As the Lord liveth, if it had a beginning, it will have an end.
This teaching from Joseph Smith parallels Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue’s commentaries on T.S. Eliot’s poem. They write:
In my beginning is my end: in his copy of Charles M. Bakwell’s Source Book in Ancient Philosophy, TSE scored Heraclitus’ frag. 103: “In the circumference of a circle beginning and end coincide.” … The motto “En ma fin est mon commencement” was embroidered on the chair-of-state of Mary, Queen of Scots, as TSE knew, perhaps from Maurice Baring’s biography In My End Is My Beginning (1931) (Sweeney 1941).6
This theme also seems to find expression in the ouroboros, a mythical snake which eats its own tail. A circle in which the obvious end of the snake is met by the obvious beginning.
What seems to make Whitney’s conceit notably different than these others is its lack of direction and forward movement. These other phrases, conceits, and analogies all rely on turning linearity into a cycle. Whitney’s conceit does not turn linear time into a cycle, but into a field. It’s the difference between a Giacometti sketch and Rothko’s color field7. Whitney’s eternity is measured by volume, whereas the others are measured by length. One is a movement that goes over itself, and the other fills space.
A few interesting notes that may help inform the metaphysical conceit:
a) A prominent geographical feature in the Book of Mormon is an isthmus, or “narrow neck of land.”
b) In Genesis 1:6, waters are divided from waters by a firmament in their midst. In Genesis 1:9, the waters are again broken up by the appearance of dry land. Breaking up waters is a part of the creation of the physical world. Does it also relate to time?
c) During the flood of Noah, “all the fountains of the great deep [were] broken up, and the windows of heaven opened” (Genesis 7:11). The waters rose up and covered the land.
John Donne happens to be the go-to poet when it comes to explaining and exemplifying metaphysical conceit.
Another piece of writing for which Donne is famous, which also includes an extended analogy bordering on metaphysical conceit, and also adds a dimension to Whitney’s metaphysical conceit from Elias, is Donne’s Meditation XVII (Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions), in which he writes:
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main. If a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a Promontory were, as well as if a Manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; Any Man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Like the isthmus in Elias, Donne’s continent exists apart from the sea. Both writers imagine the waters gradually overcoming the land, though Donne employs the image to describe humanity as a whole, and Whitney to describe time and eternity.
I specifically mentioned James Goldberg’s Canto V from his book of poetry Let Me Drown with Moses.
The phrase “one eternal round,” comes from the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 10:19, Alma 7:20, and Alma 37:12). It refers to the course of the Lord.
I’m sure that Eliot was also aware of the Donne line. He has a famous essay he wrote about Donne and the metaphysical poets.
Rothko’s color fields paintings do offer an interesting visualization for Whitney’s conceit, and understanding of eternity — two fields of color separated by a thin isthmus.