A poem arrives in the form of a vision, and the vision arrives in the form of a library. Wayfare's "Bearing Across" is not easy reading — it demands something closer to liturgical attention — but readers who give it that attention will find one of the more ambitious pieces of religious verse to appear in a small literary publication in recent memory.
The piece is a sustained narrative poem in forty-nine numbered stanzas, written in an archaic English that sits somewhere between the King James Bible and Dante's terza rima. It follows a visionary narrator who receives guidance from a heavenly Messenger, descends to a hilltop tomb where a word lies buried beneath stone, encounters the shades of canonical poets, and is ultimately charged with a mission to read, translate, and bear witness. The theological architecture is unmistakably Latter-day Saint — the golden plates, the Urim and Thummim, the eternal coexistence of intelligence and matter — but the poem's ambition is to set that tradition in conversation with the whole of Western letters, from Gilgamesh to Milton.
The Visionary Frame
The poem opens with an epigraph drawn from an early American prophetic voice — "I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what ought to be told: that I am under the direction of messengers from Heaven, daily and nightly" — and immediately establishes its governing conceit. This is a first-person account of visionary encounter, but rendered in verse so ornate and self-consciously literary that the narrator's credibility becomes the poem's first argument. How does one tell of divine instruction without being dismissed? By speaking in the inherited tongue of those who came before.
The Messenger appears early: "With darksome air aglow beyond the noon / By far-seen vesture white as ought be sought." The figure descends with classical ease, takes hold of the narrator "with signs and words and hands," and begins a sustained theological dialogue that will occupy the poem's middle sections. Wayfare renders this encounter in a verse style that flatly refuses contemporary idiom — every contraction is elided, every subordinate clause is inverted — and the effect is deliberate estrangement. The poem does not want to be read quickly.
The Theology of Eternal Intelligence
The poem's densest and most rewarding section is the Messenger's discourse on the nature of God and humanity. The argument draws directly from the Latter-day Saint doctrine of eternal intelligence — the idea that the human mind was never created from nothing but has always existed alongside God, capable of growth and increase. The Messenger puts it in verse that manages to be both philosophically precise and genuinely strange:
"Intelligence, unmade and increate, / And independently ensphered as man, / Is one of two composing all there is; / Thus all is things to act and acted on."
This is not standard Protestant metaphysics. The poem insists on a cosmos where matter and mind are coeternal, where God's greatness consists not in creating from absolute nothing but in knowing and acting from eternal fullness. The narrator pushes back — "The human mind is coequal with God's? / Th' intelligence of spirit's immortal, / It lacks beginning, thus it hath no end?" — and the Messenger confirms: yes, this is the tradition, rightly read.
The Hebrew appears at the hinge of this argument. The Messenger corrects the common translation of Genesis: "But when ברא 'tis rightly rendered thus: / 'The head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods.'" This is the King Follett discourse in verse — Joseph Smith's 1844 sermon on the plurality of gods and the eternal nature of intelligence, compressed into a couplet and placed in an angel's mouth. Whether one finds this reading persuasive or not, the poem is doing serious theological work, and it knows exactly what it is doing.
The Canon as Curriculum
The poem's most surprising turn comes when the Messenger, having established the metaphysical ground, pivots to literary instruction. The narrator is told to read — not just scripture, but everything. The canon is presented not as competition with revelation but as preparation for it:
"Seek ye out from books the best to learn, / Of Gilgamesh in whom the greater love, / That man can have, a friend for friend, subsists; / Then Beowulf who warred for kith and kin." The list continues: Plato for the youth of Christendom, Aristotle for its Middle Age, the Attic tragedies, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. This is not a defensive gesture — the poem does not present these texts as threats to be inoculated against. They are the curriculum of a serious mind, prescribed by a heavenly guide who seems entirely comfortable in the company of pagan poets.
The editorial logic here is bold. Wayfare is arguing, through its narrator's Messenger, that revelation and humanitas are not opposed — that "a grand and fundamental principle / Is to receive the truth where'er its whence." Spiritual instruction and classical education are treated as continuous rather than competing projects. "Believe and claim all good, for it is thine" is the governing principle, and the great books are a treasury of good that belongs to anyone willing to do the reading.
Critics might note that this synthesis, however appealing, tends to flatten the genuine tensions between, say, Greek tragic fate and LDS eternal progression, or between Shakespeare's mordant irony about human nature and the poem's essentially optimistic anthropology. The Messenger's reading list is curated with a light hand — the darker currents in those texts go unremarked.
The Encounter with the Dead
The poem's second movement, subtitled "Disallusioning," introduces a new element: the narrator returns to the hilltop and encounters the shades of poets past. The first is "a man emmantled poet sovereign" who "sang as with a voice of canon-fire" and responds to the narrator's approach with hostility — six feet of sword, swung in warning. The Messenger intervenes: "And would ye strike another with a sword, / Though he be over thee set by thy Lord?"
The scene is deliberately obscure, but its shape is recognizable: this is the descent to the underworld, the consultation of the dead that appears in Homer, Virgil, and Dante. The narrator must prove himself worthy to speak with the canonical dead before he can receive their instruction. The mantled poet — whose "articles" numbered thirty-nine and who sought to reform a "canon o'er indulged" — is almost certainly a figure for a Protestant reformer, perhaps Luther or Cranmer, whose Thirty-Nine Articles defined Anglican doctrine. This poet, confronted with the narrator's tradition, admits that the canon cannot be reformed from within but must be "opened and restored to Other's use."
A second shade follows — one "who loved the globe and made his son / The dwelling-place for love to sleep and die" — who sounds very much like Shakespeare, the Globe Theatre his identifying mark, love and death his abiding subjects. This shade, too, is calmed by the Messenger's intervention and yields something to the narrator's questioning.
The sequence is the poem's most technically accomplished. Wayfare is constructing a scene in which the narrator's new tradition must earn its place in the company of the old, must demonstrate that it can read those texts and receive their testimony without appropriating or erasing them. The Messenger's mediation is crucial: the narrator cannot access the canonical dead on his own authority; he needs the angelic conduit to establish the terms of dialogue.
Language as Garment
The poem's final theological claim concerns language itself. The narrator asks how to translate correctly — how to handle passages the learned understand differently — and the Messenger's answer reframes the question entirely: "An Other's mind is thine and shall instruct." Translation is not a scholarly exercise but a spiritual one; the translator does not impose her own reading but receives another's.
The Messenger elaborates: "Before ye can declare ye must obtain, / The word of Justice dressed as when it came. / For language is the garment of His light." This is a theory of sacred language that is neither fundamentalist (the King James Version as divinely dictated) nor relativist (all translations equally valid). Language is the form revelation takes in a particular moment and place — "Whichever meets the moment's wear and wend, / As He gives understanding unto men" — which means translation is always contextual, always dependent on divine assistance, always incomplete.
The poem ends with the narrator reaching into the tomb, finding the buried text, and glimpsing the great שׁלֵם — the Urim, the instrument of divine light and translation — before being cautioned not to remove it but only to read. "So called I rose, went down, took up, and read." The final line is characteristically compressed: it collapses the entire narrative into a single sentence of five monosyllables. The vision is over. The work begins.
Critics might question whether the poem's frame — visionary encounter, angelic instruction, buried golden text — does enough to distinguish genuine theological argument from elaborate genre exercise. The archaic diction sometimes obscures whether the poem is making claims or performing them. And the synthesis of LDS theology with the Western canon, while ambitious, occasionally reads as more asserted than demonstrated: the Messenger tells the narrator to read Homer and Dante, but the poem does not quite show us what the reading has done to the theology, or the theology to the reading.
A further tension: the poem's confidence in "Other's mind" as the final arbiter of meaning risks a certain quietism. If all interpretation ultimately depends on divine instruction, the reader's own intellectual effort — which the poem otherwise celebrates — becomes subordinate to a prior authority that cannot be checked or questioned. The Messenger's sharp rebuke when the narrator presumes too much ("'Tis not made thine to feed thy lust") points toward an epistemology that is not quite as open as the great books curriculum implies.
Bottom Line
"Bearing Across" is a serious, strange, and genuinely ambitious poem — the kind of thing that appears rarely in any publication and almost never in a small literary journal. Wayfare has published a work that asks what it would look like to receive a revelation in full awareness of the tradition, to be schooled by angels in Gilgamesh and Milton before being handed a golden text. Whether the synthesis fully holds is a question the poem itself raises and does not entirely answer — which is, in the end, the right kind of question for a poem to ask.