Wayfare has published something genuinely rare: a long theological poem that earns its difficulty. "Carthago" arrives in archaic verse, dense with allusion and formal restraint, and demands — not requests — the reader's full attention. The reward is proportional to the effort.
Prison, Philosophy, and the Boethian Frame
The title announces the conceit before the first line arrives. Carthago — not the ancient city, but Carthage, Illinois, where the poem's speaker will die. The piece frames itself as a prison meditation, a condemned man's testament written from captivity, and the structural echo of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy is neither accidental nor subtle. Where Boethius awaited execution under Theodoric and wrote his great reconciliation of fate and providence, this speaker — clearly drawn as Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saint movement — writes from Liberty Jail in Missouri, awaiting transfer and eventual martyrdom. The poem opens:
"This prison house of mine would ill-annoy, / As if a Punic enemy to stop, / This hallow-handed work progressing on."
The Punic reference doubles the title's work. Carthage destroys its enemies; the speaker refuses to be destroyed. The poem will not allow its narrator to be merely a victim of history. The prison is recast as a scriptorium, a place where dictation and revelation continue regardless of the bars.
Wayfare's choice to run this piece unsigned — as a publication-level work — is itself a form of argument. The poem does not ask to be evaluated as personal confession. It presents itself as institutional, communal, doctrinal. The "I" inside it is less an individual lyric voice than a prophetic office speaking across time.
The Dramatis Personae of Scripture
What makes the poem structurally ambitious is its parade of visitors to the imprisoned narrator. These are not imagined companions but figures from what the poem frames as genuine visitation — the river's son (Moses), an unnamed man who dwelt between two rivers (the poem gestures toward Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king of Genesis who blesses Abraham and then vanishes from scripture), and a hidden man fed twice daily by ravens who never died (Elijah). Each arrives bearing a commission:
"To us committed he the gathering / Of all the fathers and their families / Whose struggle in the face of Justice gave / A name to reach the four parts of the earth."
This is the poem's theological center: a doctrine of dispensational restoration, in which the keys, authorities, and offices held by ancient prophets are physically conferred upon the narrator through the laying on of hands. The poem is not metaphorizing. It is making claims that would strike many readers as either magnificent or preposterous, and it makes them in formal verse without embarrassment or hedging.
The river's son section is among the poem's most moving passages. Moses — never named, always "the river's son" — lays hands on the narrator's head in an act of ordination and transmission: "he had laid his hands upon my head / And gave me full the spirit of wisdom / As he and I knew Other face to face." The grief at Moses's departure is genuine and tender. "Mine eye had dimmed to weep the river's son." The poem allows the narrator emotional vulnerability precisely here, at the moment of greatest prophetic empowerment. The two registers — the grief of mortal friendship and the grandeur of celestial commission — do not cancel each other. They intensify each other.
Language as Veil and Revelation
Throughout, "Other" stands in for the divine — a choice both theologically resonant and formally striking. The word does double work: it keeps the divine at a reverent distance while insisting on genuine alterity, on the radical otherness of God from human categories. "One Besmeared Upon" — an unusual, somewhat startling circumlocution for "the Anointed One," or Christ — similarly refuses the easy familiarity of conventional Christian devotional language. These coinages force a kind of active reading. The reader cannot coast on received vocabulary.
The poem's archaic syntax ("upon entering's a court where's bread to shew," "as upturned almonds at the top") requires patience. Wayfare is not making accessibility easy, and the piece is frank about this tension: "But how, O prison guard, I asked myself, / Does one contain th'eternal in a word? / Before you cite the logos unto me, / Recall that wordplay's not divinity."
This is the poem's most provocative philosophical moment — a claim that language is always inadequate to revelation, that the creed the narrator is about to deliver is not the thing itself but a finger pointing toward it. "The source of Holy Writ's a constant flow / And never fully poured in single draft." Against traditions that treat written scripture as complete and closed, the poem insists on the ongoing, always-exceeding character of divine disclosure.
Critics might note that the poem's archaic register can feel, at times, less like earned difficulty than inherited costume — the thee's and thou's and inverted syntax occasionally obscure where genuine theological depth ends and stylistic posturing begins. The decision to write in a pseudo-King James idiom was presumably deliberate, but it is not without risk: it can make the poem feel like pastiche of scriptural language rather than a fresh encounter with it.
The Articles in Verse
The poem's second movement — beginning roughly with "In Letters" — shifts register dramatically. The narrator, having described the visionary commissions received in his prison, turns to the task of articulating doctrine for a community that needs to know what it believes. The structural model here is the Articles of Faith, the thirteen brief credal statements Joseph Smith drafted in 1842 in response to a request from a newspaper editor. The poem versifies these, one by one, through its numbered stanzas.
This is where the poem is most interesting and most challenging to evaluate. The articles themselves are not poetry — they are doctrinal propositions. The poem's achievement is rendering them in a form that preserves their propositional content while giving them lyric weight. The second article — concerning individual moral accountability — is a good example: "A punishment will be for every sin / By each man done, and that respectively; / No son shall bear the weight of father's sin." This is clear theological statement, but the poem places it in a context of explicit argument against other Christian traditions: "While some hold man condemned before his birth, / More yet consider him by Adam cursed / Or worse than these: that Eve hath failed us all."
The poem is not interested in diplomatic ecumenism. It knows where it stands and says so. The fifth article's claim to prophetic authority through ordination — "a man is called, we do believe, / Of Justice with His Mercy hallowing, / And that by prophecy and manumised / To hear and speak and teach of Other's will" — is placed in explicit contrast with Protestant claims of scriptural sufficiency and Catholic claims of apostolic succession. The narrator stands "apart from these, conversing deep, / With one who owns the vineyard and the tree."
The eleventh article's handling of religious liberty is worth noting, particularly for how it situates the narrator's own persecuted position within a broader commitment to freedom of conscience: "to worship Twofold One we claim, / According to our conscience dictating, / And not exclusively be this on us / But holding forth to all the freedom that / We would have held to us." From a prison cell, the poem articulates a principle of religious tolerance that extends even to those who have imprisoned its narrator. The irony is not belabored. It doesn't need to be.
Critics might push back here on whether the poem achieves genuine lyric integration of its doctrinal content or whether the versified articles remain essentially prose propositions wearing metrical clothing. The tension is real. The strongest passages are those where the doctrinal and the personal most fully merge — the section on the visiting messengers, the extended meditation on captivity and freedom, the grief at Moses's departure. When the poem is most argumentative, it is least purely a poem.
Captivity and Freedom
Running through the entire work is a sustained meditation on the paradox of captivity as a condition of spiritual freedom. The narrator is physically imprisoned; the poem insists this imprisonment is cosmically irrelevant to the work at hand. "Though borne in chains, in everything made free / As Other taught: to serve is mastery." This is not mere pious consolation. The poem earns this claim by showing how the prison itself becomes the site of visitation, revelation, and doctrinal articulation. The bars do not slow the work. They may, the poem implies, have made it possible.
The descent into despair — "I fancied none had felt as low as I; / Myself as whelmed the most excepting none" — is followed by a direct divine address: "I heard His voice, O prison guard, and 'Son'; / His peace was unto me as He'd begun / To mete the brevity of all my woes / And promise yet a triumph o'er my foes." The comparison to Job — explicitly invoked — is generous to the narrator. Wayfare is presenting a figure who has moved through the dark night of the soul and come out the other side carrying not despair but doctrine.
The image that closes the poem's first movement is haunting: "We set our capitol upon the banks / Whose currency was river-fed in thanks / To Other Whose command to beautify / Our Commerce newly-gained would show that I / Am as the messengers who came to me / And by a river called to prophesy." City-building as prophetic act. Commerce as spiritual currency. The translation of heavenly vision into earthly institution — temple, creed, gathered community — is the poem's true subject.
Bottom Line
Wayfare has published a poem of genuine ambition and, in its best passages, genuine achievement — a work that takes the prison meditations of Joseph Smith seriously as literature without flattening them into either hagiography or critique. The piece asks readers to sit with difficult, archaic language in service of claims that are either revelatory or absurd depending on one's prior commitments, and it does so without apology. That refusal to be easy is, finally, the poem's most honest quality.