For Part Two, Part Three or Part Four, choose the appropriate link.
The Talk
Marvin J. Ashton spoke next in the April 1971 Conference, with scriptural guidance about addiction and drugs, with many warnings but no literature quotes. It's Ezra Taft Benson who speaks next, and he references a poem that I have heard since I was very small in his talk, "Life is Eternal":
The Quote
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting.
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”
William Wordsworth and Mentions of the First Act of Life
The quote comes from a poem by my seventh cousin seven times removed, William Wordsworth, entitled Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. He mentioned in this quote what we in our faith call our pre-earth life, because we believe that we were who we are in spirit form before we came to Earth and gained a body, and that life will similarly continue for us after death in like manner. Sort of like a play, with a first act, a second act, and a third act, and Earth life being the often-tragic second act.
The opening stanza of the full poems begins with, "The child is father of the man", another phrase I've heard since I was small. I'll explain that part momentarily
Wordsworth was poet laureate of England in his elder years. His conversational style of poetry resonated greatly with me as a child, when I found myself traveling frequently to Temple Square, in the heart of Salt Lake City as a child. Temple Square, a place for granting visitors a small experience of my faith, was pretty much my Disneyland.
I would go there and bother the missionaries as often as I could, waiting for someone with a key to turn on the little film in the tiny black box theater. It was free, but it was for investigators more than a little girl who was already a member, but many missionaries indulged me, and over and over again I went to watch the Church film, The Great Plan of Happiness, which included this same quote:
Elder Benson's talk was similar in theme to this movie, with a greater assurance of this idea than Wordsworth was willing to put forward, talking more of his feelings as a child that something was lost in childhood - some intensity of feeling, some bit of heaven that leaves us as we move away from childhood. My trips to Temple Square held this same sort of intensity, as well as most of my childhood memories of things such as my mother, my grandmother, the lilac bush in our front yard and its heavenly aroma, the books I read, the library, and the fun of going for walks and discovering new places.
Wordsworth's other line that struck me, "The child is father of the man", I first heard from a professor of literature from Brigham Young University named Arthur Henry King.
My mother would frequent yard sales in the local area when I was young, and while she would gleefully shop, I would hide in the car out of sheer embarrassment. The thought of going through other people's things they'd moved out to the front lawn left me in agony - it seemed so undignified.
Yet later, I was never squeamish about ransacking all the boxes of books she would bring home from said sales. She was a voracious reader, she and her mother, and I picked up the habit from them.
One day I found a book with a blank grey cover. It was titled, "The Abundance of the Heart" and belonged to this Arthur Henry King, and he would talk about books and literary concepts and scriptures and rhetorical devices. I was 11 years old when I found him, and I couldn't understand half of what he talked about at the time, but I knew there was more there I needed to know.
I reread his book every year or so into my adulthood, and I still read his book today, now out of print, so I prize my worn out copy.
Now I have more of my own mind instead of leaning on him as hard as I did, but Arthur Henry King was the intellectual 'father' to my 'child'.
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