Elder Maxwell has been on our minds even more than usual this year at the Maxwell Institute. 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of his birth (July 1926), and the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU. It has been—and will be for the rest of the year—an important time to remember, reflect, and celebrate.
But what has been on my mind most recently is Elder Maxwell’s funeral—and especially what President Gordon B. Hinckley said at that funeral. It was late July 2004, and it was only three months after Marjorie Hinckley’s death. President Hinckley almost couldn’t help wearing on his sleeve the deep anguish that he was still feeling over the recent death of his wife, and that all came through in the funeral remarks that he directed specifically to Elder Maxwell’s widow, Colleen. There is something striking to me about just how raw and real President Hinckley’s comments were—maybe unusually so in what we’ve come to expect in our funeral services:
“At funerals we speak words intended to give comfort. But in reality, they afford but little comfort. Only those who have passed through this dark valley know its utter desolation. To lose one’s much-loved partner with whom one has long walked through sunshine and shadow is absolutely devastating. There is a consuming loneliness which increases in intensity. It painfully gnaws at one’s very soul.”
It’s President Hinckley’s honest admission that words of intended comfort “in reality . . . afford little comfort” that I can’t stop thinking about. I’m grateful that he gave expression to what all of us have likely felt in a time of deep mourning: Words, so often, fall flat.
And that’s why I want to offer a resounding second to the motion that Phil Barlow raised in his Maxwell Institute blog post on Ecclesiastes just two weeks ago. Phil’s essay is so good that I recommend everyone go back and read it again. And then I want to offer another cheer for the power of poetry in the scriptures—and a special “hooray!” for the chapters in Isaiah we’re reading this week.
Here’s one of Phil’s great lines: “In its authentic expression, poetry is not mere verbal decoration. Instead, it transforms the emotional and aesthetic character of diverse scriptural passages, revealing their power, awakening minds and hearts to the good and the true, the powerful and the beautiful.” And “poetry,” Phil reminded us, “can partake of the sublime, conveying the taste, feel, pleasure, and idea of the sublime.”
What has struck me as I’ve been thinking about Isaiah 35 and Elder Maxwell’s funeral at the same time is that poetry can also somehow accomplish what President Hinckley admitted most of our words of intended comfort cannot.
Poetry can rise above ordinary speech in its power to console.
I’ll readily admit that I need to think much more about why that is so, but to me, right now, it’s sufficient to say that it’s somehow self-evident. It’s something that we just intuitively seem to know.
At least one part of that power has to be the way poetry transcends triteness. No matter how well-intended our expressions of consolation might be, we all feel just how trite those expressions taste in our mouths as we’re mumbling them. We want to say so much more than we feel like we have the ability to convey—and often we end up wishing we would have said less than we did.
But poetry—in its extra-ordinariness, in its unexpectedness, in its metaphors and similes and images that detach it from everyday-ness—leaps over that “trite” barrier and carries us to a different place. Poetry seems to be “the consecration of language”—that’s how my colleague Kristian Heal captured it so well in a recent conversation—in the way it uses “everyday language in arresting and unexpected settings.” And heaven-inspired poetry seems to speak spirit to spirit, to communicate truths that are too big to merely explain or analyze.
Poetry in the scriptures is simply alive in a different way, and what it breathes is hope.
I’ve been thinking of lines like these from Isaiah 35 in the context of a setting like Elder Maxwell’s funeral:
“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose” (v. 1, KJV).
“Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees” (v. 3, NRSV).
“Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear!’” (v. 4, NRSV).
“Here is your God” (v. 4, NRSV).
“He will come and save you” (v. 4, KJV).
“Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing” (v. 6, KJV).
“And the burning sand shall become a pool” (v. 7, NRSV).
“No lion shall be there” (v. 9, KJV).
“And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads” (v. 10, KJV).
“Sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (v. 10, KJV).
I’m also struck that President Hinckley himself made a poetic turn in the direction of that same kind of hope in his funeral remarks, right after admitting how much the devastating loneliness he was feeling “gnaws at one’s very soul.” This is where he went next:
“But in the quiet of the night a silent whisper is heard that says, ‘All is well. All is well.’ And that voice from out of the unknown brings peace, certainty, and unwavering assurance that death is not the end, that life goes on, with work to do and victories to be won. That voice quietly, even unheard with mortal ears, brings the assurance that as surely as there has been separation, there will be a joyful reuniting.”
I’m more and more convinced that what that quiet voice whispers to us—reminds us of—really is, when it comes down to it, poetry. And I’m more and more convinced that when we really immerse ourselves in the poetic passages in scripture and let them wash over us, we feel a lift, a buoyancy, that comes from being understood—and from understanding the world—in ways that we can’t put into ordinary words.
J. B. Haws is the Executive Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and a professor of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. He is the author of The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, 2013) and holds a PhD in American History from the University of Utah. His research centers on the place of Mormonism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, including public perceptions of Latter-day Saints, trends in contemporary Mormon historical scholarship, and interfaith engagement.
Art by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).
The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.
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There was a Wayfare post recently, Through the Strait Gate, where Zohar Atkins wrote: "Most biblical prophets are not known for their miracles, but instead for their poetry, where meaning is so compressed that it can hardly be paraphrased."
I've been thinking about that line a lot. That's poetry's power. Its density. Poetry collapses space-time into a single-eternal moment. Metonymy, Synechdoche, Metaphor, Similar, Juxtaposition. All these things create an eternal now. Everything is a type. Everything is an instance of the whole. It's why John the Revelator, on the Isle of Patmos, 600 years after the fall of Babylon, prophecies that it will fall 2,000 years in the future at the 2nd Coming of Christ. Everything is a great, eternal now. Poetry captures that best.