BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY Eliza R. Snow was known as “Zion’s Poetess,” “prophetess,” “priestess,” and “presidentess.” The plural wife of the prophet Joseph Smith, and later of Brigham Young, this designation as “Zion’s Poetess,” was given by Joseph Smith, although it is unknown when that title was bestowed. It is clear, however, that long before her first book of poems was published in 1856, she was known by the Saints, and especially by the women of the Church, through her poetry.
She was born 21 January 1804 in Becket, Massachusetts, the second of seven children of Oliver and Rosetta Leonora Pettibone Snow—a family which included her younger brother, Lorenzo, later to be an Apostle and President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was baptized a member of the Church on 5 April 1835. In her lifetime her public persona was well known, and certainly her administrative mark is evident on most of the auxiliary organizations of the Church. She was present on 17 March 1842, in Nauvoo, Illinois, at the founding of the women’s organization known as the Relief Society, and she directed it’s resurgence in Utah from 1867 until her death in 1887. The church youth groups of today were born as Retrenchment Associations which she organized and promoted at the direction of Brigham Young, and the children’s organization, founded in Farmington, Utah, known as the Primary Association were also the focus of her substantial energy. She spent over 20 years of her life traveling throughout Utah promoting these organizations and meeting with the women and children of the Church. As Maureen Ursenbach Beecher has noted “She was a legend before half her effective life was done, and lived that legend for the rest of it.” (Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, “The Eliza Enigma,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Spring 1978): 30)
This first volume of poetry by “Zion’s Poetess” collects the poems of the preceding two decades which were published in the Times and Seasons, Nauvoo Neighbor, Millennial Star, and Deseret News. As her personal view of Mormon history, as a glimpse of the private Eliza, and as a window into the depths of her religious and doctrinal convictions, it is an invaluable book. As poetry it is an uneven collection.
The volumes include poems of great familiarity, such as “Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother,” known to today’s audience as “O My Father,” and “Be Not Discouraged,” more commonly known as “Though Deepening Trials”—both still included in the official LDS hymnal. Snow demonstrates the deep and enduring sacrifices she made to embrace the “Everlasting Covenant,” in her poem “Evening Thoughts, or What it is to be a Saint.” There is an intimate poignancy in her “The Bride’s Avowal,” written shortly after her sealing to Joseph Smith and her good humor is evident in “Mental Gas.”
The second volume of poetry, bearing the same title, was published in Salt Lake City in 1877.
Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley and Chad J. Flake, A Mormon Fifty: an exhibition in the Harold B. Lee Library in conjunction with the annual conference of the Mormon History Association. (Provo, Utah, Friends of the Brigham Young University Library, 1984). Item 47, p. [34].
Used by permission of the authors.