Today’s Poem: Psalm XIII

Sir Philip Sidney and the Psalms as English verse

J.M.W. Turner, View of Ely Cathedral, 1796 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Psalm XIII

by Sir Philip Sidney

How long (O Lord) shall I forgotten be? 
	What? Ever? 
How long wilt thou thy hidden face from me
	Dissever? 
How long shall I consult with careful sprite
	In anguish? 
How long shall I with foes’ triumphant might
	Thus languish? 
Behold me, Lord, let to thy hearing creep
	My crying. 
Nay, give me eyes, and light, lest that I sleep
	In dying:
Lest my foe brag, that in my ruin he
	Prevailed;
And at my fall they joy that, troublous, me
	Assailed. 
No, no, I trust on thee, and joy in thy
	Great pity:
Still therefore of thy graces shall be my
	Song’s ditty. 
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It seems impossible now that Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), poetic innovator and theorist, could have remained unpublished in his lifetime. Lauded, almost as soon as he was buried, as a literary titan of Tudor England, in life he was hardly an obscure figure. He served as a diplomat in the court of Elizabeth I and became son-in-law to her spymaster, Francis Walsingham. He was the dedicatee of Edmund Spenser’s 1579 pastoral, “The Shepheardes Calendar.” His sonnet cycle “Astrophel and Stella,” with its experimental riffs on Petrarch’s rhyme scheme, helped to establish the sonnet in English as a flexible, innovative form. He wrote a romance, Arcadia, and a Defence of Poesie and Poems. His biographer and fellow poet, Fulke Greville (1554–1628), instigated the posthumous publication of these works.

In the course of his curtailed life, Sidney undertook another massive poetic project: to paraphrase all one hundred-fifty “Psalmes of David” in English verse. By the time of his death, of gangrene resulting from injuries sustained in the Battle of Zutphen, he had completed forty-three verse psalms. His sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), finished the project and, in 1599, presented a copy to the queen. On the Countess’s death in 1621, John Donne composed a eulogy, not so much to the Sidneys themselves (though he called them “Moses” and “Miriam”) as to their great work of translation. As David R. Slavitt has noted,

what Donne was very clearly talking about [were] the truly terrible translations of the Psalms that had been published in 1562 and were in use in congregational worship in cathedrals and parish churches throughout the country and that had gone through 150 editions by . . . the year of the Countess’s death.

Slavitt refers here to the Whole Book of Psalms in English Meter, a work begun by Thomas Sternhold, Henry VIII’s Groom of the Robes, who died in 1548, and completed by John Hopkins and other contributors, who collectively provided the remaining 113 Psalms to Sternhold’s original 37. Published by John Day of London, what came to be known as “Sternhold and Hopkins” served well into the next century as a hymnal for the Church of England. As the title page has it, these psalms (as well as English translations of the Veni Creator Spiritus, the Te Deum, the Magnificat, and the Benedictus) had been

set forth and allowed to be Sung in all Churches, of all the People together, before and after Morning and Evening Prayer; and also before and after Sermons; and moreover in private Houses, for their godly Solace and comfort: laying apart all ungodly Songs and Ballads, which tend only to the nourishing of Vice, and corrupting of youth.

Sternhold’s translation of Psalm 13 clearly illustrates the intent behind these Psalms. They were meant to be sung as hymns, and so they are rendered in what we have come to call “hymn meter” (also “common meter,” or “measure”), with alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines. Absolute metrical regularity is the prevailing principle to which the words themselves are subject; metrical variations make a text harder to adapt for corporate singing, and harder for a group of people singing in unison to sing well.

Sir Philip Sidney (Wikimedia Commons)

Common meter overlaps to a great extent with the folk tradition’s more flexible ballad stanza, but the difference stems from who is doing the singing. A lone performer or small group of trained singers can master all kinds of shifts and variations, on whose shoals a Sunday congregation would almost certainly founder. Sternhold’s translation seems less “truly terrible” than adapted and simplified for the particular purpose of encouraging amateurs to sing together with confidence. If it fails, it fails at something it seems not particularly to have been trying to do to begin with.

Meanwhile, Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Psalms, published as part of the first English Bible in 1535, had been central to the worship of the English church since the first printing of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. These Psalms, in lines of what is essentially prose, became and remain the backbone of Anglican daily prayer. On taking holy orders in 1615, Donne would have prayed the psalms in Coverdale’s translation. Loving the Psalms, he preached on them frequently, even comparing the various translations. Ultimately, Donne’s desire for the Psalms in English was that they become not only hymns, but poetry. And for Donne and others, the Sidney Psalms answered that yearning.

Today’s Poem,“Psalm XIII,” reflects the experimental energy Philip Sidney brought to the making of verse. In this translation we can see why, for Donne, the Sidney Psalms were truly a poet’s psalmody. In Sternhold, the Psalm is a hymn. In the Coverdale translation, the same Psalm appears in long unmetered, unrhymed lines that echo the Hebrew verse principle of repetition but don’t especially bother to engage with conventions of English verse. Sidney’s rendering, by contrast, is striking as a formal construct, conscious of itself as a creature, primarily, of meter and rhyme. It’s not a hymn, and it’s not a prayer, at least not in the first order of importance. Though it might in fact be both those other things, its primary objective is to be a poem.

The abrupt metrical shifts in these abab quatrains, from iambic pentameter in the a lines to dimeter, if not monometer, in the b lines, are the sort of move that would come, in a successive literary generation, to characterize the poetry of George Herbert (1593–1633). Herbert, as David Slavitt observes, “would almost certainly have known the Sidnean Psalms,” and his prosody would just as surely have owed a debt to Sidney. In Sidney’s version, the Coverdale voice of plaintive lament — “How long, O Lord” — becomes a voice of actual outrage, characterized by the brusque “What? Ever?” But as with the trajectory of so many of the psalms, this one ends in a resolution to trust and rejoice in the goodness of God.

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