‘Psalm 117′ by Mary Sidney Herbert (1561-1621)

Praise him that ay 
Remains the same:
All tongues display
Jehovah’s fame.            4
Sing all that share
This earthly ball:
His mercies are
Expos’d to all:              8
Like as the word 
Once he doth give
Rold in record,
Doth rhyme outlive.  12

NOTES:

(A) PSALM 117 (in its entirety): 1. O praise the Lord, all ye nations: praise him, all ye people. 2 For his merciful kindness is great toward us: and the truth of the Lord endureth for ever. Praise ye the Lord.

(B) Spelling and orthography have been modernized ;

(D) Rold = written, enrolled.

Considering the Poem

The introduction of Protestant worship in England in the 1530s brought a new emphasis on the importance of a personal, unmediated relationship between God and the individual soul. That fundamental (but gradual) change made it necessary that biblical texts existed in the vernacular which gave each person written material for personal meditation.

The work of translators like Coverdale had made the bible available and, already, writers such as Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins had provided literary versions of the psalms that drew upon the resources of English versification, especially the musical elements of rhyme and metrical rhythm, and used a range of poetic forms that provided new, and transformational, structures for the psalms.

Mary Sidney Herbert was looking back to Sternhold and Hopkins and, indeed, to her own brother, Philip, who had versified forty-three of the psalms before dying at the age of thirty-one from a battle injury. She carried on the ambitious work that he had started by translating the rest of the psalms herself and rendering them in English vernacular verse forms with versatility, boldness and radical invention. As we’ll see, however, Mary Sidney Herbert’s version of Psalm 117 is not just a translation: indeed, so much formal and stylistic elaboration and adaptation was happening in her work that what we read here is something new. Really, it’s a complete transformation rather than a translation of the psalm.

She uses only thirty-nine words in the poem, and all of them are plain, common words drawn from the core English lexicon. She organizes the frugal vocabulary of the poem in a simple English verse-form: three four-line units with a rhyme scheme that makes rhymes in alternating lines and which follows (except in two significant variations) the common English iambic metrical unit of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. She deviates from this pattern to stress the command word ‘Sing’ (6) and then to foreground the key word ‘Rold’ (11) that, because it reminds us of the permanence of the biblical message, plays such an important part in the poem.

In fact, the concepts of permanence and impermanence provide the idea structure for the verse. This kind of binary opposition between one concept and its opposite remains a common structuring technique in English verse (and thinking generally) even now. We see it everywhere and feel its presence in our own thought and feeling everyday. Here, the opposition is introduced plainly and clearly in the first statement of the poem: change and chance may be our condition in life, but the God ‘Remains the same’ (2), is acclaimed universally (3-6), and will ‘outlive’ all the accidents and chances of human life.

In her rewriting of Psalm 117, Mary Sidney Herbert has Anglicised the psalm and, by doing so, has helped to consolidate and develop structures and styles that have informed, and will continue to inform, the craft of English verse even though, as she says with suitable humility in the final line of the poem, English verse itself, with all its resources, cannot outlast the word of God.

The Sidney Psalter The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (Oxford World’s Classics).

Christian Poetry Considered