Poetry in the Psalms by Henry Van Dyke

There are three ways in which we may read the Bible.

We may come to it as the divinely inspired rule of faith and conduct. / This is the point of view from which it appears most precious to / religion. It gives us the word of God to teach us what to believe and how / to live.

We may consider it as a collection of historical books, written under / certain conditions, and reflecting, in their contents and in their / language, the circumstances in which they were produced. This is the / aspect in which criticism regards the Bible; and its intellectual / interest, as well as its religious value, is greatly enhanced by a clear / vision of the truth about it from this point of view.

We may study it also as literature. We may see in it a noble and / impassioned interpretation of nature and life, uttered in language / of beauty and sublimity, touched with the vivid colours of human / personality, and embodied in forms of enduring literary art.

None of these three ways of studying the Bible is hostile to the others. / On the contrary, they are helpful to one another, because each of them / gives us knowledge of a real factor in the marvellous influence of the / Bible in the world.

The true lover of the Bible has an interest in all the elements of / its life as an immortal book. He wishes to discern, and rightly to / appreciate, the method of its history, the spirit of its philosophy, the / significance of its fiction, the power of its eloquence, and the charm of / its poetry. He wishes this all the more because he finds in it something / which is not in any other book: a vision of God, a hope for man, and an / inspiration to righteousness which seem to him divine. As the worshipper / in the Temple would observe the art and structure of the carven beams of / cedar and the lily-work on the tops of the pillars the more attentively / because they beautified the house of his God, so the man who has a / religious faith in the Bible will study more eagerly and carefully the / literary forms of the book in which the Holy Spirit speaks forever.

It is in this spirit that I wish to consider the poetical element in the / Psalms. The comfort, help, and guidance that they bring to our spiritual / life will not be diminished, but increased, by a perception of their / exquisite form and finish. If a king sent a golden cup full of cheering / cordial to a weary man, he might well admire the two-fold bounty of the / royal gift. The beauty of the vessel would make the draught more grateful / and refreshing. And if the cup were inexhaustible, if it filled itself / anew as often as it touched the lips, then the very shape and adornment / of it would become significant and precious. It would be an inestimable / possession, a singing goblet, a treasure of life.

John Milton, whose faith in religion was as exalted as his mastery of / the art of poetry was perfect, has expressed in a single sentence the / spirit in which I would approach the poetic study of the Book of Psalms: / "Not in their divine arguments alone, but in the very critical art of / composition, the Psalms may be easily made to appear over all kinds of / lyric poetry incomparable."

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Let us remember at the outset that a considerable part of the value of / the Psalms as poetry will lie beyond our reach. We cannot precisely / measure it, nor give it full appreciation, simply because we are dealing / with the Psalms only as we have them in our English Bible. This is a real / drawback; and it is well to understand clearly the two things that we / lose in reading the Psalms in this way.

First, we lose the beauty and the charm of verse. This is a serious loss. / Poetry and verse are not the same thing, but they are so intimately / related that it is difficult to divide them. Indeed, according to certain / definitions of poetry, it would seem almost impossible.

Yet who will deny that the Psalms as we have them in the English Bible / are really and truly poetical?

The only way out of this difficulty that I can see is to distinguish / between verse as the formal element and imaginative emotion as the / essential element in poetry. In the original production of a poem, it / seems to me, it is just to say that the embodiment in metrical language / is a law of art which must be observed. But in the translation of a poem / (which is a kind of reflection of it in a mirror) the verse may be lost / without altogether losing the spirit of the poem.

Take an illustration from another art. A statue has the symmetry of solid / form. You can look at it from all sides, and from every side you can see / the balance and rhythm of the parts. In a photograph this solidity of / form disappears. You see only a flat surface. But you still recognize it / as the reflection of a statue.

The Psalms were undoubtedly written, in the original Hebrew, according to / a system of versification, and perhaps to some extent with forms of rhyme.

The older scholars, like Lowth and Herder, held that such a system / existed, but could not be recovered. Later scholars, like Ewald, evolved / a system of their own. Modern scholarship, represented by such authors / as Professors Cheyne and Briggs, is reconstructing and explaining more / accurately the Hebrew versification. But, for the present at least, the / only thing that is clear is that this system must remain obscure to us. / It cannot be reproduced in English. The metrical versions of the Psalms / are the least satisfactory. The poet Cowley said of them, "They are so / far from doing justice to David that methinks they revile him worse / than Shimei. "[5] We must learn to appreciate the poetry in the Psalms / without the aid of those symmetries of form and sound in which they first / appeared. This is a serious loss. Poetry without verse is like a bride / without a bridal garment.