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The opening words of Psalm 71 call to mind the opening of Psalm 25: “In you Lord.” But instead of an image of reclining—“To you Lord | I lift my throat / God on you | I lean” (25:1-2)—this psalm depends on scenes of retreat. There is a beautiful and potent spilling-over of sheltering imagery in the first eight verses, pairing the mostly spatial figure of the mountain refuge, crag and lair, with the mostly temporal figure of the womb, the memory of the mother’s belly, the cut cord, the speaker’s youth. That cliff imagery is also temporal, part of a narrative of rescue, being snatched up and away after threats. And the maternal imagery is spatial as well, the inside of the mother’s body paralleling the safety of the lofted mountain.

This landscape and memory give way to the psalm’s center, the speaker fearing the loss of strength that has come with age: “Don’t throw me out | in the time of old age / as my might is spent | don’t leave me” (9). Again, in verse 18, “even until old and gray | God don’t leave me.” The nakedness of these imperatives reshapes the images from the start of the poem—the solidity of the mountain refuge, the vulnerability of the infant.

In its anxiety about waning power, the poem’s appeals become clear. The speaker wants security (4, 5) as well as power that is not his own (7, 8, 21). He asks for God’s fidelity (22) and extols God’s justice most of all (1, 15-16, 19, 24). By contrast with Psalm 69, the wish is not for revenge but for rescue and justice, not the massacre of those “who attack my neck,” just their turning white, turning red, their “scorn and shame” (13, cf. 24).

While the repeated “don’t leave me” is the speaker at his most vulnerable, the poem’s most potent repeated phrase shows up in verses 16 and 18. “Let me enter the power | of my lord the Lord,” he says. Two verses later, after repeating the phrase “since youth,” he says, “don’t leave me / until I’ve told of your biceps | to the age / to each | who enters your power.” “Entering the power” poignantly calls back both the cliff refuge and the womb, a complicated wish. The image of the arm muscle (zer`oa) calls to mind the image of seed (zer`ua), which combines with the word “age” to suggest something more than just a return to the speaker’s own birth scene. There is the suggestion of generativity here, the speaker asking for enough power, enough life, to pass on stories of power to the next age, a fitting transition between a psalm that names David (Psalm 70) and a psalm that names Solomon (Psalm 72).