The Book of Psalms

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  • Psalm 114

    * * * The first stanza of Psalm 114 is quoted in a famous letter to Dante’s patron Cangrande della Scala, as the author (who may not be Dante) justifies the Commedia as a “polysemous work,” one that means both literally and allegorically: “if we look at the letter alone what is signified to us Read more

  • Psalm 113

    * * * For a poem whose main image is sitting still, a psalm with only two conjugated verbs, Psalm 113 swiftly maps the whole world, encompassing time and space. A balanced yet varied structure, the psalm features three stanzas, each its own syntactical unit. The first stanza embeds a jussive wish, “let the name Read more

  • Psalm 112

    * * * Hard on the heels of the Bible’s only other single-line acrostic, Psalm 112 shifts focus from the Lord, “feeling and tender” (111:4), to the virtuous person, the upright, the level, who is also “feeling and tender | and just” (112:4). While Psalm 111 celebrates the deeds of the Lord, particularly “all his Read more

  • Psalm 111

    * * * There are any number of satisfying patterns in a poetics of pairs. One line with two halves contains all the possibilities that have been explored by students of biblical poetry since at least Robert Lowth: map, echo, balance, magnify, reverse. A typical verse in the Psalms made of two lines offers four Read more

  • Psalm 110

    (of David, lyric) * * * Across the book of Psalms, from Psalm 2 to Psalm 89 to Psalm 110, a narrative arc can be traced from monarchical bravado to despair to… whatever this is— a prophetic oracle that can be read in radically different ways. In Psalm 110, Book Five of the Psalter still Read more

  • Psalm 109

    (director: of David, a lyric) * * * This is a hard psalm, hard in its contents, made harder by the lack of stage directions—Who speaks? To whom? In which lines? Where? When?—and by the lack of any evidence of the speaker’s innocence or guilt, upon which everything depends. Psalm 109 is hard because its Read more