Tag: lament

June 20th, 2023

Psalm 102
* * *

A striking collage of personal lament and Zion’s praise, Psalm 102 holds together powerfully if we hear the lament as spoken in Zion’s voice. “Lord | hear my prayer,” the psalm begins generically, in the voice of conventional address (1). In verses 3-11, however, clichés gradually fade. A tight five-stanza complaint follows, with images of fire and dry grass, smoke and shadow (3-4a, 10-11) surrounding images of bodily wasting, and forgotten or ashen bread (4b-5, 8b-9), all surrounding a remarkable trio of bird similes:

I look like a cormorant | in the wild

I’ve become like an owl | of a ruin I’ve kept watch

and am as a wren | alone on a roof all day (6-8a).

Solitary birds, perched or nestled on wilderness and ruin and roof, they linger night and day.

As a lament, the passage is more metaphorical than informative. The speaker suffers from loneliness, from emaciation and mourning, and from impending mortality, the spread of shadows and evanescence of days. Only in the last of these five stanzas does the speaker return to address God in the second person, revealing bitter hurt: “from your face of fury | and fuming / oh you lifted me | to throw me down”(10).

While this lament in verses 3-11 is prefaced by the formulaic verses 1-2, the broader memory of what Zion was in 15-22 has its own preface in verses 12-14. Instead of the past, it emphasizes both timelessness (“you Lord | ever stay” 12) and the transformative now (“oh the time to feel for her | oh the moment has come” 13). That the moment has come recalls the shout of the trees in Psalm 96:13, “oh he’s come he’s come,” ki va’. Poignantly, the announcement that the time has come for the Lord to pity or feel compassion for Zion is mirrored by, maybe even motivated by, the compassion that the Lord’s servants feel for her “ash” (14, cf. 9). Zion’s ash is the speaker’s ash, her ruins the speaker’s ruins. Verses 15-22 recall the building of Solomon’s Temple, when the Lord “faced the prayer | of those bereft / and did not deride | their prayer” (16-17). The passage also looks back to when “the Lord from sky | to earth looked down,” some past time, either construction or afterward, with a series of infinitive purposes:

to hear a captive’s cry | to loosen children of death

to tally in Zion | the name of the Lord

and his praise | in Jerusalem

at the gathering | of the peoples together

and the realms | to serve the Lord (20-22).

The Zion passage, then, pairs what the temple was with this vision of what the temple was meant to be, and still could be: a kind of listening post as Solomon describes it in 1 Kings 8. The hearing of the captive’s cry is both past and future, as is the loosing of children from the threat of death, that they might tally and serve. Cumulatively, the passage remembers a past in order to look forward to the present, and as it does, it creates a present that looks ahead: “let this be written | for the age to follow / that a people created | might laud the Lord” (18).

Both the lament and the Zion sections are vivid and affecting, each finishing with what feels like an end: the dried up grass of verse 11, all the kingdoms and people gathering in verse 22. The psalm’s final movement has to bring the first two together, to make the first section’s personal sense of the lengthening shadows of days meet the second section’s historical sense of Jerusalem’s loss and God’s timelessness. Now that we are in the moment of the psalm, the moment of compassion for Zion, the speaker suddenly cries, “He sapped my path of power | cut short my days / I said my God don’t | snatch me up with half my days / when age after ages | are your years” (24). Again the psalm returns to the past with a purpose: to show what does not change. The earth and “the skies / they end | but you go on” (25b-26, cf. 11-12). “All things age as clothes | as a coat you slough them off / they slough off | but you are the one / whose years | do not end” (26b-27).

Powerfully, a psalm with so much ash and rubble, so much loss against such changelessness, ends with an almost Rilkean image of descent and figures for eternity. “Your servants’ children | settle down” (28) is a continuity that shares God’s timelessness with ages to come, the readers implied by verse 18. This verb “settle down,” yishkonu, is echoed by its parallel verb “is set,” yikon, the very last word in the psalm. It’s the word used for a foundation, and what is being founded is “their seed,” the offspring, the line. What but a seed pressed into the ground could serve as such a potent response to the dried grass and bones and dust of Zion’s lament, compensating for loneliness and the cutting short of days? What better way “to loosen children of death” than to see children settling and seeding the ground?
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My name is Mark Minster. I’m an English and Comparative Literature professor with a background in ministry and in poetry. I teach courses on writing, reading, religion, and nature.
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May 18th, 2023

Psalm 69
(director: on “The Lilies,” of David)

* * *

Interpretation always risks being wrong. Vital clues might be missing or missed. Contextual signals from the primary scenes of writing and reading might be tuned too low, while noise from we the interpreters’ own culture and bent might be turned up too loud. We might not just be wrong, but pettily wrong. Take, for example, what Mitchell Dahood says of Psalm 69, calling it “the lament of an individual who prays for deliverance from his personal enemies and especially from his archenemy, Death. Kraus… rightly notes that the text of this lament is excellently preserved, but this of itself does not permit the inference that traditional translations have necessarily grasped the thought of the psalmist” (155). Who could know, ever, if we have “grasped the thought of the psalmist,” both nouns singular? Despite Dahood’s claim, this psalm has far less to do with death, let alone Death personified, than with a speaker deeply ambivalent about her own demonstrations of piety. She parades her persecutions and seeks pity, compensating for her pain with a completely disproportionate fantasy of revenge.

An interpretative danger more specific to psalms like this is that understanding relies so heavily on whether we believe the speaker’s claims of persecution. Our default setting, influenced by liturgical recitation and our own kind hearts, is to identify with a first-person speaker, taking as evidence of virtue her claims of virtue, ignoring the logical circle. In a society that asserts that we assume innocence until guilt is proved, a line like “what I did not steal | I must still restore” (4) easily evinces pity and fury at injustice. But reading is not a court of law. Nothing necessitates our sympathy, let alone our credulity. The first verses express that the speaker is sinking. Is this literally true or is it a topos, a commonplace? Verses 3 and 4 suggest that drowning is a figure for feeling surrounded by “they who hate me for no reason / those who would end me… my wrongful foes” (4). In these verses, innocence is asserted— “for no reason” she is hated, the foes are “wrongful,” what she did not steal she must pay back.

And yet the very next verse brings admissions of a different kind of guilt: “God you have known | my stupidity / my wrongs from you | have never been hidden” (5). If we are talking of wrongs, what exactly is the accusation, the threat, the crime? Why turn from insistence on being beleaguered to an acknowledgement of wrongs? And from there, in verse 6, why worry that the speaker’s guilt might reflect badly on “they who hope in” and “they who seek” the God of Israel?

The psychology of martyrdom deepens from there. Verses 7-12 describe the negative consequences of the speaker’s piety. “For you | I have taken the taunts… I’ve grown estranged | from my brothers… when passion for your house | devoured me / the taunts of your taunters | fell on me” (7-9). Her focus is not on devotion to the Lord, nor on anything inherent in rites such as fasting, but curiously on the opinions of others and on the “you.” The lines veer between self-pity and blaming God— “look what I have done for you… and this is the thanks I get.” In these lines, there is no real threat of death, just noise from those who mock the speaker.

Verses 13-15 return to the drowning imagery from the first two verses, with redoubled emphasis: “snatch me from the muck | let me not sink / snatch me from my haters | from the watery lows” (14). This sinking takes on added significance in verse 15, not just the wish that “streams of water | not sweep over me,” but that “the deep | not swallow me / may the pit its mouth | not shut on me.” These lines do indeed show fear of death, but death as the outcome of inundation. The deep and the pit justify the urgency behind the appeals to the Lord’s “care,” mentioned before and after the lines, in 13 and 16, alongside the threefold call to “answer me” in 13, 16, and 17. As with the earlier turn from oppression to confession in verses 4-5, this whole section of appeals to God’s care and compassion is followed by an admission: “you’ve known my scorn | my shame my indignity / right there before you | all my distresses” (19). The effect of this movement on the particularly poignant lines in verses 20-21 is to deepen whatever attitudes we readers have towards the speaker. “I hoped for pity | none / for sympathy | I found none” (20). Our own responses of pity and sympathy completely determine how we read these lines, whether we are moved to accept her figurative claims— she is literally drowning and literally dying— or retain some measure of critical distance.

Why does our critical response matter? Because the next four four-line stanzas call for extraordinary punishment of the speaker’s enemies, a punishment that explicitly asks for justice to be withheld: “stack guilty | on their guilty / don’t let them enter | your justice” (27). There is no more mention of care or pity. Rather, she wants revenge. Not just revenge, but a storm of harm: “make their eyes | too dark to see / make their privates | constantly stumble” (23), “let their base | be pillaged / in their tents | leave no one left” (25), “let them be effaced | from the book of life / that with the just | they may not be written” (28). Lamech to his wives in Genesis 4 has not such rage.

Cumulatively, then, we have a speaker who feels beset and wronged for her convictions and practices, comparing her embarrassment to drowning. She begs rescue and sympathy, then craves revenge to the point of genocide. Sure: a danger of reading is that readings might be wrong. And so it is possible, of course, that the speaker is indeed as completely innocent as she claims. And yet a danger of sympathetic identification is how it allows us to intone with others, reciting this psalm, her terrible wish for divine justice and care to be suspended to make room for a bloodbath.

The closure of this psalm, verses 30-36, might be spoken by anyone. It makes no mention of personal circumstances, as do the previous twenty-nine verses. In this context, following the personal drama that precedes it, this part too seems like a wish. It is the moment when hot rage has passed and cool piety sets in. That hearts might revive, that the oppressed might be heard, the imprisoned rescued, the whole earth rejoice—these all are sentiments worthy of praise. But reading the psalm, actually reading it, demands that we ask how these final verses—the rescue of Zion—fit with what comes before. Again, our answer depends on the dynamics of identification. How willing are we to indulge the fantasies of the speaker in verses 22-29?
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My name is Mark Minster. I’m an English and Comparative Literature professor with a background in ministry and in poetry. I teach courses on writing, reading, religion, and nature.
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May 4th, 2023

Psalm 55
(director: with strings, instructive, of David)

* * *

Psalm 55 appears to be deeply personal, interior, a psalmist suffering inwardly. The voice of the enemy and the face of the vile have mentally torn up the speaker: “My heart twists | in my insides” (4).

That root word for “insides,” qerev, holds the poem together. It shows up not just to describe the suffering, but the end of that suffering: “he bought back in peace | my throat in my insides” (18). Curiously, it also describes the whole city where “they” go around: “harm and trouble | in her insides / hunger in her insides” (10c-11a). They themselves, whoever they are exactly, have “bad in their lodgings | and in their insides” (15). Most intriguingly, that same consonantal root qerev shows up as qerav in verse 21 where it describes conflict within someone, someone third-person: “smoother than butter | his mouth / and aggression | was in his heart” (21). (Given that that word “aggression” is paralleled by the word petichot, which seems to mean an opened sheath or drawn sword, the similarity between qerev and cherev, “sword,” seems purposive.)

That there are numerous “insides” in the psalm suggests something less personal than it first appears. After all, the poem turns from the twisting and shivering heart (3-5) to the wish for a wing, the desire to get away (6-8a). From there it turns, hinged by “out of rushing wind | out of a whirlwind” (8b), to a second wish, a wish that the Lord would descend and punish (9). In verses 10-11 the personal becomes collective, the insides of the city. And yet just as it turns, the psalm ironically becomes more personal, the first-person speaker addressing a second-person betrayer.

For if an enemy slurs me       that, I can bear

if a hater swelled against me   from him I could hide

but you                              someone of my worth

my close friend                    one so known to me

who sweet talk as one           in the house of God

we walk                             with the masses (12-14).

The piling up of appositives (“you | someone of my worth … who sweet talk as one”) deepens our sense of the speaker’s pain even though it comes no closer to naming the disloyal friend. Instead, brutally, this psalm that emphasizes insides goes all the way out into the temple with what seem like intimate whispers, only to disappear again, diffused into a crowd.

The wish for destruction that follows immediately in verse 15 still doesn’t name the “they.” Context implies the “masses” with whom the speaker and the disloyal friend walk. Their walking calls back those “in the city | days and nights / [who] go round | up on her walls” (10). Are all of them betrayers? Are they part of the city’s insides, rotten to the core, or are they invaders from without? What does “there’s no changing them | they do not revere God” (19) reveal about them? Have they—plural or singular—betrayed the speaker or have they betrayed God?

From this they whom the speaker clearly wants to see punished (the word “answer” in “may God hear | and answer at them” in verse 19 sure looks like the word “harm”), the psalm whipsaws back to the singular “he”:

He sent his hands                 against his friends

he broke                            his pact

Smoother than butter           his mouth

and aggression                     was in his heart

his words were slicker           than oil

and they                             were unsheathed (20-21).

Who is this “he” who sent out against his friends and broke his pact? And what is this description doing here? If this is more evidence against the disloyal friend, it seems to be justifying the call for harsh punishment. But wedged here, between calls for punishment in verses 15 and 19 (which flank a relatively straightforward call for rescue, similar to that with which the psalm began) and celebration of that punishment in verses 22-23, this third-person singular sounds almost like it refers to the one doing the punishing.

It isn’t necessary to conclude that this psalm is hopelessly broken, as others have claimed, nor that it must have resulted from two different psalms having been stitched together or interleaved. Rather, whatever the core experience of this psalm, whatever its origins, there are tensions hard to resolve. There are tensions between what happens inside and what happens outside, tensions between the singular personal experience of betrayal by one person and collective generalizations about “them, “people of blood and fraud” (23). These others didn’t break just one person’s trust, but he, the bad one, “sent his hands | against his friends” plural (20). Like Poe’s purloined letter, the insides of Psalm 55 are right there on its surfaces, inward pain facing out, suffering becoming a call for terrifyingly, problematically disproportionate response: “let death come over them | let them be buried alive / bad in their lodgings | and in their insides” (15).
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My name is Mark Minster. I’m an English and Comparative Literature professor with a background in ministry and in poetry. I teach courses on writing, reading, religion, and nature.
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April 19th, 2023

Psalm 39
(director: of Jeduthun, lyric, of David)

* * *

As the first book of the Book of Psalms nears its end— Psalms 40 and 41 are its final pair— things get bleak. Psalm 39 is as dark as it gets, a protest psalm, a prayer of outrage. The physical suffering and psychological torment of Psalm 38 have given way to resignation, the end of the rope. This is the mode of Job and Ecclesiastes, a speaker with no time for pieties, who can’t keep her mouth shut.

The introductory verses, best read as two tercets with the last line of verse 2 marking the turn to a second stanza, establish a complicated dynamic at the very edge of speech. “I said,” says the speaker, talking ironically about having tamed the tongue and gagged the mouth. But pain and its contemplation boil over, and again she speaks: “I spoke | with my tongue” (3). The effect is paradoxical, speech that doesn’t want to be spoken, the clenched teeth of an outburst.

  And what an outburst!

          Make me know, Lord         my end                                                  4

          and the hem of my days     how it is

          I want to know                  how fragile I am

In Hebrew, too, the syntax is interruptive, with expressions that waver between statement, question, and exclamation. The doubled mah, rendered here as “how,” can be interrogative, but also means “what” and “oh.” It even means “why.” How long do I have left? How is it my life is so short? The line “I want to know” reframes “make me know,” an insistence on being told. It works backward—“what is it that I want to know?”—as well as forward: “I want to know | how fragile I am.”

That irony cuts deep. If the speaker knows anything, it’s how fragile she is, as evidenced by answering her own question: “Look, palms wide | you made my days / my lifespan | as nothing to you” (5). Those palms are a gesture of prayer, which the lyric address to the Lord achieves. It is a prayer, an extraordinarily bold one. It indicts God for the injustices of pain and mortality. The term that comes next is straight out of Ecclesiastes: vanity, vanity, all is vanity. The word is hevel, a puff of breath, a lifespan measured not by hands but by the single exhalation it takes to speak or pray. Existence itself is empty: standing, walking, blowing around, “just air” (5-6). And more, life is cut off, leaving behind all the unnamed things a life accrues: “she piles but doesn’t know | who gathers up” (6).

There are gestures at modesty and piety in Psalm 39, to be sure, but even these feel hollowed out. “From all my wrongs | deliver me,” the speaker cries out in verse 8. But this line follows the desperation of verse 7: “Now what | have I held out for, my lord,” a question that’s answered, limply, by “my hope | is in you.” If we have been reading verses 1-6, we have the sense that life is simultaneously too short and too long, that our lifespan is “as nothing to you” (5). Even the traditional language of verse 12—“Hear my prayer… do not hush”—manages to sound both deeply felt and empty of heart. Again, the gesture is emptied by what precedes it: “you rub off as with a moth | what makes them lovely / just air | all of us” (11).

In this powerful prayer of outrage, there are two truly exceptional moments. The first comes in verse 9 where the speaker, having reluctantly broken her desire to keep quiet, tries again to keep quiet. It echoes the scene at the psalm’s beginning: “I have been bound | I won’t open my mouth.” But look at that next line: “for you | you did.” Did what? What did the Lord do? Opened the speaker’s mouth for them? Already made the speaker “a taunt for dolts”? Did something else? Is the text fragmented here, or is the speaker, whose mouth is a volatile border, just unwilling or unable to finish the thought?

The other standout moment is the ending, which begins with the speaker’s last imperative. Nothing about her is cowed or craven. Maybe that’s because there’s nothing left for her to lose. “Look away from me” is an aching command, a gut-punch prayer. It bears the weight of both shame and indignation: “avert your eyes!” as well as “what are you looking at?” as well as “stop looking at me!” And why this? Because, the speaker says, “I would like to smile / before I walk away | and am nothing.”

The echoes of Job’s speech in Job 10 are unmistakable. It’s not that the psalmist or speaker wants to “curse God and die,” as Job’s wife unhelpfully suggests (Job 2:9). It’s that her mouth wants to do something other than keeping it all inside.
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About Me

My name is Mark Minster. I’m an English and Comparative Literature professor with a background in ministry and in poetry. I teach courses on writing, reading, religion, and nature.
Recent Posts
- Psalm 150
- Psalm 149
- Psalm 148
- Psalm 147
- Psalm 146
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